Mapping the sites of civil-war abuses

Preliminary mapping of the sites of former mass graves and slaughter houses in Sierra Leone is intended to establish patterns of human rights abuses during the 10-year civil war that ended in January, a human rights expert told IRIN on Wednesday.

United Nations forces deployed in various parts of the country in December discovered evidence of mass graves, prompting the UN Mission to Sierra Leone , UNAMSIL, to recommend that a forensic team be brought in to conduct preliminary mapping of the sites and assess the work necessary to conduct further investigations.

“The team of Argentinian forensic experts arrived in the country 10 days ago. They will map the sites, assess the amount of forensic expertise required to carry out more investigations and advise on how to preserve evidence,” Rodolfo Mattarollo, Chief of the Human Rights Section at UNAMSIL, said.

Apart from mass graves and slaughter houses, the section had also interviewed 150 victims of war-related amputations, Mattarollo said. “According to assessments of several international NGOs supporting such victims, it is estimated that no fewer than 4,000 people were amputated, of whom only 1,000 survived,” he added.

Other ongoing investigations are into war-related sexual violence. With UNAMSIL support, the US-based Physicians for Human Rights produced a report early this year from interviews with 900 internally displaced women.

According to the report, about 50,000 to 64,000 internally displaced women suffered sexual violence during Sierra Leone’s war. Of these, 89 percent reported rape, including gang-rape (reported by 33 percent) and sexual slavery (15 percent). Over half of the cases were reportedly perpetrated by Revolutionary United Front rebels.

Mattarollo said the ongoing investigations would also cover summary executions, in which thousands died, mostly women and children. “We need to have a clearer picture for truth, justice and redress,” he said. He added that some secondary evidence of massacres and summary executions already existed from NGOs like Amnesty International.

“The Argentinian team will lay groundwork for another mission to conduct in-depth investigations to establish that remains found were human, identify victims in some cases and prove the cause and manner of death, for example by massacre or death by nature,” he said.

Local media in Freetown reported that there were 75 mass graves in various districts of the country, while the BBC reported on Monday that 12 skulls and a big pile of skeletal bones had been found in a room in a house in Tombodu, in the eastern district of Kono. Another room had remains of four bodies.