People still fleeing in fear of persecution, says human rights league

Frightened citizens are continuing to stream into the offices of the Togo Human Rights League (LTDH) to complain of political persecution, despite government assurances that it is now safe for people who fled the country in recent weeks to return home, a leader of the rights group said. “The human rights situation today in Togo is catastrophic,” Togoata Apedo-Amah, LTDH secretary-general, said in an interview on Thursday. “Togo has descended into barbarity.” Almost three months after a disputed presidential election degenerated into violence, sending 38,000 refugees fleeing into Benin and Ghana, government opponents still live in fear of arrest and persecution, Apedo-Amah said. Sitting at a desk piled high with complaints of rights abuse filed in June and July, Apedo-Amah said “only this week a young man from Kpalime said his father had been abducted at 11 p.m. by non-identified individuals.” Other complaints include rape, notably against a 92-year-old woman whose oldest child is 71. Apedo-Amaha highlighted another case where 13 young girls from the town of Kpalime, 150 km north of Lome near the Ghana border, had been detained and raped for three days by a group of men wearing military gear. Young men arrested with them were beaten on the penis during the rapes, he added. Apedo-Amah, whose organisation is criticised by the authorities as being close to the opposition, said that the LTDH had received complaints from many people who feared arrest because they had monitored voting booths on behalf of the opposition during the 24 April presidential election. The poll was called hurriedly following the death of Togo’s president for 38 years, Gnassingbe Eyadema. His son Faure Gnassingbe was officially declared the winner, despite opposition claims that the ballot was rigged. The father-to-son succession triggered violent street protests put down by security forces. Earlier this month, the UN refugee agency UNHCR said between 20 and 60 Togolese refugees were still registering for asylum daily at Hilacondji, the main border crossing with neighbouring Benin. Most were young people afraid of being abducted or arrested at night, UNHCR officials said. UNHCR said in a statement that over 3,000 new refugees fled to Benin and Ghana in June alone. Despite pledges of help and safe return from President Gnassingbe’s new government, only a handful of the 38,000 who fled Togo over the last three months have actually gone home, the officials added. Food aid is urgently needed both for the refugees and the families in Benin and Ghana who have been hosting them and sharing their scant resources, the UN food agency World Food Programme said in a statement on Friday. It appealed for US $3 million to prevent an estimated 66,500 people going hungry. “The victims of Togo’s turmoil are some of the least acknowledged in the world,” said WFP’s West Africa director Mustapha Darboe. WFP said the aid was needed to feed 21,000 refugees in Benin, 17,000 in Ghana and 10,000 who are internally displaced people within Togo, as well as 18,500 people in Benin and Ghana who have hosted the refugees. The government has put the casualty toll during the election violence at less than 100, while the LTDH has said 790 people were killed in the election strife, mostly at the hands of the security forces and pro-government militiamen. In Lome, Communications Minister Kokou Tozoun dismissed the LTDH’s claims of continuing persecution. “Give us the names of those who are sought or arrested,” he told IRIN. “During the elections there were people who committed crimes, who killed, who burned Malian people alive. Those guilty of these crimes cannot go unpunished,” he added. Tozoun, who until recently served as Foreign Minister under Gnassingbe's father, said the government was still urging refugees to come home and also was releasing prisoners from Togo's jails. But Apedo-Amah retorted that the government’s planned release of several hundred detainees was a propaganda exercise aimed at securing European Union funds. “They’re releasing them because of the visit by an EU follow-up mission,” he said. An EU team is in Togo on a weeklong visit to assess whether the new government is sticking to an April 2004 deal to implement 22 commitments to promote democracy and human rights. The EU cut off aid to the former French colony in 1993 because of “democratic deficiencies” and is refusing to resume aid until it is satisfied that Togo has improved its poor record. Justice Minister Abi Tchessa said earlier this week that 105 prisoners had been freed in Lome and hundreds more would be allowed to walk free from other jails as part of a humanitarian scheme aimed at decongesting prisons countrywide. He said the main beneficiaries would be detainees who had almost completed their jail terms and prisoners who had been held for long periods on remand without being brought to trial. The EU team, which toured some of Togo’s jails, also met members of the so-called six-party opposition alliance whose joint candidate was defeated in the April election. This so called "radical" opposition has refused to join a government of national unity formed by the new president. This includes a sprinkling of defectors from the opposition ranks as well as hard-line stalwarts of the Eyadema regime. The new president is a 39-year-old graduate of business schools in France and the United States.