Human rights report seized, writers harassed, says group

A human rights group said on Wednesday that the Nigerian customs had seized more than 2,000 copies of a report detailing massacres and other abuses by the state. The Lagos-based Centre for Law Enforcement Education in Nigeria (CLEEN) published: "Hope Betrayed? A Report on Impunity and State-Sponsored Violence in Nigeria", in collaboration with the Geneva-based World Organisation Against Torture. It said in a statement sent to IRIN that three people who contributed to the report had been harassed by the State Security Services (SSS). "Over 2,000 copies of the report that were sent for distribution in Nigeria have been impounded at the customs office in Lagos, due to alleged political undertones of a subversive nature within the report," said CLEEN Director Innocent Chukwuma. "Furthermore, a researcher and two persons who collaborated in drafting the report are reportedly being subjected to harassment by security service agents," he added. About 60 Nigerian non-governmental organisations are said to have contributed to the report, which focuses on ethnic and communal conflicts that have claimed about 10,000 lives in Nigeria in the past three years. The report, launched in Lagos in August, blames the government for the massacre of more than 200 unarmed civilians in October 2001 in the central state of Benue. They were killed by soldiers seeking to avenge the killing of 19 of their colleagues by a local militia. That incident and a similar massacre in 1999 in Odi, a town in the southern Niger Delta, are among 32 alleged breaches of the constitution for which the national legislature has threatened to impeach President Olusegun Obasanjo. Isioma Ojugbana and Ijeoma Nwachukwu, members of the Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO) who co-wrote a chapter of the report titled "Benue Killings", said they had repeatedly been ordered by telephone to report to the SSS office in the capital, Abuja. They said their demand for a written invitation in accordance with standard procedures had been ignored. CLEEN alleged that Idris Bawa, a researcher with the National Human Rights Commission, had been interrogated by the SSS for his involvement in the production of the report. Customs and SSS officials were not immediately available for comment.