Amnesty reports widespread rights abuses

Amnesty International on Wednesday drew attention in its 1999 annual report to the enormous human cost of conflict in the Great Lakes region which, it said, “continued to be the theatre of widespread human rights abuses” throughout last year. The regionalisation of the conflict in the DRC, together with massive population displacement and the “privatisation of the use of violence” by rebel groups, mean “it is difficult to see any improvement in the situation in the near future”, Amnesty’s regional representative for the Great Lakes, Patrice Vahard, told IRIN on Thursday.

In the DRC, thousands of people were extrajudicially executed - particularly in the Kivu provinces -, and hundreds of human rights defenders were detained and torture, Amnesty reported. “Scores of people were sentenced to death” after unfair trials, the report added.

There was a sharp rise in ‘disappearances’ in Rwanda in 1998, while more than 130,000 people were detained for long periods, mostly in connection with the 1994 genocide, in conditions that amounted to “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment”, Amnesty reported. Hundreds of Burundian refugees were also coerced into returning to Burundi through ill-treatment by security forces and harsh conditions in refugee camps, the report said.

In Burundi, torture continued to be widely used, detention conditions were often “cruel and inhuman” and ‘disappearances’ were frequently reported. At least 53 people were sentenced to death after unfair trials. In Burundi, as in Rwanda, genocide trials continued to fall short of international standards, the report added.

The response by security forces in Uganda to a series of bombings in Kampala “breached international human rights standards and Ugandan constitutional provisions”, according to the annual report. Hundreds of political prisoners were detained, often incommunicado, with Muslims particularly targeted, it added. Torture was “endemic” in police stations, while elements of the Ugandan army engaged in extrajudicial killings, rape and other human rights abuses, Amnesty stated.

Armed opposition groups throughout the region - notably the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda - also committed grave human rights abuses during 1998, including abduction, looting, extortion, rape and other forms of torture, forced recruitment and ‘disappearances’ as well as deliberate and arbitrary killing of unarmed civilians, the Amnesty report stated.