Month: June 2024

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abuja, nigeria — A new report by rights group Amnesty International accuses Nigeria’s military of inhumane treatment toward women and girls who survived Boko Haram. Nigerian defense authorities reject the report’s findings, saying that military personnel operate within the scope of international laws of conflict.

A statement said the military has “self-regulating mechanisms to address any proven case of misconduct” by its operatives.

The report from Amnesty International, titled “Help Us Build Our Lives,” said women and girls who survived Boko Haram captivity were subjected to further suffering, including prolonged, unlawful detention by the military and inadequate support by authorities for them to rebuild their lives.

“We still stand by what we have said,” said Isa Sanusi, Amnesty International’s Nigeria director. “We believe that if somebody is saying that what you’re saying is not true, he should provide evidence. This research took more than a year and it is based on interviews with over 126 people.”

The Amnesty report said girls who were not detained were left to fend for themselves in camps where they sometimes reunite with former or so-called “repentant” Boko Haram husbands — putting them at risk of continued abuse from the men.

“These girls were picked when they were children,” said Sanusi. “They didn’t give their consent, they were forced. And what they went through is more or less human trafficking and abduction, therefore it is completely based on illegitimacy and it is unacceptable that they will be kept in government-run camps and pretend that they’re married or something. Even if the girls say that they want to live with them, an investigation should be done in a free atmosphere without coercion.”

Nigerian troops have been fighting Boko Haram insurgents in northeast Nigeria since 2009. The group’s rebellion has killed more than 35,000 people and displaced millions, according to the United Nations.

The Nigerian military’s approach and tactics have often sparked criticism.

Nigerian authorities said the military will engage with Amnesty International but said authorities were “unperturbed by such self-serving statements targeted at dampening the morale of troops.”

Security analyst Senator Iroegbu says the matter is a delicate topic and must be treated with caution.

“Anything associated with Boko Haram is a sensitive matter, there are a lot of misgivings over this so-called rehabilitation and reintegration of Boko Haram terrorists,” said Iroegbu. “For the military, they’re also in a very delicate situation. Once these survivors are rescued there’s a detention facility where they’re being vetted. Now the challenge is how long are they being vetted? The military in the first place are not even trained for the role they’re playing.”

Last year, a Reuters news agency investigation accused the military of secretly running a mass abortion program for girls and women rescued from Boko Haram.

Authorities set up an investigation into the matter but Amnesty International says the findings are shrouded in secrecy.

Iroegbu says sometimes overzealous personnel are to blame for the misconduct.

“The military as an institution might have committed to observing human rights but there are some individual soldiers that might have committed rights violations in their own actions,” said Iroegbu, the security analyst. “What I expected the military [to do] is say, ‘Okay, we’ll investigate.'”

Amnesty says before releasing the report, it presented Nigeria’s federal and state authorities as well as the United Nations with its findings.

The military referred to Amnesty International’s sources as “intrinsically unreliable.”
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Blantyre — Medical workers in Malawi’s public health facilities started a nationwide sit-in strike Monday to push the government to meet their longtime grievances, which include special allowances and improved conditions of service. The strike forced patients in many hospitals to return home without receiving medical care. Strike organizers said some medical workers could treat patients with critical conditions.

In some public health facilities medical workers were seen singing and dancing outside the hospitals.

While some patients like Nelia Banda of the M’bwatalika area returned home without receiving attention.

She said “Medical workers told me that they will not attend to me because they are not working today. They said I should come again on Monday next week. I am pregnant and yesterday I fell because of high blood pressure but I haven’t been assisted here.”

The strike is a result of the failure of negotiations between the medical workers and government authorities on worker demands dating back to February of this year.

The government had told the medical workers that it would increase their allowances and improve their working conditions instead of meeting the 15% salary increase that medical workers were demanding.    

The increase was meant for risk allowance, top-up allowance and professional allowance. Put simply, this is income that medical workers receive for working overtime or for performing duties outside their normal schedule.

Daniel Nasimba is the general secretary for the Physician Assistants Union of Malawi (PAUM), one of the organizers of the strike.

He said some staff members at the hospital were allowed to attend to patients with emergencies.

He said, “At least we have people. Every department has someone who can attend to any emergency that can come in. What is happening now is called a sit-in. It’s not a complete shutdown of the health service. We are all at work, nobody is at home.”

Nasimba said the workers will not return to duty fully — until the government honors its promise.

However, the Malawi government has obtained an injunction stopping the strike.

Organizers of the strike, the National Organization of Nurses and Midwives and the Physician Assistants Union of Malawi, said in a statement released Monday evening that they were consulting their legal team about the matter. 
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Brussels — A court in Brussels on Monday sentenced a 65-year-old Belgian-Rwandan man to 25 years in prison for murder and rape committed during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.  

Emmanuel Nkunduwimye was found guilty of war crimes and genocide for a series of murders as well as the rape of a Tutsi woman. 

Nkunduwimye, who was first arrested in Belgium in 2011, owned a garage in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, in April 1994 when the genocide began. The garage was part of a complex of buildings that was the scene of massacres perpetrated by Interahamwe militiamen.  

Nkunduwimye was close to several militia leaders – including Georges Rutaganda, who was sentenced to life imprisonment by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and died in 2010. 

The jury at the trial in Brussels found the accused assisted the militia “with full knowledge of the facts.”  

“He could not have been unaware of the abuses committed there,” the sentencing said, according to Belga news agency.  

During the trial, Nkunduwimye was formally identified by the woman he raped, who came to testify in private at the hearing. 

Nkunduwimye denied the accusations and his defense called for his acquittal, arguing in particular that the prosecution’s evidence was unreliable. 

Prosecutors at the trial, which began in April, had requested a sentence of 30 years in jail.  

The genocide in Rwanda, which took place between April and July 1994, claimed at least 800,000 lives, according to the U.N. The victims were mainly members of the Tutsi minority, but also included moderate Hutus.  

The trial of Nkunduwimye was the seventh such trial to be held in Belgium since 2001 involving alleged crimes committed during the genocide. 

Belgium – which controlled Rwanda during the colonial period – can prosecute alleged genocidaires because its court recognizes universal jurisdiction for crimes under international humanitarian law committed outside the country. 

In the most recent trial, Seraphin Twahirwa was sentenced in December 2023 to life imprisonment for dozens of murders and rapes perpetrated by himself or the Interahamwe militiamen under his authority in Kigali between April and July 1994.
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