TOGO: Human Rights group Says 790 Killed in Election Violence

[struggle4progress]

UN Integrated Regional Information Networks
May 13, 2005
Posted to the web May 13, 2005

Lome

The Togolese League of Human Rights said on Friday that 790 people had been killed and 4,345 hurt in political violence triggered by the recent election of Faure Gnassingbe to succeed his father as president of the West African nation.

"The international community must hold an inquiry given the scale of the human rights violations," Ayayi Apedo-Amah, the secretary-general of the organisation, told IRIN.

Photos released by the group showed corpses of young men who had been disembowelled or had their faces hacked to bits with machetes. Other survivors were pictured, their faces bleeding after being attacked with nail-spiked clubs.

Government officials were not immediately available to comment on the reported death toll, which was much higher than the figure of about 100 previously estimated by diplomats. <snip>

http://allafrica.com/stories/200505130038.html

[Rex]

1. Spiked clubs and machetes

Sounds like feudalism!

[bennywhale]

2. "The international community must hold an inquiry" Yeah will they fuck

When has the international community ever given a shit about Africa. Theres an aids epidemic on apocalyptic proportions and we're spending billions chasing shadows around the world.

"The biggest threat in the world today is international terrorism"

Tell that to the Africans Bushy

[uppityperson]

3. link doesn't work. Here we go again in Africa

[struggle4progress]

4. Link works fine for me. eom

[Beowulf]

5. This is a very important story

My daughter was a Peace Corps volunteer in Togo. The situation in Togo is explosive. The political divisions break down along ethnic lines and the hostilities between the Northern people (who have been in power for almost 40 years) and the Southern people are deep. The army is comprised almost entirely of Northern people who have terrorized the Southern peoples for 40 years now. The army believes that if they lose power, the Southerners would kill them.The potential for civil war is great. There is a great deal of suspision and malice between the groups and no trust whatsoever. Should civil war come, genocide is possible.

Togo needs the West to step in. There needs to be a provisional government comprised of leaders from all the groups and the leaders of a provisional government must not stand for election, it must be a government that will willingly dissolve itself after open and honest elections. The army needs to be disbanded and disarmed and an international peacekeeping force brought in until the military and police can be retrained and integrated with members of all ethnic groups.

It's a very small but beautiful country (I visited my daughter three years ago). My heart breaks for its people.