A United States based organisation that helps the United Nations (UN) to uncover cases of human rights abuses worldwide, Benetech Initiative, has said that it will visit Nigeria to investigate likely cases of genocide and sundry rights abuses by government or institutions.
The company’s investigation led to the arrest of former president of Yugoslovia, Slobodan Milosevic in the 90s.
The upcoming mission to Nigeria was disclosed by Vijaya Tripathi of Benetech’s human rights programme who also stated that other countries like Guatemala, Egypt, Lebanon, and Cambodia will be in their ittinery.
According to Patrick Ball, the chief scientist and director of human rights programme of the organisation: “”A central part of our work is finding big chunks of paper documents of different kinds and then making sense of it. We call it found data, like found art. We put real numbers on human rights atrocities numbers that can be scientifically defended,”.
Scientifically selected samples were scanned into computers, carefully coded. “Does it talk about arrests or actions that can be taken under surveillance? Does it talk about the discovery of a body? Any of those things would really get our attention,” said Ball to ABCnews.com.
Another instance of the success of the company is in Guatemala. During Guatemala’s civil war, the government denied allegations of genocide.
Those denials, according to the company, might have stood, even after the discovery of 80 million government documents in an abandoned warehouse. But Benetech was called in.
Benetech’s work helped lead to the conclusion by the Independent Historical Clarification Commission, that acts of genocide had indeed occurred. The same approach also helped in the investigation of Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia in the 90’s.
Ball said his work does not identify individual suspects – it is big picture.
“When a large institution, an army or a government, creates a policy to commit violence, a heck of a lot more people are going to suffer than if one individual perpetrator decides to do a few bad things,” said Ball.
The company also stated in its website that its analysis demonstrated that the civil war in Per� was much bloodier than the elites in the country’s capital Lima ever imagined.
In a testimony to the work of Benetech, Howard Varney, former chief investigator for Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Sierra Leone stated that his commission’s detailed understanding of the role of different factions in the conflict and the impact on women and children was aided by the US based company.
In its 2005 report on human rights practices around the world, the US Department of State found that Nigeria’s human rights record was “poor.” According to the report, Nigerian government officials and police were responsible for “serious abuses,” including politically motivated killings; the use of lethal force against suspected criminals and hostage-seizing militants in the Niger Delta ; beatings and even torture of suspects, detainees, and convicts; and extortion of civilians. Other abuses included violence, discrimination, and female genital cutting ,child labor and prostitution , and human trafficking .
In addition, the era of former president Olusegun Obasanjo witnessed the invasion of Odi in Bayelsa State in 1999 during which the entire town was allegedly leveled, killing many people in the process. In the same vein, the Zaki Biam episode in Benue State in 2001 was similar to that of Odi.
Jul222008