Rights abuses 'rife in Africa'

2006-05-23 09:08

London - Africa saw a reduction in conflicts last year, but gross human rights violations including killings and rape continued in volatile areas, said Amnesty International's annual report.

The report said: "The signing of several peace agreements in 2005 resulted in a decline in armed conflict across the region.

"There was encouraging progress in peacemaking in some conflicts", including in Senegal, where a 2004 peace agreement in the southern Casamance region ended two decades of fighting.

But, the rights watchdog said that conflict continued in Burundi, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast and Sudan while "many places (in Africa) faced political instability and serious risk of further conflict and violence".

African governments slammed

It said: "Grave human rights violations including killings, rape and other forms of sexual violence characterised continuing conflicts."

The report slammed African governments as well as opposition groups in Sudan, northern Uganda, Chad, the Ivory Coast and the DRC for human rights abuses.

In Sudan's Darfur region, "civilians were killed and injured by government troops, which sometimes bombed villages from the air, as well as the government-aligned nomadic Janjaweed militias".

War broke out in 2003 after rebel groups revolted against what they said was the political and economic marginalisation of the region's black African ethnic groups by the Arab-dominated regime in Khartoum.

The government responded by unleashing the Janjaweed militia, a force of horse-mounted gunmen blamed for atrocities including rape and the burning of villages.

Conflict claims 300 000 lives

The main rebel group known as the Sudanese Liberation Movement (SLM) signed a peace accord on May 5 with the Khartoum government.

Two other groups had resisted signing, but had came under intense international pressure. Three years of conflict had claimed about 300 000 lives and left 2.4 million homeless.

The report said, in northern Uganda, civilians continued to be victims of the 19-year-old fight between the government and Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels, leaving more than three million internally displaced and half a million refugees moving to the south.

A foreign ministry statement said that in neighbouring Burundi, armed conflict continued between the government and one last rebel group, the National Liberation Forces (FNL).

The FNL was the last of Burundi's seven Hutu rebel groups to join in the peace process in the central African nation, where fighting since 1993 had claimed 300 000 lives.

Across in West Africa, there had been no progress in demobilising about 50 000 fighters under the Ivory Coast's peace process, while child soldiers continued to be used there and in the DRC.

Apart from conflict, the report said that many governments continued to deny rights to food, shelter, health and education.

- AFP