CLETUS AKWAYA, Abuja | Wednesday
AN army officer has told a Nigerian human rights inquiry commission how he was chained, hands and legs, for a full year by agents of late dictator Sani Abacha on false charges.
The packed hearing fell silent, except for observers sobbing quietly, as Captain Sadiq Usman Suleiman testified on his detention and inprisonment over an alleged 1995 coup plot.
”I have undergone torture, inhuman acts, and been detained in jail with my legs and my hands chained at night for one year,” Suleiman told the first full session of the Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission.
President Olusegun Obasanjo set up the commission to help heal the trauma of 15 years of brutal military rule. Nigerians hope it will open up Nigeria’s military past in much the same way South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission did for the Apartheid era.
Suleiman said he had spent four years in jail ”in a hut without ventilation” in the remote northeastern town of Jalingo. The period included pre-trial detention and time in jail after his conviction for alleged plotting.
Scores of serving and former officers and prominent personalities, including Obasanjo himself, were rounded up and jailed for what has since been accepted as a phoney coup plot.
Abacha’s sudden death in June 1998 brought in a transitional military government which freed political prisoners and organised elections won by Obasanjo. Military rule ended in May 1999.
One of the officers Suleiman named as his torturers sat among observers at the hearing, smiling benignly as he narrated his ordeal.
Another officer, Colonel Martins Azuka Igwe, said he was ”a victim of callous acts of inhumanity”.
Both Igwe and Suleiman were among people sentenced to summary execution by the coup plot tribunal. The sentences were commuted to 25 years in jail following international appeals.
Both officers, who were dismissed from the army, are seeking their reinstatement and promotion as well as compensation for the infringement of their human rights.
Commission chairman, retired supreme court judge Chukwudifu Oputa, says his focus is on reconciliation rather than punishment.
The commission received over 10000 petitions during a nationwide tour but has decided to narrow its scrutiny to 150 cases it terms as gross abuses. – Reuters