Letters to the Editor

• Much Much Worse Than Pinochet

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  "The Ottawa Citizen" (http://canada.com/ottawacitizen) Sunday, November 6, 2005
  archived at http://dangardner.ca/Featnov605.html

  On a June evening in 2004, Washington's elite gathered at the Marriott hotel for a black-tie dinner in honour of Condoleezza Rice, currently the U. S. Secretary of State but then the national security adviser to President George W. Bush. Rice was to receive the Leon H. Sullivan International Diplomacy Award, an honour named after the black American minister who fought for human rights in Africa and around the world.

  . . . Rice began her acceptance speech by thanking a list of "distinguished guests." First, was Rev. Sullivan's daughter. Second, "President Obiang of Equatorial Guinea."

  The transcript does not record whether, at that moment, there were any gasps from the audience.

  . . . "There is not really a government" in Equatorial Guinea, says John Bennett, who witnessed Obiang's operation up close when he served as U.S. ambassador to the tiny nation between 1991 and 1994. "There is an ongoing family criminal conspiracy. That's what runs the country."

  [The conspiracy began in 1968, with the regime of current President Obiang's uncle, for whom Obiang was the chief enforcer, until Obiang executed his uncle in 1979.] . . .

  . . . "From the middle of 1969 to 1979, about a quarter of the population was living outside the country," says Randall Fegley, a professor at Pennsylvania State University and one of the few academic experts on Equatorial Guinea.

  To maintain power amid the growing chaos, the regime deployed relentless terror. Random arrests and torture were routine. Public executions were commonplace. In one, "36 prisoners were taken outside, told to dig a trench and stand in it," Fegley wrote in Equatorial Guinea: An African Tragedy. "The trench was then filled so that only the prisoners' heads stuck out of the ground. The next day only two remained alive. Ants had eaten all but a bit of their victims' heads and faces."

  . . . What set Equatorial Guinea apart, says Fegley, is the totality of the slaughter. The regime didn't just murder intellectuals and suspected opponents. It wiped out their families. Even entire villages.

  No one is certain how many people died.

  "I have seen estimates between 50,000 to 80,000 dead. I would tend to think it's 65,000 or 70,000. This is out of a population of 380,000." says Fegley. "It is proportionally much worse than Nazi-occupied Europe."

  . . . Obiang was also the director of Blackbich Prison. And Blackbich was the very heart of the reign of terror.

  . . . The common method of execution in Blackbich involved pushing the condemned face-down and then smashing his skull with iron bars. Other prisoners, Fegley wrote, "would then clean up the blood, vomit and brain matter and the body was disposed of in an open pit."

  This was the institution governed by Teodoro Obiang. And according to Fegley, many sources indicate that Obiang personally supervised many of the atrocities committed in the prison.

  . . . Torture is "the normal means of investigation," concluded a United Nations inspector in 2002. The 2004 U.S. State Department report on human rights in Equatorial Guinea noted that "senior government officials told foreign diplomats during the year that human rights do not apply to criminals and that torture of known criminals was not a human rights abuse."

  . . . Blackbich prison continues to function as a centre of torture and, occasionally, murder.

  . . . There is not one bookstore or newsstand anywhere in the country, and almost all broadcast media are government-owned. In a rare interview with a foreign news agency, President Obiang defended his government by noting that there is a private radio station in the capital -- although he neglected to mention the station is owned by his son.

  . . . In 2002, the government claimed 98 per cent of the electorate went to the polls and re-elected Obiang with 97.1 per cent of the vote.

  . . . Obiang's son told journalist Peter Maass that he appreciated the Bush administration's approach to his father's government. "The United States, like China, is careful not to get into internal issues."

  . . . "The State Department's a disgrace on this issue," says Frank Ruddy, U.S. ambassador to Equatorial Guinea from 1984 to 1988. "I was talking with somebody over there, whom I knew, a person who worked with me when I was over there, who was with the State Department and had a position in Equatorial Guinea. He told me our people could hear the screams of torture from some of these places. They know damned well what is happening and they are not taking any kind of strong action on it. They are a disgrace."

  . . . "We in this room," Condoleezza Rice told the Washington elite in 2004, have "an obligation to help (Africans) achieve lasting liberty." The human rights work of the late Leon Sullivan should be an inspiration, she said. "Americans must never excuse tyranny or corruption in Africa."

  - - The Ottawa Citizen

  Permalink Friday, May 4, 2007 04:16 PM