According to a report published on May 12 by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Malian Army together with “foreign fighters” would have killed 500 people between March 27 and 31, 2022. The UN said that he has “reasonable grounds to believe” that at least 58 women and girls were victims of rape and other sexual assaults during that military operation.
For months, human rights experts from the UN and other institutions such as Human Rights Watch had been requesting an independent investigation, after multiple witnesses denounced that in March 2022, in Moura, in the center of the country, crimes against the population had been committed. .
This May 12, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) finally affirmed that it has “reasonable grounds to believe that at least 500 people died in violation of norms, standards, rules and/or principles of international law ” between March 27 and 31, 2022, in Moura, by the Mali Armed Forces (Fama) and foreign military personnel.
The organization assured that at least 238 of the fatalities were identified as civilians, including children.
The report that collects the accusations also indicated that among the deceased are at least twenty women, including seven minus seven minors.
It also stressed that the High Commissioner has reason “to believe that 58 women and girls were victims of rape and other forms of sexual violence,” in addition to torture.
“The Malian soldiers handed me over to State Security (intelligence services) where I was tortured and electrocuted to have sex during my hearings, which lasted six days, before taking me back to Camp 1 (of the Gendarmerie) in Bamako.” said one of the women who testified in the report.
Volker Turk, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, stressed that the accounts are “extremely disturbing” and assured that “summary executions, rape and torture during armed conflicts amount to war crimes and could” also constitute crimes. against humanity. Other United Nations voices have requested that the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court investigate the case.
The military attacked “indiscriminately”, according to civilian witnesses
On April 1, 2022, the Malian Army claimed that it had carried out an operation in Moura in which, according to its statements, “203 combatants of terrorist groups were killed”, while 51 people had been arrested. A few days later, the Army General Staff denied any involvement in human rights violations in that operation.
But civilian voices began to denounce that during the operation, Malian soldiers had attacked civilians who were trying to flee the scene, killing groups of “up to ten (civilians) at a time,” according to the United Nations.
According to the report, the arrival of Malian troops and their foreign partners occurred on March 27, with five helicopters flying over a market where thousands of people had come to stock up before Ramadan.
As the document describes, one of the helicopters opened fire on the market “indiscriminately”, which provoked a response from jihadists who were in the crowd and exchanged fire with the military.
After that, the soldiers would have selected hundreds of people among those present, using criteria such as having a long beard, which in their eyes was a “suspicious” factor. This is how many men would have been selected who would have been executed and then buried in common graves, according to the report.
The text denounces that many of the captured civilians were tortured both in Moura and in other towns such as Sévaré, also in the center of the country, and in the capital, Bamako. “The soldiers slapped us, beat us, kicked us on the head, beat us with ropes and the butts of their weapons. They called us jihadists, accused us of killing our own brothers and destroying our country,” said one of them. the testimonies collected.
The report indicates that the “foreign personnel” were part of the Wagner group
The document indicates that the Malian military has systematically denied Moura access to MINUSMA, the UN mission in Mali, whose chief, Guillaume Ngefa, was declared “persona non grata” before being expelled from the country. However, the entity has begun an investigation that will last six months and in which satellite images will be used.
The report does not specify the nationality of the “foreign personnel” who would have participated. However, in the document some testimonies describe these soldiers as “white men” who spoke an “unknown language”, so there are hypotheses that they did not speak French – the official language – or English.
He also mentions comments attributed to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov regarding the presence of the Russian Wagner paramilitary group in Mali. Its leader, Yevgueni Prigozhin, also indirectly acknowledged the presence of mercenaries in that African nation, by assuring that no members of their ranks had died in that territory, in recent statements.
The UN report conducted 157 interviews with witnesses who claim to be rape survivors, people with direct knowledge of the events and members of 18 neighboring towns, as well as internally displaced persons who fled Moura after the episode of violence.
Mali has been mired in a security crisis since a failed Islamist coup more than ten years ago left various regions of the country at the mercy of armed groups including the Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin, the wing of Al-Muslimin. Qaeda in Mali, or the self-styled Islamic State in the Greater Sahara. The United Nations denounces that attacks perpetrated by these groups, as well as military actions “have trapped civilians in the grip of violence.”
with AFP
