* News Release Issued by the International Secretariat of Amnesty
International *

5 April 2001
AFR 29/003/2001
63/01

Amnesty International today called for a vigorous international
presence in Guinea to protect hundreds of thousands of Sierra
Leonean and Liberian refugees and Guinean civilians caught in a
vicious six-month old insurgency in Guinea.

In a statement issued at the end of an Amnesty
International fact-finding mission to Guinea, the organization
recommended that: "The present UN force in Sierra Leone, UNAMSIL,
or the proposed ECOWAS intervention force in the border area,
should be mandated immediately to provide support for such an
initiative and ensure strong human rights monitoring. It is time
to bring this West African human rights disaster to an end."

Sierra Leonean refugees had fled to Guinea to escape
vicious fighting, marked by widespread killings, abduction, rape,
and amputation. Until recently there has been safety in Guinea.

Guineans generously took in close to 700,000 refugees who
streamed across the border over the past decade. They lived and
worked alongside each other. However, as the region's spiralling
violence and human rights abuses spilled across borders, Guinea's
President Lansana Conte declared in September 2000 that it was
time for the refugees to go home, and the place of refuge has now
become a virtual hell on earth.

Over the past six months, Sierra Leonean and Liberian
refugees have fled from one camp to another and Guinean villagers
from one village to another, in a desperate attempt to avoid the
chaotic violence that has descended in south eastern Guinea. As
they flee camps, the camps are burned, to prevent return.

The UN and aid agencies are working feverishly to
establish new camps, further inland, hopefully beyond the reach
of the cross-border raids. Most refugees express resentment and
anger at the prospect of further transfers to other camps. They
have had enough and want only to go home, even though they know
the situation there is no better. "If I must die, at least let me
die at home", many of them told Amnesty International delegates.

The mission found overwhelming evidence of violence from
so many different directions and forms. One after another, camps
have been emptied because of attacks or rumoured attacks. While
fleeing, countless refugees have been killed or abducted by
rebels. Others have disappeared after being abducted by Guinean
soldiers, such as the nine refugees who disappeared after being
arrested in Forecariah in September 2000. Checkpoints have sprung
up everywhere, sometimes set-up by the Guinean military,
sometimes the local population, where refugees are forced to pay
money or turn over their supply of rice and cooking oil in order
to pass.

Mabinte Bangura told Amnesty International that she fled
Sierra Leone 3 years ago, after witnessing her husband being shot
in the back by the RUF. Three weeks ago at Kilibenda, the RUF
stopped her family and 20 others, who were fleeing an attack.
Terrified, she watched as her fifteen year old daughter Salaymatu
Bangura was taken away by the rebels, and her seventeen year old
son Sorie Bangura was beaten almost senseless.

A 75 year-old-man told how five of his grandchildren,
aged 10 to 35 years, were taken away by the RUF following the
March 9th attack on Nongoa. A few days later, his son was
arrested by the Guinean military after a villager accused him of
being one of those very same rebels. His body was later found in
Nongoa, with his throat and belly cut.

Alfred Kaloko, a 35 year-old farmer and refugee from
Sierra Leone, and his two year-old son were shot in the back by
uniformed men when they tried to flee the attack on the Katkama
refugee camp in December 2000.

Meanwhile the Guinean army conducts sweeping arrests in
the refugee camps when rumours mount of impending rebel
incursions. Authorities often hold individuals bearing tattoos,
an RUF trait. However, distinctions are frequently not made
between such tattoos and common traditional marks and protective
tattoos which are prevalent throughout the region.

The Amnesty International delegation visited Massakoundou
Camp the day after a massive and seemingly arbitrary round-up of
some 400 refugees. The detainees were held in appalling
conditions in a local prison, and all but a handful appear to
have been released within 48 hours. Amnesty International was
told by local authorities that the round-ups did not constitute
arrest and detention, but were simply part of a verification
process.

Often forgotten in the midst of the refugee crisis is the
plight of some 300,000 Guineans who have fled their homes. The
once vibrant market town of Guéckédou lies in near total ruins
following a frenzy of fighting there two months. Delegates were
able to tour the city, to which only a handful of citizens have
begun to return.

During visits to villages in and around Kissidougou and
Guéckédou, as well as to Kolomba Camp, at the far end of the
Parrot's Beak, where over 40,000 refugees have not received any
food since November 2000, the delegates documented
heart-wrenching cases of Guinean men, women and children who were
killed, raped and abducted by Sierra Leonean rebels during an
incursion far into Guinea in mid-December.

In Waltou Village Amnesty International heard one man
describe how rebels took women, including his wife, and young
girls, one as young as six or seven, into a building to be raped,
while he was made to listen outside.

In Waltou Gbaran, Tamba Leno told the mission that his
wife Sia Teukiano, thinking the rebels had left the village,
returned home because she was worried that animals were
disturbing the family's crops. But she was captured and her
body, burned beyond recognition, was found later and could only
be identified by virtue of a deformed finger.

In order to end the abuses and safeguard the physical
integrity of these refugees, Amnesty International is "urging all
parties to the conflicts in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea to
abide by international human rights standards and the principles
of international humanitarian law. Other states and the
international community as a whole, must use all opportunities to
exert strong pressure on the governments and armed groups
involved in the fighting".

There is a pressing need for more support if the basic
needs of refugees and displaced Guineans are to be met. The
international community must ensure that UN agencies, aid
organizations and the Guinean government have adequate resources
to provide the assistance that is required. And those agencies
and organizations should not be prevented in any way from doing
their work.

Amnesty further calls on:

the international community to put in place a meaningful process
of resettlement, including adequate resources, which provide
refugees with safe haven elsewhere, to the extent that Guinea
remains dangerous;
the United Nations to immediately set up the Special Court on
Sierra Leone to try those responsible for serious human rights
crimes and, thus, end impunity.

Background
Parties to the conflict include Sierra Leone's Revolutionary
United Front (RUF) based in both Sierra Leone and Liberia; the
Guinea-based Liberian rebel group ULIMO-K; the Guinean army;
Guinean Civil Defence Forces; traditional Kamajor fighters from
sierra Leone; an elusive armed Guinean opposition group, the
Rassemblement des Forces Democratiques de Guinée; and bans of
villagers who have, out of fear, begun to turn on their refugee
neighbors.

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