Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria, HURIWA, has called out President Muhammadu Buhari over a damning report by Amnesty International report on Police extrajudicial killings in the South East.
The group said that this shows that for the Buhari government, Igbo lives do not matter.
HURIWA said it was shocked that the Presidency was just reacting to the report nearly a month after Amnesty International released its report on extra legal killings allegedly carried out by security forces and even listed out the police victims of the attacks by unknown gunmen in the South East.
“Thereby telling whoever is rational enough to decipher the body language of the president that he cares just a little about Igbo lives,” HURIWA said.
HURIWA argued that previously, the Federal Government had always responded to Amnesty International’s numerous reports on killings in the North with absolute rapidity and precise speed.
The human rights advocacy group further carpeted the presidency for allegedly making largely pre-fabricated allegations against the already banned Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) just so that it can hold on to something as a justification for the atrocities unleashed in the South East by security forces.
“Proscription of an organization does not justify the reckless killings of suspected members of such a group especially when most of those killed were never armed,” HURIWA said.
HURIWA’s statement was signed by Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko and the National Media Affairs Director, Miss Zainab Yusuf, and made available to DAILY POST on Thursday.
The statement totally absolves Amnesty International of any sort of collusion with IPOB, insisting that the president rather than castigate AI should be thankful that the organisation is helping Nigeria to sanitize the standards of policing and to expose rogue armed security forces committing atrocities against citizens.
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“The president’s people should cover their faces in shame for making spurious, jaundiced and irresponsible allegations against the banned Indigenous Peoples of Biafra just for political propaganda.
“The government has not legally established any nexus between the embattled IPOB and those sensational allegations.
“What a responsible government ought to have done was to understudy the Amnesty International report and prosecute armed security operatives identified to have applied extralegal killings as a tactic of law enforcement and not to make a generalized and fallacious allegation”.
HURIWA is therefore challenging Amnesty International to sue the Federal government of Nigeria before the International Criminal Court in The Hague Netherlands.
Buhari had on Wednesday accused the Nnamdi Kanu-led IPOB, of stockpiling weapons across Nigeria.
The President, through a statement signed by Garba Shehu, his Spokesman, accused members of the secessionist group of killing security agents and setting government facilities in the Southeast ablaze.
He was responding to claims by Amnesty International on human rights violations in the Southeast where it lamented that the human rights watch organisation was defending the Nnamdi Kanu led group which it described as a terrorist group.
AI had recently released a report on the security situation in the country where it claimed that at least 167 persons have been ruthlessly killed from January to June by operatives of Nigerian security forces.
The organisation claimed that security agents have carried out a catalogue of human rights violations and crimes under international law while responding to spiralling violence in the Southeast.
The group added that these violations included sweeping mass arrests, excessive and unlawful force, and torture and other ill-treatment, Amnesty International alleged.
