mess . The looting and the rioting had been bad, but… given the poverty of the people,
the dispiriting of the people, you can understanding. So, really it’s the people on the
street who suffered you want to contact. I am afraid that they are afraid to testify. I
spoke to several this morning, clearly who suffered, people who were taken off to the
cells and prisons. But they just wasn’t …they just too afraid. It’s really a police state.
That’s I saw lots of cases of seeing the army being more brutal, I didn’t see the police
being brutal. I saw the army being brutal.
It is quite clear that the ZNA were involved in human rights violations, ranging from humiliating
and degrading treatment through to extreme brutality.
Brutality in detention
Detention is one area in which it has been very difficult to establish the scale of human rights
violations. Given the very large number of arrests and the subsequent discharge of most
persons, it is obviously important to ascertain.
Yes, and they took us to some other offices, some other rooms around that place. And
they were treating us in a harsh way . We were beaten, I was also beaten. They were
giving us slaps. I was being slapped, more than four times, for answering him when he
asked, “how many of you say that they are not guilty?” Then I raised my hand, I was
one of these. I was near to him so he has to hit me, very hard. He hit me, with his hand.
He just slapped me. He said, “How can you say you are not guilty, or you yourself, so
you are telling us that the police they don’t know what they are doing. They just took
you like that?” And I didn’t answer because I was afraid I was going to be bitten till
death. I had to shut up. I had to keep quiet. I was hit…. You know up to now my ears,
they don’t hear nicely. I’ve got a problem. I don’t know… I kind of hear some words,
when you ask, when you are talking to me, I’m having problems with my family. They
something, my wife, she says something, I have to have her repeat it again, She must
repeat sot that I can get what she’s saying. On that day, on that Wednesday, it was a
harsh day.
[Question: Can you tell me a bit about the interrogation?]
What happened when they were asking you question? They were asking us what
happened. Why we has acted violently. I was always telling them that you should
excuse me because excuse myself because I wasn’t involved I don’t know anything, I
just don’t know about what acting violently with the police or throwing stones of
whatever, which was violent, I wasn’t involved. I was just not involved. So I don’t know
nothing. So I was bitten with a broomstick again....All over the body. They just didn’t
came where they hit me. The just hit. And, then often some of the people they were
scared. They were scared to death. They had seen some examples which were set on
us. So they were so scared that they even admitted throwing stones and doing some
foolish thing of which some of these they didn’t do...There was another guy. They were
about four more guys with me. We were the first people to raise our hands up when we
were asked, “How many of you say that they are not guilty of the offences?” That’s
when we were beaten, because we were the first four, not knowing of some other
people which had been beaten in other rooms cause we were put in different rooms.
So we were put in like, 20 in a room, cause we were many. More than a hundred I tell
you, more than 200 in the cells at central prison. So they were taking us into some
rooms different rooms. So we could hear some other hiding, in some other rooms. We
could hear some other people being beaten, in some other rooms around there.
Surrounding the rooms which we were in….
Humiliating and degrading treatment
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