Victims and their families of crimes committed during Guinea’s 2009 stadium massacre wait to enter a courthouse in Conakry, Guinea, September 28, 2022. © 2022 Elise Keppler/Human Rights Watch |
Thirteen years ago, Guinea’s security forces stormed a stadium filled with tens of thousands of peaceful protesters. More than 150 people were slaughtered, bodies strewn across the field. Scores of women were raped.
Now, a long-delayed effort to bring the perpetrators of the massacre to justice is finally underway.
When the trial opened roughly a week ago, exactly 13 years after the massacre, surviving witnesses and their families waited in a long line to enter the courthouse where those accused of committing the atrocities, including former President Moussa Dadis Camara and other government officials, would be standing trial. It was mostly women in the packed courtroom’s second-floor victim observation area; mothers of the dead and survivors of the sexual assaults among them. The mood was one of anticipation.
“I have known too much trauma for 13 years,” one victim told us. “Today, I feel relieved. I want the perpetrators to answer for their actions and to be punished.” |
On September 28, 2009, thousands of people gathered peacefully in a stadium in Conakry, Guinea’s capital, to protest the intention of Camara, then a military leader, to run for president.
Shortly before noon, security forces opened fire into the crowd. Witnesses described to Human Rights Watch how bodies were strewn across the field, crushed against gates, draped over walls, and piled outside locker rooms where doors had been pulled shut by the terrified few who had gotten there first. |
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Shortly after the attack, a team of HRW experts arrived in Guinea. After speaking with hundreds of victims and witnesses, the team produced a seminal report on the crimes, Bloody Monday. |
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Watch a video calling for justice at the massacre’s 10th anniversary. |
The team documented the killings and investigated how scores of bodies were removed from hospital morgues and buried in mass graves in a government cover-up.
They interviewed dozens of rape survivors and witnesses to sexual assault, documenting how more than 100 women were raped in the stadium, with several women murdered after the assault. For days after the massacre, security forces raped, murdered, and pillaged in neighborhoods where opposition supporters lived. |
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HRW, along with international partners and Guinean civil society activists, set to work on a years-long campaign to see those implicated in the attack, including high-ranking government and military figures, prosecuted.
But a host of obstacles kept justice out of reach until the government finally opened its own investigation and handed down indictments. It took a few more years of concerted pressure before the suspected perpetrators – including Camara – would face their victims in court.
For victims and those who have worked for years to get here, the occasion is momentous.
“I have spent nearly twenty years pressing for prosecutions of the world’s worst crimes,” said Elise Keppler, associate director of HRW’s International Justice Program. “The rarity of victims seeing high-level figures on trial, and particularly before a domestic court, is too well known to me.”
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| Since relaunching the Week in Rights with a fresh layout, we’ve been focused on bringing you our top human rights news. But now we’d like to hear from you. What topics interest you? Any suggestions for us? Write us at WeekInRights@hrw.org and let us know! And thanks as always for your support. |
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