Radio reveals camp horrors

Press, 22 June 1984, Page 6

Radio reveals camp horrors

By

JOSEPH CAMPBELL,

of the Associated Press (through NZPA) Conakry, Guinea

Almost every evening, as darkness gathers along the West African coast, Guineans, huddle around their radios, tuned in to a programme devoted to stories of horror and inhumanity. Since the military seized power in Guinea in early April, State-run Radio Conakry has invited former political prisoners to recount their treatment at Camp Boiro, the dreaded prison of the deposed civilian regime.

Their accounts are invariably chilling, filled with descriptions of electric-shock torture to extract confessions, of long stretches of malnourishment, or prolonged confinement in dank, crowded cells scarcely larger than closets. Untold hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Guineans were imprisoned at Camp Boiro during the long, harsh regime of Ahmed Sekou Toure, who was President from 1958 until he died on March 26 after emergency heart surgery in the United States. _ His death left a'-Taping power vacuum, filjfed by

moderate military officers who staged a bloodless coup on April 3. Although Mr Sekou Toure was frequently criticised for suspected abuses by such human rights organisations as Amnesty International, the extreme degree of his regime’s harshness has only emerged since the coup. For that, the evening radio programme, called “La Parole est a Vous” (The Floor is Yours), has been a principal conduit. Its effect has been significant on Guineans in re-evaluating Mr Sekou Toure, black Africa’s long-est-serving leader at the time of his death. “We didn’t know who he was or what he was until after his death,” said Muhammed Kaba Bangoura, a Foreign Affairs Ministry official who was a Government bureaucrat during Mr Sekou Toure’s reign. “I didn’t know what happened at Camp Boiro. And when I heard how they treated man, I said, ‘No — we were in the dark.’ It was a regime of intolerance.” While Mr Sekou Toure was alive former inmates at Camp Boiro generally kept silent about their ordeals — for fear, they say, of certain reprisals. “Leaving Boiro, you said nothing. You knew that if

you didn’t keep quiet, you would go back. And if you went back, it was certain death,” said Dr Ibrahim Barry, who spent seven years at the prison. Camp Boiro is a ramshackle, walled military compound not far from where Mr Sekou Toure’s body was buried in Conakry, Guinea’s decaying capital. The tight rows of tin-roofed cells, some of them no larger than 2 metres by 3.5 metres, are empty now. But the walls still bear traces of immense suffering. In cell No. 52, someone etched “God save me” in blood and datd&Mhe inscription June, 1978/

The most dreaded place at Camp Boiro was the “Head of Death,” highwalled chambers where, visitors are told, no prisoner came out alive. The walls are grotesquely adorned with small, neatly stencilled skulls, and the rooms open on to a common courtyard. During the summer rainy season the courtyard would fill with water which spilled into the cells.

“Prisoners would literally rot in the head of death,” said Lieutenant Lansana Maen, who serves as a guide. “As many as four, five, or six prisoners died here a day.”

Former inmates said that they underwent excruciating electric-shock torture upon arriving at Camp Boiro. Current was generated by a crude, hand-cranked device and passed through wires attached to prisoners’ feet, genitals, and other sensitive body parts. Rene Gomez, a former director-general of Guinea’s Civil Aviation Authority who spent eight years at Camp Boiro, said that some prisoners were suspended head-first into a pit filled with excrement. The torture was meant to extract confessions and, former, inmates said, it invariably succeeded. «

“Whoever was subjected to the torture at Camp Boiro,” Dr Barry said, “would be ready to denounce his own mother. It was that intense.” Hundreds are believed to have died at Camp Boiro, and those who survived were often left with physical and psychological disabilities.

Dr Jean-Jacques Frere, medical director of the French organisation, Doctors Without Borders, said that prolonged vitamin and nutritional deficiencies had caused nervous disorders in many former inmates. Others, including prisoners freed as long ago as 1977, had difficulties walking, “because they were not treated after their release from Boiro. For some, the damage is permanent.”

Also common, he said, were vision and digestive problems, acute anxiety, and sexual disorders. Teams from Doctors Without Borders had examined several dozen former Boiro inmates, and, said Dr Frere, “each day brings accounts of new horrors ... all the former inmates we’ve seen have similar versions about what happened at Boiro. Their accounts are corroborated time and again.”