The United Nations on Friday May 12 accused the Malian army and combatants “strangers” of having executed in March 2022 at least 500 people during an anti-jihadist operation in the center of the country.
Din a damning reportbased on a survey by the human rights division of the blue helmets mission deployed since 2013 in Mali (Minusma), the High Commissioner for Human Rights believes that it has “reasonable grounds to believe” that at least 500 people, including some twenty women and seven children, were allegedly “carried out by the Malian armed forces and foreign military personnel (…) after the area [avait] been completely mastered” between March 27 and 31, 2022 in Moura.
OHCHR has also “reasonable grounds to believe that 58 women and girls were victims of rape and other forms of sexual violence”. It reports acts of torture on arrested persons.
Potential crimes against humanity
These acts could constitute war crimes and, “depending on the circumstances”crimes against humanity, judge in a statement Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
The report does not explicitly identify the “strangers”. But he recalls the Malian official statements about the contest “instructors” Russians in the fight against the jihadists as well as the remarks attributed to the head of Russian diplomacy, Sergei Lavrov, on the presence in Mali of the private Russian security company Wagner. The UN reports testimonies collected by its investigators and describing these foreigners as white men in fatigues speaking a language “unknown”.
As documented in the report, the events in Moura, the subject of contradictory versions for a year, are among the worst of their kind in a country familiar with the atrocities committed by jihadists and other armed groups since 2012. The report is the most accusatory document ever produced against the Malian forces, implicated on numerous occasions in the past for their actions.