HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK ---------------------------
from http://www.japantoday.com/ __________ Peru truth commission hears horror stories Tuesday, April 9, 2002 at 09:30 JST HUAMANGA, Peru - Grim-faced, fighting tears, peasants on Monday told horror stories of rape and torture from years of violence by the military, police and rebels that killed 30,000 as Peru's truth commission held its first public hearings. Pointing her finger to her temple like a gun, Angelica Mendoza, 72, who wore the typical broad-brimmed white hat and wide skirts of the Peruvian Andes, told the Truth and Reconciliation Commission how her 19-year-old son was dragged out of bed by hooded soldiers in 1983, never to be seen again. Liz Valdez, 22, recounted how her mother was hauled off by police, raped and then tortured to death in 1991, leaving her - she was then aged 12 - and her 8-year-old brother orphans. Twenty-year-old Rebecca Gamboa, living proof of Peru's painful past, heard for the first time full details of how she was conceived when her mother was gang raped by soldiers at the age of 16. Tears poured down her cheeks as she listened. The emotional accounts were delivered in a university auditorium in Huamanga, near Ayacucho, the southern city where Peru's bloodiest rebel group, Shining Path, was born. It is the first time a Latin American truth commission has held public hearings. Peru created its truth board last year with a mandate to shed light on human rights atrocities committed under three governments between 1980 and 2000. For much of that time, Peru was wracked by parallel wars by Shining Path and the smaller Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, or MRTA, both seeking to impose a communist state. The military responded with take-no-prisoners tactics. Many poor Andean villagers lived in the cross-fire between the armed forces, who threatened to treat anyone who did not help them as rebel collaborators, and guerrillas, who killed anyone they suspected of helping the military. "These hearings seek to end the silence that had become intolerable," the commission's President Salomon Lerner said. Dozens of peasant women turned out for the first day of the hearing, many clutching red balloons to symbolize drops of blood and photographs of relatives who died or disappeared. Peru estimates that in addition to those killed by leftist rebels or the military, some 6,000 people simply vanished. The commission reckons there are over 150 mass graves in Peru. Mendoza, her hair in braids and wearing a wide, pleated white skirt, told Reuters in halting Spanish how 30 hooded soldiers broke down her door on July 12, 1983, and dragged her son Arquimedes Ascarza out of bed, accusing him of being a Shining Path rebel. She was beaten with a rifle butt. "'Bastard old woman, leave your terrorist son or we'll take you as well'," she recalled a soldier telling her. Choking back tears as she sat at the front of the auditorium in the same university where her son had studied mine engineering, Mendoza told her story to the commission in the Andean language Quechua, and pulled out a scrap of paper with a note from her son which she says a soldier delivered to her home. "I'm fine, don't worry, but try to get money for me to have a trial. Otherwise they're going to kill me in the barracks," her son wrote. Mendoza now heads a national association of the victims of those detained, kidnapped or disappeared. Valdez, in tears, told how her mother had been out shopping with a friend on May 7, 1991, when a police officer dragged her away, bundled her into a sack with her wrists tied and took her to a police station. She was never seen alive again. "I know who did this, I have the name, the photo, but I've never said it out of fear. But when the time comes, I will," Valdez told Reuters. "The commission is going to help me." Valdez held a daily vigil at the police station, where an officer told her he had tortured her mother. One day he told her she had said: "Tell my daughter to look after her brother and to be strong, because I'm not going to get out of here." Gamboa's mother Giorgina told her harrowing tale of rape - but said she was by no means unique. "I'm asking for justice. The guilty should pay for the damage they did us," she said. Around 800 people thronged the town square in Huamanga on Sunday night with candles and silhouettes representing their "disappeared" relatives in a poignant vigil. But the commission has stirred controversy, too. Some 20 protesters from the opposition American Popular Revolutionary Alliance party, who say some of its members are biased, protested on the doorstep of the auditorium during the hearing and were ushered away by police. Alleged atrocities during the 1985-1990 government of their leader, former President Alan Garcia, will come under the commission's scrutiny. (Compiled from wire reports) ____________________ Click the link below to view this article and related discussions on Japan Today http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&id=210496 ____________________ ===== Lake Merritt Neighbors Organized for Peace. Weekly peace walks around Lake Merritt in Oakland. Starts & ends at the colonnade between Grand & Lakeshore Avenues, 3 P.M., every Sunday. Info: (510)763-8712, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> or http://www.webwm.com/LMNOP __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - online filing with TurboTax http://taxes.yahoo.com/ --------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: archive@jab.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9617B Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
