MALABO, Equatorial Guinea — While the United States has turned its back on some authoritarian rulers in North Africa and the Middle East, its attitude toward strategically placed autocrats in less restive corners of Africa is more ambiguous, and perhaps nowhere more so than in this oil-rich speck of a nation in the Gulf of Guinea.
Multimedia Slide Show
A Wealth Gap in Equatorial GuineaRelated
Times Topic: Equatorial Guinea
Enlarge This Image
Tyler Hicks/The New York Times
Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, the ruler for more than 30 years, holds “absolute executive power,” the World Bank says. More Photos »
Readers´ Comments
Readers shared their thoughts on this article.
Read All Comments (47) »
Officially and unofficially, Americans do business with one of the undisputed human rights global bad boys, Equatorial Guinea, Africa’s fourth biggest oil exporter. Its widely criticized record on basic freedoms has offered little barrier to broad engagement by the United States, commercially or diplomatically.
American oil companies have billions of dollars invested here. One American diplomat, using language that makes human rights advocates fume, praised the “mellowing, benign leadership” of the dictator in power for more than 30 years, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, in 2009 cables released by WikiLeaks. And a leading American military contractor with strong Pentagon ties has a multimillion-dollar contract to protect his shores and help train his forces.
The contractor, Military Professional Resources Inc., or M.P.R.I., led by a top aide to former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, works on maritime security and human rights training for Mr. Obiang’s police forces. But even with the training, the United Nations, human rights groups and local dissidents say torture by the nation’s authorities remains systematic. And maritime security touches on the most sensitive aspects of personal defense for Mr. Obiang, especially in an island capital where coup attempts have come from the sea.
Until March, President Bill Clinton’s former special counsel, Lanny J. Davis, had a million-dollar-a-year contract to help Mr. Obiang with an image makeover. “He feels very vulnerable, without any friends,” Mr. Davis said in an interview late last year.
Mr. Obiang’s government could be considered a tough sell. Freedom House, the watchdog group, has ranked Equatorial Guinea among the nine most repressive “Worst of the Worst” nations in the world, along with Libya, Turkmenistan and Myanmar. It called the country’s government “a highly corrupt regime with one of the worst human rights records in Africa.”
Decades of repression and “systematic” torture, according to the United Nations, have created a culture of fear in this former Spanish colony of 670,000 people, Africa’s only Spanish-speaking country.
“They don’t even hide the torture instruments,” said Manfred Nowak, until recently the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture. “It was just on the table.”
Interviewed at the presidential palace here, Mr. Obiang, sub-Saharan Africa’s longest-serving ruler, rejected such assertions. “We don’t have torture,” he said, adding: “International organizations have accused our police of mistreatment of prisoners. That’s why I hired M.P.R.I., to train our police. And our police are acting appropriately.”
Mr. Nowak found otherwise. “I’m deeply convinced it is a governmental policy,” he said. “They know exactly what is going on.”
Citizens who are audacious enough to talk about the political climate here joke behind closed doors about North Korea as a role model. Last month, opposition leaders were arrested for putting up a poster calling for a demonstration against Mr. Obiang, who overthrew his notoriously brutal uncle in a 1979 coup and won the last election here in November 2009 with more than 95 percent of the vote.
Strolling in the wrong neighborhood lands you at the police station. A visit to Parliament’s lone opposition member in his crumbling downtown walk-up is quickly known to the security services, bringing stern warnings from the information minister. The government publishes the only newspaper, and it is five months out of date at the leading hotel, a former torture center.
“Any policeman can arrest any citizen, at any time,” said Plácido Micó, a lawyer who is the only opposition deputy, and has been arrested numerous times. Torture is a “current thing, current,” Mr. Micó said, recalling his own beating in the presence of high officials late one night in 1992.
Gonzalo Ndong Sima, a pharmacist in the center of town here, recounted his recent encounter with the police over a simple traffic mishap, saying, “They beat me like an animal.”
Fuente: New York TIMES.
Seguir a @guinea_net
