By MATT SIEGEL
The nine minutes of shaky cellphone footage
are hard to watch, not because of the quality but because of the
content. A young man lies handcuffed on the bed of a pickup truck,
wailing as he is beaten repeatedly with a thick baton. Later, his
assailant switches to a metal rod. A snarling dog drags another victim
past his laughing attackers, who punch the man relentlessly.
The attackers in the video are, according to officials in the Pacific island nation of Fiji,
officers in the country’s police force. On Friday, Fiji’s military
leader, Commodore Josaia Voreqe Bainimarama, also known as Frank
Bainimarama, addressed the video for the first time since it surfaced on
YouTube last week.
“At the end of the day, I will stick by my men, by the police officers
or anyone else that might be named in this investigation,” Mr.
Bainimarama told local Web site Fijivillage.
“We cannot discard them just because they’ve done their duty in looking
after the security of this nation and making sure we sleep peacefully
at night.”
Mr. Bainimarama seized power in Fiji, a former British colony made up of
about 330 islands in the central Pacific Ocean, in a 2006 coup — the
country’s fourth since independence in 1970. He has insisted that
military rule was the only way to ensure an end to the spasms of
political and ethnic violence that have so often destabilized the
country. Since then, however, accusations of human rights abuses have
dogged his government, souring relations with its traditional allies,
Australia and New Zealand.
In early 2012, Mr. Bainimarama lifted a state of emergency that had been
in place since he abrogated the Constitution in 2009, and he announced
that free elections would be held by 2014. But in January he scrapped a
draft constitution that had been seen as crucial to any return to
democracy. The police even seized hundreds of copies of the document and
burned them in front of their architect, an internationally renowned
legal scholar.
A spokesman for the United States State Department, speaking under the
condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the
news media, condemned the actions caught on the video in unusually frank
terms even as he said Washington welcomed an investigation promised by
Fiji’s government.
The human rights group Amnesty International issued a statement last week calling the episode a clear case of torture.
“The humiliation of the men and their injuries evident in the video is
very serious,” Roseann Rife, an Amnesty spokeswoman, said in the
statement. “Forced to undress and harassed by a dog, as men nearby
laugh, it is difficult to watch. The subsequent brutal beating with
batons is harrowing. It is torture.”
Mr. Bainimarama, whose government has grown increasingly antagonistic
toward foreign critics, played down the accusations and assailed
nongovernmental organizations that took issue with is government.
“NGOs are paid by the international community to jump up and down every
time we do something,” he said. “That’s their job, they’re paid to do
that by the people that fund them.”
Still, the video has provoked anger among governments in the region. The
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said Friday in a statement
that the organization was “shocked” by the video and described the
episode as torture. A vote condemning the attack is expected to come
before New Zealand’s Parliament as early as Tuesday.
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