Mail And Guardian, South Africa
March 11 2005
Equatorial Guinea prisoners ‘starving’
Katharine Houreld
11 March 2005 09:42
While international attention focuses on the 62 convicted coup plotters
whose release was blocked in Zimbabwe this week, the 11 men still
imprisoned in Equatorial Guinea may be slowly starving to death.
This emerged both from prisoners’ notes smuggled out of Black Beach
prison in Malabo and from a leaked report by human rights monitors,
which a London-based newspaper is expected to publish this weekend.
The prisoners, convicted of attempting to overthrow Equatorial Guinea’s
President Teodoro Obiang Nguema, received sentences ranging from 17
to 34 years last November.
Their alleged co-plotters were expected to be freed this week from
Zimbabwe’s Chikurubi prison after the Zimbabwe High Court reduced
their sentences last week.
However, Zimbabwe’s Attorney General, Sobuza Gula-Ndebele, has stalled
the process by lodging an appeal against their release.
The leaked document said that while the 11 prisoners held in Malabo
usually receive one cup of rice a day, this was removed for several
days last week.
It appears the Malabo authorities were anxiously waiting for the end
of the men’s trial for them to stop food supply to the prisoners,
the document says.
Attempts by the families to send food, since their arrest, have
frequently been unsuccessful.
“I sent my husband 23 packets of biltong, and he received seven,”
Nick du Toit’s wife Belinda told The Mail & Guardian.
“On two occasions, I bought fresh food ~W hamburgers and chips ~W
when I went to visit them. They let me put the food on the table in
front of the men, who were drooling with hunger. Then they ordered
me to throw it away.
“The men have malaria, lice and scabies, eye and skin infections
and open sores from the handcuffs, but when I send them medicines,
it often disappears.”
Du Toit has visited her husband once since he was sentenced in
November last year. She had to spend three weeks in Malabo before
she was granted a 20-minute visit.
An attempt by a European Union delegation to visit the Armenian flight
crew implicated in the coup was blocked, as were several applications
lodged by Amnesty International since the coup plotters’ arrest in
March last year.
The document says: “Since the end of the hearing, there has never
been any visit by the lawyers to the prisoners. Neither do we expect
any change for the better in this regard.”
Former inmate Marc Schmidt recalls that the men were often tortured
while they ate.
“For the first few weeks, they would handcuff us to the beds for
meals,” recalls Schmidt, one of three men acquitted at the trial.
“They’d kick and burn you, swear at you. Although a lot of that
stopped after Gerhard [Nershz] passed away, the threats continued.
Sometimes we’d be tied to the bed for five days and we had to piss
in bottles and beg the local guys to empty them.”
Nershz, a German national arrested with Du Toit, Schmidt and 12 others,
died in prison of cerebral malaria while awaiting trial.
Schmidt said the rats and mice that infested the cells often
contaminated the food. A hunt organised by the prisoners had killed
20 rodents in a single day, but there were always more.
Schmidt said the prisoners remain shackled hand and foot, while light
and air is only let into the cell through a slit of a window and a
single door opened at the whim of the warders.
“I’m trying to exercise five times a week, but if the door is not
opened it is difficult because the cell is so small and hot,” wrote
Du Toit to his wife last month.
In an earlier note, also smuggled out of prison, he appeared uncertain
of the sentence imposed on him. “It looks like we’ve got 23 years or
$600 000 each. I don’t know where we will raise that much money.”
Lines of cramped writing fill the scraps of torn paper, which must
have been smuggled out of prison as official correspondence usually
hinges on the arrival of a rare consular delegation. In another letter,
to his 11-year-old daughter, whose room is plastered with pictures
of her father, Du Toit pleads: “Dear Flea, please stay strong.
“I miss you so much and ask God, every day, to protect you and bring
me home soon. Work hard at school and love your mum; don’t get any
boyfriends until I get back.”