The Peruvian authorities should provide immediate protection to the president of the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Human Rights Watch said today. Salomón Lerner, the president of the commission, has recently received death threats and insulting, anti-Semitic e-mails.
Human Rights Watch said that the Peruvian government should also undertake an immediate and thorough investigation to find out who is responsible for the threats.
“The Peruvian government must respond firmly to these vicious threats before Lerner or another human rights defender is hurt,” said José Miguel Vivanco, Americas director at Human Rights Watch. “And the people responsible for the threats must be promptly found and brought to justice.”
Lerner told the Peruvian newspaper Peru21 that a few days ago, when he was out of the country, an anonymous caller called his office at the Catholic University in Lima. The caller told his secretary that Lerner should “consider himself dead.”
Over the last few weeks, Lerner, whose father was Jewish, has also received insulting and crudely anti-Semitic e-mails that accuse him of attacking the Peruvian armed forces. Other members of the commission have also received insulting messages. Most have been sent by a writer calling himself “Pachacútec,” which was the name of an Inca emperor.
Peru’s truth commission published its report on human rights violations in the country’s 20-year armed conflict on August 28, 2003. This year, on the second anniversary of publication, the commission came under fierce attack in the press from retired military officers and politicians.
Largely due to the commission’s careful collection of evidence, the number of former military and police officers under prosecution for human rights violations has climbed steeply in the past year. At the last count 378 were facing charges, including 273 from the army.
Lerner and other commissioners are now facing nine legal suits filed by military officers and one civilian for allegedly misrepresenting the facts and making baseless accusations against them.
Human Rights Watch urged the Peruvian government to issue a public declaration of support for the commission and renew its pledge to carry out the commission’s recommendations in full.
In an interview published yesterday in Peru21, Lerner commented: “in our report we condemned the subversion. But we also said that there were people in the armed forces who applied a bad understanding of the strategy of combat, and thought that it was legitimate and moral to pay collateral costs to combat terrorism, that innocent people should die. That’s unacceptable.”
