Human rights advocacy group, Amnesty International believes the politicization of the recent post-election disturbances is uncalled for.
Some members of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) have been blamed for violent attacks on their opponents following the party’s election victory.
Some of these incidents have involved attacks on National Democratic Congress (NDC) sympathizers and vandalism of state property.
For instance, on Monday, persons identifying as NPP youth had illegally taken over the Tema Motorway toll booth, sacked the officially designated toll collectors and were illegally taking the tolls themselves.
Despite similar occurrences in the days following the NPP’s election victory, the Director of Amnesty International Ghana, Lawrence Amesu warned that though the attackers may purport to be members of one party or the other, their allegiances could not be guaranteed.
Thus such incidents will continue if police do not disassociate the skirmishes from the political parties and act on them as pure criminal activity, Mr. Amesu insisted.
“Amnesty international would like to advise that when people take action, we should not politicise it. It is very difficult to say that it is NPP who is organising this for supporters to do this or that NDC organised it. When you talk to those people, they may just be putting on the party paraphernalia for nothing.”
This continuos association of the acts of lawlessness with political parties could end up escalation into a vicious cycle of retaliation, thus “so long as we are tagging parties to people who are committing individual crimes, we are just encouraging the situation to continue,” he explained.
Mr. Amesu instead suggested that “we should just deal with people the way we will deal individuals at other times. It doesn’t matter if it is election time and somebody is committing crimes then we would want to deal with the person as party A and party B.”
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(Via: CitiFM Online Ghana)
