The Wonga Coup by Adam Roberts Page A

democratic institutions (such as free elections), and through a regime which uses torture to procure confessions as a systematic feature of its legal system, and in which the judiciary is not independent but under the control of the President’s political party …’
Black Beach
    In Obiang’s realm, prisons, especially, are horrific places. Opposition leaders die behind bars with suspicious regularity. Pedro Motu led a small political party preparing to contest an election in 1993. He was arrested and killed by police within days of his returning from exile. Obiang gave an explanation favoured by his monstrous uncle, claiming the opposition leader had killed himself to cause trouble: ‘he swallowed some pills that were probably poisoned … He wanted to create disorder for political reasons.’ In fact, he was tortured and murdered. Close watchers of Equatorial Guinea said Motu’s liver was removed. A colleague arrested with him also died, after being tortured so badly that he slumped into a coma.
    Such events in rat-infested Black Beach prison are common enough. One ex-inmate says the guards ‘whipped my hands with electric cables so badly I could not even sign a confession’. Another had his jaw broken when being bundled into the jail. Some were tied to poles in such a way that the bones in their forearms eventually snapped. One said he felt like a chicken in a back yard: ‘You never know when they are going to come out and chop your head off.’ Such ill treatment is never justified, but it is worth remembering the trivial ‘crimes’ of some who were detained. Fabian Nsue Nguema, an opposition politician, was arrested in April 2002 for ‘insulting’ the president. His insult? A lawyer, he dared prepare the defence case for several people accused of plotting Obiang’s overthrow. Others – notably the diminutive islanders of the Bubi group, a people under the thumb of the mainland Fang group – were rounded up, beaten, jailed and raped as a means of discouraging political protest or coup attempts. In 1998 a small protest did erupt, dismissed by a foreign journalist as ‘four guys, two guns, a pick-up truck and a row at a roadblock’. He recalls sitting with a minister as they heard the news. The minister – now an ambassador in a western country – immediately warned that ‘these people [the Bubis] will be sorry’. Pogroms and attacks on Bubi villages followed and some hundred people were dragged before a military court where fifteen were sentenced to death.
    Most outsiders ignored it all unless a foreigner died. Soldiers shot dead a young Spanish missionary as her bus approached their roadblock in July 2003, causing some criticism from Spain. Earlier, a French economist was found dead in his bedroom in Malabo: he had been beaten unconscious and the veins in his neck sliced open, suggesting a professional killing. Some said he was about to expose corruption in an aid programme.
    Sometimes, however, outsiders noticed if a rival to Obiang disappeared. Late in December 2003 Obiang’s half-brother General Augustin Ndong Ona – seen by some as a rival to the president – was arrested and reportedly tortured.
    Equatorial Guinea stages elections and calls itself a ‘fledgling democracy’, but it is more like the comic-opera dictatorships in Burma or Zimbabwe. Voters know elections are not secret. During campaigns people know to wear Obiang-embossed clothing ‘to keep clear of trouble’. ‘If you’re not seen showing support for the party you can have problems,’ said a resident of Malabo during one campaign. The opposition call Obiang and his family ‘gangsters with no respect for the law’. The president’s son, Teodorin, owns the sole private radio station, Radio Asonga; Obiang owns the only television station. In 2005 the international press freedom group Reporters Without Borders