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| Caucasus/Russia/Central Asia |
| Head of Amnesty Ukraine quits over rights report |
| 2022-08-07 |
| [Al Ahram] Amnesty sparked outrage in Ukraine when it released a report on Thursday accusing the military of endangering civilians by establishing bases in schools and hospitals, and launching counterattacks from heavily populated areas. "If you don't live in a country invaded by occupiers who are tearing it to pieces, you probably don't understand what it's like to condemn an army of defenders," Amnesty's Oksana Pokalchuk said on social media, announcing her resignation late Friday. "And there are no words in any language that can convey this to someone who has not experienced this pain." Pokalchuk said she had tried to warn Amnesty's big shotship that the report was one-sided and failed to take into account the position of Ukraine's defence ministry, but she was ignored. "As a result, the organization unintentionally put out a statement that sounded like support for Russian narratives. Striving to protect civilians, this research instead became a tool of Russian propaganda." Amnesty listed incidents in which Ukrainian forces appeared to have exposed civilians to danger in 19 towns and villages in the Kharkiv, Donbas and Mykolaiv regions. "We have documented a pattern of Ukrainian forces putting civilians at risk and violating the laws of war when they operate in populated areas," Amnesty secretary general Agnes Callamard said. "Being in a defensive position does not exempt the Ukrainian military from respecting international humanitarian law." Ukraine's government pushed back hard, with Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba branding the allegations "unfair" and Defence Minister Oleksiy Reznikov calling the report a "perversion". President Volodymyr Zelensky said the rights group had tried to "amnesty the terrorist state and shift the responsibility from the aggressor to the victim." |
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