President Olusegun Obasanjo appeared Thursday before Nigeria's newly established human rights panel and sought reconciliation among those implicated with him in an alleged coup plot in 1995 and their accusers.
Obasanjo and about 40 soldiers and civilians were convicted of involvement in a failed plot to oust ex-dictator General Sani Abacha. Their case was up before the panel modelled on South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
"We are not asking for financial compensation ... but the families of the dead should be made to know that they did not deserve the grief that had befallen them," Obasanjo, himself a former general, told the panel.
Obasanjo's son, Olugbenga, filed a petition to the government-backed panel on behalf of his father and demanded "reparation for injustice and human rights abuse."
The Nigerian head of state, who appeared as the principal witness, was led in evidence by his lawyer and further cross-examined by other parties for almost an hour while standing in the witness box.
"I believe Nigerians and God had vindicated me and for me to try to seek any further form of vindication is to be ungrateful to God," said Obasanjo, who was elected president last year, ending military rule.
Obasanjo created an emotional stir when he stepped down from the witness box and embraced his principal accuser in the alleged plot, former colonel Bello Fadile, who claimed that he had told Obasanjo of the plot but that the latter had failed to tell Abacha.
On October 23, the human rights commission launched 12 weeks of public hearings probing human rights abuses in Nigeria dating back to the first military coup in 1966.
The commission was set up last year by Obasanjo and has received over 10,000 complaints of rights violations, officials said.
He was arrested in March 1995, convicted before a special military panel in June 1995 of "concealment of treason" and given a 25-year imprisonment term but released after the sudden death of Abacha in 1988.
The military tribunal sat in camera in Lagos.
Before the panel on Thursday, Obasanjo, who tendered a copy of a letter of apology from his accuser, said he responded to the panel summons "because I regard this commission as an important element in the task of reconciliation in this country."
The panel, headed by a former Supreme Court judge, Chukwudifu Oputa, will hold similar sittings in many parts of the country before completing its assignment -- ABUJA (AFP)
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