Dozens of prominent activists, politicians, actors and musicians – including Harry Belafonte, Angela Davis, Greta Thunberg and Alicia Keys – have signed an open letter to Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari calling on him to release protesters jailed for taking part in the country’s recent mass anti-police brutality demonstrations.

The letter – which was organised by Diaspora Rising, a media and advocacy organisation that was founded by the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Opal Tometi – was taken out as a full-page ad in The New York Times and published to mark International Human Rights Day.

Among its demands, it calls on Buhari to allow an independent investigation into the shooting that occurred on the 12th day of protests when officers of the Nigerian military are alleged to have opened fire on demonstrators in Lagos.

“As signatories of this public letter, we express our dismay and outrage at your administrations violent response to the peaceful #EndSARS protests taking place across Nigeria in October,” the letter says.

“For the first time in recent memory, the world witnessed Nigerians from all walks of life, ethnicities, religions, gender identities, sexual orientations and socioeconomic classes, come together to make known the collective needs of the people. Yet their peaceful requests were met with state-sanctioned violence and suppression, as your administration meted out unwarranted force against its own unarmed citizens.”

PHOTO COURTESY OF DIASPORA RISING

Other signatories to the open letter include actors Kerry Washington, Riz Ahmed, Mark Ruffalo and Yvonee Orji; musicians Angélique Kidjo, Jidenna and Cynthia Erivo; politicians Ilhan Omar and Jamaal Bowman; and activists Dr. Bernice King and Rev. William Barber.

“As people who have supported the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States and throughout the diaspora, we cannot be silent when similar atrocities take place in African countries,” the letter continues. “We demand respect for the Nigerian people, especially as they engage in their constitutional right to protest grave injustices.”

For two weeks in October, millions of protesters across Nigeria took to the streets in peaceful demonstrations against Nigeria’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) – a unit of the Nigerian police force that has been accused of alleged extrajudicial killings and the indiscriminate extortion of young people. The protests eventually transformed into broader demonstrations against general police brutality and the Nigerian government. The demonstrations turned deadly on the 20th of October, with eyewitness accounts and video footage appearing to show officers shooting into a large crowd of protesters that had gathered at the Lekki toll gate – a site that had become the central hub of the movements. According to Amnesty International, at least 12 people were killed.

The sudden state-sanctioned violence effectively brought an end to the nationwide protests. Since then, a number of the movement’s organisers and more prominent voices have spoken publicly of being threatened and harassed by authorities, with some being stopped from travelling outside of the country and others randomly arrested and detained for several days.

This latest push for accountability comes at a time when the Nigerian government appears as resolute as ever to push back against any criticism of their response to the #EndSARS movement. In recent weeks, Nigeria’s minister of information, Lai Mohammed, has threatened sanctions against news agencies that have reported evidence of the shooting. On Wednesday, President Buhari, a former 1980s military dictator who was elected into office in 2015, wrote on Twitter to complain that the international coverage of the protests were biased against his government. “It must be said that foreign press coverage of the ENDSARS violence was not balanced, especially from CNN and BBC,” he wrote. “I was disgusted by the coverage, which did not give attention to the policemen that were killed, the stations that were burnt, and prisons that were opened.”