"Such conditions have become necessary following the vitriolic attack which Safety and Security Minister Nickey Iyambo had launched last week in Parliament on NSHR executive director Phil ya Nangoloh and the human rights organisation," the NSHR said yesterday.

After the NSHR said it found a mass grave dating back to 1972 and other sites apparently dating from the post-Independence era last month, the Police requested the NSHR to undertake a joint trip to the 36-year-old grave on condition that the Police participation would not be disclosed to the media.

In his ministerial statement in the National Assembly on Wednesday, Minister Iyambo accused the NSHR of sensationalism and pretending that the 1972 grave was a "new discovery", although it was known to the nearby communities and Government.

Iyambo further called Ya Nangoloh a "mercenary who is using human rights as a springboard to get recognition or financial reward, alternatively, he wants to tarnish the names of gallant Namibian leaders and her people".

Iyambo said Ya Nangoloh last month claimed discovery of another grave at Oshikome in the Kavango Region, to which he promised to take the Police.

"Till today, he has not done so.

We are waiting," Minister Iyambo criticised the NSHR executive.

Yesterday, the NSHR said it would do so only if the purpose and the terms of reference for going to the mass graves are made public either by the Police or Minister Iyambo, and if the trip would not result in "discourteous, abusive, disparaging, impolite and hostile utterances against the NSHR, its executive director, any other human rights representatives and NSHR sources of information."

The Ministry should after the trip disclose to the national and international public all and any information in their possession about all and any individual or mass graves on the Namibian side of the border with Angola, it said.

Such information should include, as accurately as possible, the identities and nationalities as well as the exact causes of the deaths of those whose remains are buried in such mass and or individual graves.

Iyambo said in Parliament that all "the information of the graves on our side of the border is well known to the Namibian Government".

Another condition set by the human rights body is that the Ministry should allow an internationally sanctioned, thorough, impartial and independent forensic investigation into the contents of such mass graves.

The Namibian Police and any other organs of the Namibian Government should not conduct any exhumations of such graves in the absence of independent international forensic experts or destroy the graves, it demands.

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