A final report on Peru's brutal 20-year war against the Shining Path insurgency concluded that nearly 70,000 people were killed, and that military officers responsible for many of those deaths committed massive human rights abuses, an official said Thursday.

Peru's President Alejandro Toledo (R) holds one of nine volumes presented Friday by Peru's truth commission at the Government Palace Thursday, Aug 28, 2003.  [AP]

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's nine-volume report, delivered to the government Thursday, said the conflict was exacerbated by deep racism and a fundamental misunderstanding of the highland Indians who comprised most of the victims.

"We have proven with sorrow that members of the armed forces and police implemented a systematic or generalized practice of human rights violations and consequently there exist grounds for indicating crimes against humanity," commission president Salomon Lerner said.

Only pieces of the report were released to the public Thursday, but officials discussed it widely during the two years they compiled it.

Commissioner Gasten Garatea said the names of more than 100 officers incriminated in human rights abuses and the evidence against them will be given to prosecutors. He said that has not been put in the report being made available to the public.

Peru's powerful armed forces had awaited the report with trepidation. Retired officers warned the military was unhappy with the commission's plans to name individual officers.

Political parties in power during the violence also criticized the commission for digging into the past. The commission has "managed to put into the defendant's chair nothing less than those who won the war against terrorism," conservative congressman Jose Barba Caballero said Thursday.

Despite the discontent within military ranks, experts on the military forces said they expected the findings to be accepted.

The 12-member Truth and Reconciliation Commission was formed in June 2001 to shed light on the atrocities that occurred from May 1980 to November 2000 during the fighting between government security forces, leftist rebels and civilians. Most of the battles happened in remote Andean areas.

The commission has identified by name some 32,000 people who died during the violence, but the report estimated that 69,000 people disappeared or were killed — double previous estimates.

Nelson Manrique, a sociologist and historian who worked on the project, said the study attributes half the deaths to security forces and government-backed peasant militias. He said the Shining Path was responsible for 48 percent of the killings and a small, Cuban-inspired guerrilla group for 2 percent.

Commission members hope the report will force Peruvians to deal with a dark chapter in their history that many have tried to ignore.

"Today, Peru must confront a time of national shame," Lerner said as the report was presented to President Alejandro Toledo. "Three of every four victims of the violence were peasants whose mother tongue was Quechua, a broad sector of the population historically ignored, even ridiculed, by the state and urban society."

The violence erupted in May 1980 when the Shining Path, a Maoist-inspired rebel movement that tolerated no opposition, began terrorizing peasants to force them into supporting its drive to overthrow the government.

The army was unfamiliar with the Shining Path's strategy and suspicious that many highland villages supported the guerrillas. It responded with a brutal campaign against Indian communities.

Both sides attacked villages, killing unarmed men, women and children.

"If the country learns anything from this experience, it should be that violence is not the problem," Manrique said. "Rather, it's the manifestation of much deeper problems — racism, discrimination, the existence of second-class citizens."

One of the army's greatest problems in fighting the Shining Path was the lack of Quechua speakers in its ranks. Spanish-speaking soldiers from the coast often viewed highland Indians as virtual foreigners.

"They didn't know Quechua and that made the problem of intelligence even worse," said Ciro Alegria, a political scientist who has studied the military's role in the violence.

Many army generals remain defiant.

"I don't regret anything. If I had to use the same anti-subversive strategy again today, I would apply it without hesitation," said retired army Gen. Clemente Noel, who commanded forces in the Ayacucho region in 1983, when some of the worst army massacres occurred.

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