Vanguard, Nigeria
Sept 24 2004
LAW & HUMAN RIGHT :- Darfur: The New Name of Genocide
CHIDI ODINKALU
Friday, September 24, 2004
They came on their horses, killed the people of our village, who
started to resist them. When I heard the machine guns, I started to
collect my kids, trying to escape from the agony. But they captured
me, killed my three kids, and six of them raped me. Then they went
away. The rest of the villagers collected together and fled the area,
and now I am staying at a refugee camp looking for something secure.
I do not know how to say it, I am really afraid of even being killed
by my relatives because of the Janjaweed baby that I am bearing.’
This is the testimony of a female survivor of the on-going genocide
in Darfur Western Sudan. In 1944, Polish Philosopher, Ralph Lemkin,
coined the expression, Genocide, to describe the crimes such as the
Nazi-led attempt to eliminate the gene of a race, in that case, the
Jewish race. During the First World War, the Armenians suffered a
similar fate. A world appalled at the crimes of the Nazis adopted on
the last day of 1949 the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment
of the Crime of Genocide, otherwise known as the Genocide
Convention.
The Genocide Convention entered into force on January on 12 January
1951. Article 2 of the Convention defines Genocide as `any of the
following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part,
a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life
calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in
part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.’
This definition makes genocide a crime of very specific intent. It is
adopted completely by Article 6 of the Rome Statute of the
International Criminal Court. One or a mixture of these elements
would constitute the crime of genocide. Article 8 of the Genocide
Convention establishes perhaps the most important obligation
contained in that treaty. It obliges all Contracting Parties to
`call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such
action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider
appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide or
any other acts enumerated in Article III of the Convention’. These
enumerated acts are genocide, conspiracy to commit genocide,
incitement to genocide, attempt to commit genocide, and complicity
in genocide.
The obligations to prevent, suppress, and punish the crime of
genocide are both customary and peremptory norms of international
law. Thus, the egregiously notable failure of Sudan to ratify the
Genocide Convention does not shield it from the obligations to
prevent, suppress and punish the crime of genocide. Moreover, as the
United Nations Security Council noted in its Resolution 1556 of 30
July 2004, `the Government of Sudan (GoS) bears the primary
responsibility to respect human rights while maintaining law and
order and protecting its population within its territory.’ The GoS
has not just manifestly failed to do this; it is actively involved
in the most brutal violations of these obligations.
On this continent in 1994, the world witnessed genocide in Rwanda. On
that occasion, African leaders and the world outside the continent
looked the other way as an estimated one million Rwandans were
exterminated like vermin (the victims were described by the
Genocidaires as `Cockroaches’) in one hundred days.
Following the Rwanda genocide, the world sought to expiate for its
complicity by setting up the International Criminal Tribunal for
Rwanda and sundry other mechanisms of investigation of the Rwanda
Genocide. The then Organization of African Unity (OAU), set up a
similar investigation that found the inaction of the OAU inexcusable.
After the genocide in Rwanda, both the leadership of Africa and of
the international community promised `never again’. Desperate for
something to hold onto, we believed. Yet, today, again on our watch,
we see the same pattern of denial, indifference, and tardiness
repeated as millions of victims of genocide and ethnic cleansing are
created in Sudan.
The prefatory testimony to this article is not isolated. The numbers
are even more harrowing: international agencies estimate that over
50,000 have been killed in the Darfur region since the beginning of
February 2003; over 200,000 have been forcibly displaced into
refugee camps in neighboring Chad; over 1,700,000 million people are
internally displaced and mostly encamped within Sudan itself; there
are up to an estimated 600 deaths in the camps for the internally
displaced who, until recently, have been denied access to
humanitarian assistance by the Sudanese Government. This adds up to a
monthly average of about 18,000 deaths; sexual violence and rape of
the women and young girls, some of the victims as young as eight
years and less, is employed as an instrument of war and ethnic
cleansing.
In a recent survey of the Darfurian refugee population conducted for
the State Department by the Centre for International Justice, 67%
had witnessed the killing of a non-family member; 61% had seen their
own family members killed; 44% had survived being shot at; 28% had
suffered death or forced displacement; 25% had been abducted; and 16%
of the population had been raped!
To put these numbers in perspective, Darfur, comprises three States
of the Republic of Sudan that between them are bigger than the
territory of France and host about 7 million people. Nearly one-third
of this number are now dead, displaced, abducted, raped, or being
starved to death in installments. Faced with this evidence, both the
European Union and the United States have in the past fortnight
determined that the situation in Darfur amounts to genocide. On any
reading, violations on this scale must qualify, in the language of
Article II(c) of the Genocide Convention, as `deliberately inflicting
on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its
physical destruction in whole or in part.’
For its part, the farthest that the African Union has been able to go
was the acknowledgement at the 5th Session of its Peace and Security
Council in April 2004, that the situation in Darfur represents a
`grave humanitarian situation’. The AU requested an investigation of
the situation in Darfur by the continental human rights body, the
African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights. But just as the
five-person team Commission was physically deployed on its mission in
Darfur in July, the Summit meeting of the 3rd Ordinary Session of
the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union,
presided over by Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo, prejudged
the outcome of the investigation by deciding on 8 July that `even
though the humanitarian situation in Darfur is serious, it cannot be
defined as a genocide.’
Article 4 of the Constitutive Act of the African Union requires
African States to exercise active intervention in other Member
States of the Union when those other States are involved in
committing war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide.
Africa’s leaders persist in minimizing the international crimes being
committed in Darfur as `a humanitarian crisis’, very much redolent
of acts of nature like a flood, earthquake or hurricane. But Darfur
is not an act of nature. It is caused by human actors, exercising
political authority. They must be halted and brought to account. One
point of view within the leadership of the African Union is that
unlike the case of Rwanda, a genocide in terms of both the quantity
(nearly one million killed) and quality (mass murder) of the acts
perpetrated, `a mere’ 50,000 have been killed in Darfur. Apparently,
in the arithmetic of the African Union, the 2 million forcibly
displaced into death-like conditions in refugee camps guarded by the
same Janjaweed militia that have raped, outraged, and violated them
should have been physically wiped out too.
To support the implementation of the N’djamena Humanitarian Ceasefire
Agreement, the African Union established a Ceasefire Monitoring
Commission with Military Observers led by Nigeria’s own
Brigadier-General Okonkwo. Fewer than sixty AU Military Observers
have been deployed under this arrangement. In July 2004, the
Chairperson of the Commission of the African Union reported that the
entire budget of the AU Military Observer Mission in Darfur is $26
million, of which about $15 million ( 12 million) is contributed by
the European Union, the UK and Germany provided an additional $4
million between them, and the USA is providing headquarters
logistics. To put this in perspective again, $26 million is less than
the sum of business expense disbursed for a middling contract in
Nigeria’s petroleum or public works sector. It is less than half the
money that Nigeria is reported to have lent to Sao Tomé earlier this
year. Yet, between them, African States have managed to pledge less
than 18% of this derisory budget. Pray tell, how many of our people
have to be massacred and violated before Africa’s rulers think
Africans matter? When will the continent’s rulers begin to behave as
if the African life has intrinsic value?
In Pretoria, South Africa, the African Commission on Human and
Peoples’ Rights met on Sunday, 19 September, to adopt the report of
its investigation mission to Darfur. The report of the Commission is
yet to be published but authoritative sources close to the
Commission indicate that it found as a fact that in Darfur, the
government of Sudan had been involved in `war crimes and crimes
against humanity, and massive human rights violations by members of
the security forces’. The Commission is reported to have recommended
the establishment of an independent international commission to
investigate the international crimes in Darfur. While this
bureaucratic rigmarole goes on, the people of Darfur are being
savaged and the continent’s rulers shrink from their moral and legal
duty to call the crime by its name, Genocide.