Genocide is headline news over Ukraine and Gaza in the mainstream media. Cases have been taken to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court. Meanwhile, genocides in Africa with even more victims received but token coverage.
Rwanda, Darfur, and Libya were soon forgotten. Ongoing genocides in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), South Sudan, Sudan, the Central African Republic, and Biafra are largely ignored. The toll in the DRC has exceeded a horrifying 6 million, on par with the number of Holocaust murders. How many Americans know that shocking fact?
Why does the world shut its eyes to African genocides? Sam Faddis, a retired CIA operations officer and former head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center’s Weapons of Mass Destruction unit, on one of my recent television shows, blurted the ugly secret: “Because white people are not dying!”
Racism endures. It finds expression in international law enforcement. Only Africans have been charged and convicted by the International Criminal Court.
Africa is impoverished. Africa is mal-governed. Africa’s fabulous riches are sold for a song to foreigners willing to bribe corrupt African leaders. The latter are as despicable as erstwhile Africans who captured and sold their brethren into slavery to white slave traders. Yet the corrupt African dictators are routinely supported by the United States or Europe to keep them from the clutches of China or Russia on the international chess board.
Responsibility for Africa’s acute plight and sanguinary conflicts is shared. European colonization of Africa began in 1415 with Portugal. It accelerated with the so-called “Scramble for Africa” between 1884 and 1914 featuring the Berlin Conference. White, European nations arbitrarily vivisected the continent with colonial conquests for their own ambitions. Boundaries were drawn heedless of the minimum homogeneity required for domestic tranquility. Divide and conquer was the common colonization strategy. The colonized were largely denied education or training in self-government.
Belgium exited the DRC in 1960 leaving only a handful of Indigenous college or university graduates. It is unsurprising that the DRC instantly plunged into civil war from which it has never completely emerged. European countries did nothing to alleviate the bloodshed and strife born of their colonization of the continent. They were satisfied with propping up corrupt and dictatorial regimes in exchange for sweetheart economic concessions and military interventions under the banner of anti-Communism. France dispatched military expeditions more than 50 times since 1960 on behalf of dictatorial, corrupt, genocidal regimes, including Chad, Zaire (now the DRC) under Mobutu Sese Seko, and Rwanda.
Only two countries escaped European colonization: Liberia and Ethiopia. But even those countries suffer from bloody tribalism and chronic upheaval. Ethiopia fractures between the Amhara, Tigrayans, and Oromos, among others. Internecine warfare and war crimes are staples there, even with Nobel Peace Prize Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali. Liberia has suffered two grisly civil wars fueled by ethnic antagonism between the Krahn, Gio, and Mano. The first lasted from 1989-1997 and witnessed 200,000 deaths. The second lasted from 1999-2003. In total, 250,000 were killed, 1 million were displaced, and war crimes abounded. War criminal Charles Taylor was sentenced to 50 years in prison.
The appalling examples of Ethiopia and Liberia are referenced to show that Africa’s convulsions and miseries are not solely the legacies of European colonization. A substantial portion has been self-inflicted. The constant upheavals and ubiquitous corruption have occasioned a massive brain drain to the United States and Europe. The most gifted and entrepreneurial — invaluable human capital — have fled abroad where they prosper notwithstanding the daunting barriers they confront as immigrants at a time when xenophobia is flourishing.
African countries have within their own hands the power to rectify or diminish the havoc wreaked by European colonialism. They can arrange under United Nations auspices independence referendums for their distinct peoples to redraw national boundaries to align with more natural and harmonious ethnic or tribal divisions. Such referendums are implied in the 1960 declaration resolution 1514 of the United Nations General Assembly.
But Africa’s strongmen are adamantly opposed. They crave limitless power and luxury at the expense of their hapless subjects. The Organization of African Unity declared shortly after decolonization, “all Member States pledge themselves to respect the borders existing on their achievement of national independence,” in other words, to the principle of the inviolability of colonially inherited territorial integrity in which not a single African had a say.
Racism was a driving force behind colonialism. Remember Rudyard Kipling’s patronizing “The White Man’s Burden” poem. But Africans have been in pari delicto. Self-help is Africa’s deliverance from the legacy of colonial oppression.
Armstrong Williams ([email protected]; @arightside) is a political analyst, syndicated columnist and owner of the broadcasting company, Howard Stirk Holdings. He is also part owner of The Baltimore Sun.
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Publish date : 2024-06-05 06:02:19
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