The Dark Continent?

Brendan O'Neill writes:

When does war become genocide? When the protagonists are black people. That is the only conclusion one can draw from the unhinged claims that the Ivory Coast is on “the brink of genocide” following the disputed presidential elections and the stand-off between the incumbent president Laurent Gbagbo and president-elect Alassane Ouattara.

Unlike we in the West, Africans, it seems, never “fight wars”; they don’t “launch invasions”; they don’t have “political tensions”. They just commit genocides – barmy, inexplicable genocides, often with machetes, for no other reason than the fact that they like to kill people. Lots of people. Entire races of people if they can get away with it.

The speed and casualness, the robotic thoughtlessness, with which the term “genocide” is applied to African conflicts is extraordinary. No matter how relatively small-scale the conflict is, no matter where it is taking place in Africa, it will quickly be stamped with the G-word, marking it out as a product of exterminatory bloodlust rather than politics.

So the political clash in the Ivory Coast, which has not yet spilled over into large-scale violence, is already frantically talked up as a genocide-in-the-making. Ouattara’s envoy to the United Nations says his country is on “the brink of genocide”. The media, who love nothing more than getting a whiff of evil in the Dark Continent, have lapped it up, with headlines variously telling us that the Ivory Coast is on the “edge of”, the “precipice of” or is “close to” genocide.

This echoes the discussion of the post-election violence in Kenya in January 2008. Kenya was likewise said to be on the “brink of genocide”, as forces loyal to Raila Odinga, who lost out in that disputed poll, carried out what was widely referred to as “ethnic cleansing”. In truth there was no genocide in Kenya. No community was wiped out. There was political violence.

The more serious conflict in Liberia in 2003 also led to high-level handwringing about that country being “plunged into a Rwanda-style genocide”. The Sudanese government’s violent incursions into Darfur in 2004 and 2005 were described everywhere as “the first genocide of the twenty-first century”, despite the fact that both the UN and leading American experts disputed the use of that term and questioned the claim that 400,000 Darfurians had been killed by forces loyal to Khartoum.

It seems the calamity of Rwanda has become the default script for understanding conflict in Africa. Every stand-off, every skirmish, every war is now labelled the “next Rwanda”. Amnesty International says we mustn’t let the Ivory Coast become “the sequel to Rwanda”, as if barbarism in Africa is as certain as Hollywood producing a new gory Saw movie every year. Profound local complexities are airbrushed out of history, as wars across an entire continent are madly depicted as symptoms of some kind of border-leaping African virus.

These discussions reveal rather more about the warped Western imagination than they do about realities on the ground. Seemingly incapable of making sense of contemporary political conflict, observers reach for sensationalist, one-size-fits-all explanations instead. These conflicts are like pornography for Western misanthropes who see in every African stand-off the potential for Holocaust-style horrors. It’s a PC rehabilitation of the idea that there is a divide between the civilised West and uncivilised Africa – only today we use the more acceptable-sounding terminology of “genocide preventers” (us) and “genocidaires” (them) to establish our superiority over the dark-skinned barbarians.

It has come to something when it takes Naomi Campbell. But here we are. Ad hoc tribunals to try specific individuals are inherently illegal. Amnesty International rightly made that point, and did so very powerfully, in its 2003 report into the trial of the Grenada 17. Yet in 2007 that same organisation welcomed the trial of Charles Taylor before just such a tribunal, and called for its proceedings to be broadcast in Liberia for “educative” effect. Be he innocent or be he guilty, Taylor is being tried, if it can be so described, by an unlawful body: a specially constituted branch of the Special Court for Sierra Leone, itself a creature, not of international treaty-making and ratification, but of executive fiat on the part of the United Nations.

Or consider Rwanda. If anything, there really were two genocides in Rwanda. But “genocide” is a slipperier concept than you might think. In 1993, the former Bolivian President, García Meza Tejada, was convicted of “genocide” for the deaths of fully eight people. Those may or may not have been the only people whom he killed. But they were the only victims of his “genocide”. And so to Rwanda. Or, rather, to a kangaroo court in Tanzania, set up by a UN Security Council resolution with no authority to do so, and specifically empowered - again, on no proper authority whatever - to try only members of the former, devoutly Catholic regime, and not of that which overthrew it, namely a direct extension, by means of a Ugandan invasion of Rwanda in 1990, of the only-too-successful Maoist insurrection in Uganda. Thank God that no one is now to be sent from this country, historic refuge of the oppressed, to appear before that kangaroo court.

Théoneste Bagosora was finally convicted (well, of course he was – this sort of thing never, ever acquits anyone) eighteen months after the prosecution’s final submission, and fully twelve years after his arrest, even though his trial had started almost immediately. That was entirely typical, as is the use of European and American activists as “expert witnesses” even though they witnessed absolutely nothing and were in fact thousands of miles away at the time alleged. As is the heavy reliance on anonymous prosecution witnesses (even though it is in fact six defence witnesses before this “Tribunal” who have been murdered soon after giving evidence), universally known to be paid liars. As is the routine holding of session in camera. As is the admission of hearsay evidence. As are the rulings that no corroboration is necessary to convict a man of rape even he has pleaded not guilty, and that it matters not one jot if a prosecution witness’s written statement differs markedly from his testimony in court. As is the astonishing principle that a prosecution witness’s inconsistencies are proof of trauma, and therefore of the guilt of the accused. And as are the farcical translation problems.

The remit of this “Tribunal” is frankly racist, providing only for the trial of Hutus, the overwhelmingly predominant ethnic group, for crimes against Tutsis, the historically royal and aristocratic minority. Crimes by Hutus against Tutsis undoubtedly happened. But so did crimes by Tutsis against Hutus. Neither Maoist guerrillas nor embittered, dispossessed aristocrats are characteristically restrained in these matters. No one knows how many people were killed, often with machetes. The usual figure cited is eight hundred thousand. Perhaps that is correct, perhaps it is not. But what is undoubtedly the case is that not all the perpetrators were Hutus, although many were. What is undoubtedly the case is that not all the victims were Tutsis, although many were. What is undoubtedly the case is that no Tutsi has ever been tried, because none can be: that whole people has been declared innocent in advance, and another whole people declared guilty in advance.

What is undoubtedly the case is that an invasion of a sovereign state by a larger neighbour at exactly the same time as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait has been backed up to the hilt by the West in general and the United States, so that the Americans are now where first the Germans and then the Belgians once were: running Rwanda through a tiny clique drawn exclusively from the Tutsi minority. And what is undoubtedly the case is that that clique is Maoist, whereas the majority-derived government that it overthrew was headed by a daily communicant, Jean Kambanda, whom it subsequently tortured into confession while illegally detaining him, and whom it denied the lawyer of his choice.

Ivorians, you have been warned.