Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe
Nigeria does not deserve UN security council seat
(originally published in dissidentvoice, 12 May 2005, and is republished here unedited as in the original)
(originally published in dissidentvoice, 12 May 2005, and is republished here unedited as in the original)
IT NOW APPEARS very likely that Nigeria
will, after all, hand over Liberian fugitive leader Charles Taylor (currently
in exile in Nigeria) to the Freetown-based UN court investigating war crimes in
conflicts in and around Sierra Leone. Thanks to the insistence of the US
government, the Obasanjo regime is about to send Taylor to the Freetown court
despite its long-held position to the contrary. The regime has until recently
argued that it was against its “national honour” (whatever that means) to
respond positively to the court’s request to extradite Taylor to face trial for
overseeing the slaughter of 1.3 million Africans in the west central states of
Liberia, Sierra Leone and southern Guinea while he was president of Liberia.
The irony is of course not lost on any
keen observer of this development. Whatever may be the US’s strategic interests
on this subject (possible Taylor links with al-Qaida, possible Taylor
involvement in millions of dollars worth of money laundering, possible Taylor
complicity in the January 2005 attempted coup in Conakry to remove the
pro-American Guinean president), it has taken the intervention of a non-African
power to force a disreputable African leadership to hand over the head of a
fellow murderous African leadership to face trial for the murder of 1.3 million
Africans – not 1.3 million non-Africans. African democrats are
surely unencumbered by this irony. African leaderships have murdered 15 million
Africans across the continent in the past 40 years in appalling spates of
genocide. Even if the devil itself were to lecture African leaderships to stop
murdering their peoples and, in the process, help prevent just one more African
being annihilated by their depraved overlords, that would be readily welcome.
African populations are under siege by brutal regimes replete across Africa.
The peoples require unremitting support for their right to safeguard their
lives and progress from wherever in the world. Not less.
If indeed the US administration has
threatened to block Nigeria’s current so-called “bid” for a permanent seat on a
possibly enlarged UN Security Council, if it continues to keep Taylor away from
facing justice, as some press reports indicate, Washington has done very well.
But the Americans shouldn’t lift their threat yet, even if Nigeria dispatches
Taylor to Freetown. It is breathtakingly obscene for Nigeria to wish to be
considered for a permanent seat at the Security Council given the ghastly human
rights records of successive Nigerian regimes in the past 40 years including the
current one where statecraft at best is run as some medieval baronial fiefdom.
The US and the rest of the world should reject this “bid” out of hand. Not to
do that would be to send the wrong signal to Africa – by rewarding a band of
genocidist operatives who have the blood of Africans on their hands, and who
have in tandem pillaged an economy whose resources alone could easily have
transformed the entire continent.
Pestilence
IT MUSTN’T be forgotten that Nigeria
inaugurated the current African “Age of Pestilence” when its leadership in 1966
embarked on the premeditated massacres of its Igbo population during a stretch
of five months. One hundred thousand Igbo were killed during what emerged as
the first phase of this genocide. The following year, the leadership expanded
the territorial reach of this campaign into Igboland itself for the second
phase. Three million Igbo, or one-quarter of the nation’s population then, were
annihilated within 30 months. Most of Africa stood by and watched, hardly
critical or condemnatory of this wanton destruction of human lives and the
sacking and plundering of community after community. As the perpetrators
appeared to have got off free from any forms of sanctions from Africa (and the
rest of the world) for what were clearly crimes against humanity, several
leaderships elsewhere in Africa were “convinced” of the lessons that they had
drawn from the escapades of their Nigerian counterpart: “We can murder our
peoples at will. There will be no sanctions from abroad”. As a result, the
killing fields of the age stretched inexorably beyond the Nigerian frontiers:
Liberia, Sierra Leone, southern Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ethiopia, Uganda, Zaïre/Democratic
Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan.
In the past 40 years, Nigeria has been
run by a succession of genocidist generals and other operatives (military and
civilian alike) who planned, executed and sustained the Igbo genocide. The
current head of state, Olusegun Obasanjo, commanded a notorious division in
southern Igboland that committed indescribable atrocities as it overran cities,
towns and villages. Neither he (who has been head of state for a total of nine
years during the period) nor any of his colleagues (most of whom are still
alive) has apologized or shown remorse for their crimes against humanity. On
the contrary. In fact Yakubu Gowon, who was head of state and grand overseer of
the genocide, only recently told the press in Enugu (political and cultural
capital of Igboland) that he had “nothing to apologize” to the Igbo.
BEFORE he shot himself in a Berlin
bunker in 1945, few would have expected Adolf Hitler to apologize or show
remorse for his organized genocide of six million Jews across Europe during the
Second World War. Hardly anyone, though, would wish to contemplate a Hitler
traveling to Jerusalem today to address a press conference in which he would
insist categorically: “I have nothing to apologize for the six million Jews my
forces annihilated between 1939 and 1945. What I did was right”. That would be
unimaginable monstrosity. But this was precisely what Gowon did at Enugu a
fortnight ago.
Nigeria’s “bid” to join the Security
Council could not have provided the world with a better opportunity to deal
with the crux of contemporary Africa’s malaise: the non-accountability of
African leaderships who employ genocide and mass murder as a twin-track
instrument of power. No country in Africa is more appropriate for the world to
enforce this accountability than where the disease emerged in the first place on
the continent – Nigeria, the quintessentially failed and genocide-state.
NOW is the time for the US and the
world to insist that each and every member of the Nigerian leaderships who
participated in the murder of three million Africans 40 years ago, and who in
effect triggered off the chain of mass killings of 12 million others elsewhere
in the continent must be made to account for their action. Besides, if Nigeria
is ultimately forced to hand over Taylor to face trial for the murder of 1.3
million Africans in the 1980s-1990s, then his current hosts (Obasanjo,
Abubakar, Babangida, Buhari, Gowon, Danjuma and many many others) must also be
apprehended for the murder of 3.1 million Africans in the 1960s-1970s.
(New York Art Quartet plays “Mohawk”, a composition by Charlie Parker [personnel: John Tchicai, alto saxophone; Roswell Rudd, trombone; Reggie Workman, bass; Milford Graves, drums; recorded: Nippon Phonogram, New York, US, 16 July 1965])
Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe
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