Yet, another breaking news from The Hague!

When a person desires something, all the universe conspires to help that person to realize [their] dream.
– Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist (London: Thorsons, 1995)

The International Court of Justice in The Hague has declared, in a landmark ruling, that Kosovo’s February 2008 declaration of independence from Serbia did not violate international law. On the contrary, ICJ President Hisashi Owada notes, in his address on the majority verdict (10 jurists to 4), that international law contained “no applicable prohibition” of Kosovo's declaration of independence. The ICJ therefore rejected Serbia’s claims, which it had earlier brought to the court for consideration, that its “territorial integrity was violated” by the Kosova independence proclamation.

These are extraordinary times indeed… It mustn’t be forgotten that it has been under the seemingly protective umbrella of this “[state’s] territorial integrity was violated”-dubious legal mantra that many a regime across the world, particularly in Africa, have since the 1960s waged genocidal and other military campaigns against constituent nations and peoples within the population who seek their own independence and state. The most notorious of this occurrence is of course the 1966-1970 Igbo genocide. 3.1 million Igbo people were murdered during the timeframe of 42 months. For the Harold Wilson British government, which was centrally involved in the planning and the execution of the genocide and which often prided itself at the time as a more credible spokesperson of the campaign than envoys of the genocidist junta in Lagos, this mantra was the linchpin of its publicity and lobbying efforts across varying sociopolitical forums and circles during those 42 catastrophic months to “rationalise” its sordid role.

Forty years on, both the ICJ and the International Criminal Court, also in The Hague, have made it impossible for anyone, anywhere, to invoke some statute of international law as a “rationalisation” to embark on the murder of any people or peoples within its frontiers on the bogus basis of operating for or on behalf of this existing state’s territorial status. No heads of regime or indeed any other regime operatives enjoy immunity, as a result of their office, for murdering people or peoples in their population and there is no statute of limitations for the crime of genocide or/and war crimes. Forty four years after the beginning of the Igbo genocide, today’s ICJ ruling is a giant step forward in bringing the goals of the restoration of the sovereignty of Biafra very much closer. As the saying goes, the ball is now clearly in the Igbo court.

Update on the al-Bashir indictment!

Appropriately, the The Hague-based International Criminal Court has issued a second arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir, the head of the Sudanese regime, charging him of committing genocide in Darfur (west of the country). His regime has, in total, murdered 300,000 Darfuri since 2003 and forced 2.5 million survivors into refugee camps in neighbouring Chad. The text of the current indictment is succinct and unambiguous: al-Bashir is accused of “genocide by killing, genocide by causing serious bodily or mental harm and genocide by deliberately inflicting on each target group conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction”. Earlier on, in March 2009, the ICC had issued its first arrest warrant for al-Bashir to stand trial for “war crimes and crimes against humanity” in Darfur, making him the first head of state in office to be so indicted.

For 44 years, since Nigeria inaugurated the genocide-state in Africa, murdering 3.1 million Igbo people, Africans have eagerly looked forward to these laudable developments from The Hague: the issuance of arrest warrants, by the ICC, to apprehend the head of an African regime to stand trial for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. Surely, the time for reckoning has drawn much closer, than ever before, for the principal, foundational architects of this continental age of slaughter who are still alive and who are responsible for the murder of 3.1 million during 1966-1970.

Breaking news on Kenya!

The International Criminal Court in The Hague is on the move again in Africa. Coming fast on the heels of its laudable decision last year to issue an arrest warrant to apprehend Omar al-Bashir (head of the Sudanese regime) to stand trial for “war crimes and crimes against humanity” committed in Darfur, the ICC has turned its attention to Kenya. The court has empowered Luis Moreno-Ocampo, its indefatigable chief prosecutor, to embark on the investigation into the December 2007 post-election widespread violence in Kenya when 1300 people were murdered. It declares that “information available provides a reasonable basis to believe that crimes against humanity [were] committed on Kenyan territory” during the polls. Moreno-Ocampo had asked the court’s authorisation to investigate these murders because he believed that Kenyan “political leaders organised and financed” some of the killings.

For 44 years, African peoples have waited patiently, sometimes in understandable despair, for this kind of news report. The report is indeed extraordinary. Little did these Kenyan “leaders” believe that as they plotted and unleashed unimaginable violence on their very own citizens over elections that the regime and its allies had fraudulently organised and consequently rigged, they might account to some tribunal for perpetrating this heinous crime. The tens of thousands who survived the massacres and are still displaced from their homes and communities have waited anxiously for justice. They will undoubtedly view the ICC intervention as the beginning of this overdue process of restitution. Thankfully, there is no statute of limitations on pursuing the perpetrators of the crimes against humanity.
Until now, African “leaderships” have felt that they could murder any one, people or peoples tagged as “opponents” within the country’s population as ruthlessly and horrifically as they wished because they envisaged no sanctions whatsoever from their colleagues elsewhere in Africa or from the rest of the world. The background to this impunity was of course laid in Nigeria on 29 May 1966. On this day, the north Nigeria political, religious, business and military establishment ordered a janjaweed attack on Igbo population centres across the entire stretch of north Nigeria – killing, raping, looting, wasting and heralding the first phase of the Igbo genocide which would claim 3.1 million lives by 12 January 1970. The world stood by as these murders were committed. Even some major powers and transnational institutions of the time were either complicit in the genocide or supported it outright. It is precisely because the perpetrators of the Igbo genocide appeared to have been let off the hook for their crimes by the world that Africa did not wait very long before the politics of the Nigeria genocide state morphed violently beyond the country’s frontiers. Leaders elsewhere on the continent including Rwanda, the Sudan, Uganda, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Somalia Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya particularly waged their own vile versions of liquidations of peoples, à la Nigeria, because they expected no sanctions as a result. The tragic consequence for Africa for not stopping these regimes, since 1970, has been the additional state murders of 12 million children, women and men.

The ICC’s next port of call in its Africa journey cannot but be Nigeria. This was where this infectious malady was incubated. As should be expected, Moreno-Ocampo is assured a very busy workload here. Many of those responsible for the genocide, pogroms and other acts of murder against the Igbo are still alive. Many are in their 60s-70s while some are in their 80s and 90s. A number of them are ex-heads of regime, ex-military and ex-police personnel, ex-civil servants, legislators, retired professors, businesspeople, even “diplomats”. Prior to the genocide, Igbo people were murdered in Jos (1945) and Kano (1953) for what were effectively “dress rehearsals” for the slaughtering of 1966-1970. Subsequently, the Igbo have been subjected to 16 planned pogroms/other acts of murder in Nigeria during the following years: 1980, 1982, 1985, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010. Lately, in the wake of a catastrophic strain in state hegemonic coalition, the Berom of the plateau central region have been targeted as well as the earlier destruction of the village of Odi.

With this historic ICC intervention, members of Africa’s “leaderships” (at whatever tiers of their regimes) who have murdered people/peoples in their country or are currently murdering people/peoples in their country or are in the process of planning to murder people/peoples in their country now know that they can no longer hide under the bogus rubric of “immunity from prosecution” or seek the protective “diplomatic cover” offered by a London or Moscow or whoever else as often occurred in the past. The world, even if belatedly, now demands and expects justice for the slain and the survivor from Africa’s states of death.