Genocide and why Nigeria does not deserve UN Security Council seat
By Professor
Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe
Special to USAfricaonline.com,
USAfrica The Newspaper, Houston; IgboEvents
blog and CLASS
magazine
March 26, 2006: It now appears very likely that Nigeria will,
after all, hand over Liberian fugitive leader Charles Taylor
(currently on 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 whilst 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 &endash; 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 &endash; 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 which 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 apologised 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 apologise" to the Igbo. Before he shot himself in a Berlin bunker in 1945, few would have expected Adolf Hitler to apologise or show remorse for his organised genocide of six million Jews across Europe during the Second World War. Hardly anyone, though, would wish to contemplate a Hitler travelling to Jerusalem today to address a press conference in which he would insist categorically: "I have nothing to apologise 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 the pillage of the economy 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 &endash; 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, Adekunle, Buhari,
Gowon, Akinrinade, Danjuma, Enaharo and many many others) must also
be apprehended for the murder of 3 million Africans in the
1960s-1970s.
Prof. Ekwe-Ekwe,
contributing editor of USAfricaonline.com, has written several books
and essays on Africa and Nigeria. His new book, Biafra
Revisited is published in May 2006. He is also the author
of Beyond the "failed state": Reconstituting Africa,
published in 2004. He wrote in May 2001, an exclusive commentary for
USAfricaonline.com titled 'Obasanjo
obsession with Biafra versus facts of history.'
Also on Bifara, see related
USAfricaonline.com exclusive Interview with Dim Odumegwu
Emeka Ojukwu:
"It was simply a choice between Biafra and enslavement."By Chido
Nwangwu
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Obasanjo: Let me say this to you, when you put the question of 10,000 -- 10,000 people dying in Nigeria, of course, for a population of over 120 million people...." But USAfricaonline.com Founder and recipient of the Journalism Excellence award (1997), Chido Nwangwu, who appeared on the same program as as a CNN International analyst (Africa) pointed out that "when (President Obasanjo) answered that in a country of 100 million that 10,000 people are said to have died, as if that was a small number, that in itself reflects a disconnect with the concerns of Nigerians. The second one is that when the risk is civil disagreement, the police are required to intervene in the country. And the deployment of the armed forces of Nigeria requires at least some consultation, however modest, with the parliament." Nwangwu, former member of the editorial board of Nigeria's Daily Times continued that "the third factor that is equally important to underscore is that the armed forces of Nigeria moved in for a punitive action rather than just containing a civil disagreement." He noted in USAfricaonline.com backgrounder "it was revealing and interesting interesting discussing Nigeria's issues with its leader - under the current circumstances of an increasingly out-of-schedule elections and the gathering storm of an impeachment process by a majority of the members of the National Assembly, predominantly by Obasanjo's party members." See rush transcript of the CNN International news program. Obasanjo facing corruption and ineptitude impeachment charges, again since the parliament, a few weeks ago, passed a motion carrying a majority of the members of Obasanjo's party, the PDP. RELIGION
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Chinua
Achebe returns "home" from U.S., to love and
adulation of 
SPECIAL
EVENT:
