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| Africa Subsaharan |
| Genocide by any other name |
| 2009-03-19 |
| The first half-century of black Africa's independence was especially notorious for three reasons: coups, corrupt dictatorships and genocides. Just seven years after Nigeria's independence in 1960, more than a million Igbos died of starvation or were slaughtered in the Biafran war in Nigeria; in the 1980s a million people died of starvation in Ethiopia as the government was busy buying weapons, and more than 20 000 Ndebele were slaughtered by the Zimbabwean army's Fifth Brigade. In 1994, in just three months, a million Tutsis died in Rwanda at the hands of their Hutu compatriots and, more recently, up to four million Congolese people have died as an indirect result of 10 years of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. And in the Sudanese provinces of Darfur, massacres have claimed up to 300 000 people, a conflict for which the country's president Omar al-Bashir has been indicted by the International Criminal Court. So many millions gone, deaths that could easily fill an encyclopedia, which is precisely the project that Abebe Zegeye, professor and chair of genocide and holocaust studies at Unisa, and Maurice Vambe, a professor at Unisa's English studies department, have undertaken. The two academics are writing the first African encyclopedia of genocide, a 600-page tome that is due to come out next year. The pair's working definition of genocide is not the one the UN arrived at in 1948, which defines genocide as what happens when one ethnic group seeks to destroy another in part or in whole. "While this definition provides a broad framework within which to understand mass murder, it has to be expanded to accommodate the peculiarities of present-day crimes related to mass murder in Africa." They argue that "genocide must be explained first in terms of the number of bodies that lie dead, but also most importantly, in terms of the conditions that result directly or indirectly [in] the death of masses of people". Vambe said rogue governments now know that killing 100 people, for example, will ignite the interest of the international community, so what governments do instead is create conditions that make it impossible for people to live or learn. "These conditions could be hunger, choleraor failure to go school. We shouldn't focus on the outcome, but on the process of consciously denying people their rights." Using this definition, the two scholars argue that the lives lost in Operation Murambatsvina, the Zimbabwean government'sbrutal 2005 crackdown on inhabitants of informal settlements, and the electoral violence of last year could be defined as genocide. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #7 No good deed goes unpunished, anon. :-( |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2009-03-19 16:12 |
| #6 If anything, the white man has delayed and reduced the slaughter through his attempts at installing the rule of law, modern governance, religion, and medicine. And thus creating a spectacular population explosion (multiplied by 10 over a century), with the overflow flooding whitey's homeland(s). Isn't that funny, in some weird way? |
| Posted by: anonymous5089 2009-03-19 15:52 |
| #5 It is quite difficult to attach western logic and modern terms such as "genocide, independence, democracy" to events in Africa since the first white man set foot on the continent. One must attempt to eradicate from one's mind the notion that being a mere breath of time, western beliefs or views must somehow be to blame for the natural selection, tribalism, disease and famine that has gone on in Africa for tens of thousands of years. If anything, the white man has delayed and reduced the slaughter through his attempts at installing the rule of law, modern governance, religion, and medicine. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2009-03-19 15:30 |
| #4 I disagree. Deliberately creating conditions in which most of the population die is the lazy method of genocide. Think, for instance, about the Warsaw Ghetto, which had three purposes: to separate the Jews from the general population, to provide an boundaried area to which Jews from elsewhere could be shipped, and to create conditions -- grossly inadequate food, fuel and medicine rations -- such that between 25% and 66% of the population would die of "natural causes", reducing the number that had to be subsequently processed in death camps. It worked, too: I'm sure y'all have seen some of the many photos of the old and young lying dead in doorway after doorway... except the ones who died in the streets because they hadn't the strength to get to a doorway. Yes, academics and other ideologues do many stupid and nasty things as they attempt to redefine the universe to match their preconceptions. This is not one of them. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2009-03-19 14:44 |
| #3 Ridiculous. Deliberate hijacking of a well understood term is almost always done to advance a social engineering agenda. Examples of terms that have been stolen and redefined include "torture", "gay", "democratic".... |
| Posted by: Bunyip 2009-03-19 07:45 |
| #2 To these African academics, "failure to go to school" is now the same thing as genocide. |
| Posted by: Excalibur 2009-03-19 04:29 |
| #1 Colonialism doesn't look that bad in the hindsight? |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2009-03-19 03:45 |