African Unification Front
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GENOCIDE & MASS MURDER IN AFRICA
FAILING INSTITUTIONS & STRAINED COMMUNITIES
...Article II of the U.N.'s 1948 Convention on Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide (UN GOAR Res. 260A (III) 9 December 1948; effective 21 January 1951) specifies five categories of activity to be genocidal when directed against an identified "national, ethnical, racial, or religious group," and therefore criminal under international law. Only one of these involves outright killing,
a) Killing members of the group;
b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Under Article III, the Convention makes the following acts punishable under the law;
a) Genocide;
b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;
c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
d) Attempt to commit genocide;
e) Complicity in genocide.
Intercommunity rivalries are not new to Africans and yet did not produce genocide in the past. African community conflicts are not solely responsible nor are they the primary cause of genocide. It is factors, previously external to these communities, that have catalyzed and excerbated the conditions that result in genocide. These external factors include racist repression of Africans, the undermining of Africa's social institutions, and external support of illegitimate and violent regimes by Europe and America in pursuit of narrowly defined financial interests. As well the debilitating campaign of propaganda favourable to the exploitation of African conflicts, and finacial support for exploitative and harsh terms of trade that have impoverished Africans while arming them.
Genocide reflects a deep instability in a society's matrix. After enduring slavery and colonial occupation, African communities are still at risk of failure and disintegration. The political and social incoherence that produced such fury was fostered by the demands for resources to build European empires. Slave trade and occupation left shattered commnities that need to generate and to rebuild cultural spaces appropriate to their own sensibilities.
Interahamwe genocidaires block traffic in Kigali
In the last 14 centuries, the African community has suffered genocide and massive loss of life as a result of hostile policies by European and Asian empires locked in competition for African resources.
The massive effort that resulted in the disabling and annihilation of the African community, lasting many centuries, stands out as the longest-lived genocide in human history. The capture, murder, rape and castration of Africans began in 640 and lasted until the abolition of slavery in England in 1833. Subsequent attempts at suppressing Africans have resulted from, and augmented, the profoundly devastating effects of the period of slavery. Other than loss of lives, the African civilization lost coherent community organizations, and African achievements in all fields of knowledge and culture and science were destroyed or appropriated during the colonial occupation that began in 1885.
Victims of the interhamwe lie dead on the roadside in Kigali
Moreover, individual African communities have come under genocidal attacts since then. An estimated ten million Africans died in the Congo at the hands of the Leopold's maladministrators.
At the beginning of the 20th century German troops based in South West Africa were ordered to annihilate the African communities under their jurisdiction. That action resulted in the extermination of 80% of the Nama and Herero communities. Thousands died in massacres and thousands more died trying to cross the desert in order to escape the German fury.
The Herero and Nama women and girls were interned in concentration camps and raped by German troops, while the men and boys were tortured and murdered. This treatment of the Africans was later applied to Jews and other enemies of the NAZI regime in Germany, by the same units of troops that had practised their deadly craft on Africa. Moreover, at least 5000 Africans died in NAZI Germany.
The whole excercise of colonial occupation made the abuse and murder of Africans in the hundreds of thousands possible, and on it own constitutes genocide. The Apartheid regime in Africa, carried on where the colonial occupation left off, and sabotaged the political stability across Africa.
 In 1959 the revolution in Rwanda resulted in a series of massacres against members of the Tutsi community. More massacres directed at the same community on a massive scale in subsequent years produced hundreds of thousands of casualties. In 1994, the Tutsi were again subjected to actions that produced the fasted, most intense and massive loss of lives in human history. In 1992 in Bugesera region, thousands of Tutsis were massacred using machetes, latrines, and small arms. Later on, between April 6 and July 15 of 1994, over one million Tutsi's and several hundred thousand Hutus and Twa people died in Rwanda at the hands of Interahamwe militia, FAR troops, RPF troops, with the complicity of the French, Belgian, and American armies. Except for a battallion of mutineering troops from Ghana under the command of a renegade Canadian general, the UN acquiesced to the orgy of death and stood by or evacuted in full view of the gory mass murder.
The short lived republic of Biafra in western Africa lost an estimated one million people in the course of the war between 1968 and 1970. A continuous military seige and several offensive military actions caused injury, starvation and death in the thousands every week for the duration of the Biafran war. As in the case of Rwanda, the international community did everything short of directly killing the Biafrans.
In Burundi, the Tutsi dominated government, has for 40 years pursued a policy of extreme military repression against Hutus. An estimated 50,000 Hutus died in the 1980s at the hands of the Burundina armed forces. Estimates put the number of dead Hutus in Burundi since 1994 at 250,000.
UPDF: responsible for regional instability
Beginning in 1986, the NRM government in Uganda (and its armed forces, NRA and UPDF) pursued a policy of regional destabilization, that is directly responsible for triggering the violence in the Central and Eastern Africa in the late 1980s and through the 1990s and early 21st century. Moreover, the NRA victimised directly the communities of northern Uganda, particularly the Acholi community in an effort to break the spirit of that community. An estimated million Acholis are have died in the last 16 years due to this terrorist policy. In addition to the Acholis, the people of the Rwenzori region in western Uganda have also been victims to the military adventurism of the NRA government since 1986.
Between 1994 and 1998 a further half million people were killed in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the three years following on the August 2, 1998 offensive by several African republicsan forces and thier allied militias, an astounding 2.5 million people have died dierectly as a result of the military actions. A further four million have been displaced, and 16 million face starvation.
In isolation these latest actions tend to be treated as if they are not genocide on account of the number of groups involved as perpetrators or as victims. In their proper context, the deaths of so many Africans is in fact genocide, especially because it is objectively generated by strains that the entire African community faces due to a particularly hostile set of international relations.
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