Scourge of conflicts and rights abuses continue affecting Sub-Saharan Africa

By Kestér Kenn Klomegâh

Overa year, the Russia-Ukraine crisis has complicated the unbearable economic conditions for majority of the 1.3 billion population in Africa. The impoverished population and marginalized groups continue suffering from rising prices of commodities, the future still looks uncertain as African leaders attempt to contain the growing negative sentiments and to find suitable solutions for stabilizing somehow the economy.

Amnesty International says in a report that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 generated a global energy and food crisis, which hit Africa hard, and sought to further disrupt weak multilateral and regional systems meant to protect human rights on the continent. It also laid bare the inconsistent responses to crises around the world.”

It further says that while Western states as well as some African states reacted forcefully to the Kremlin’s aggression in Ukraine, they were muted in response to grave violations being committed in African countries including Burkina Faso, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Mali and Mozambique.

In the assessment report, the recovery efforts from the Covid-19 pandemic were hindered by conflicts, economic shocks arising from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and extreme weather conditions, exacerbated by climate change. Consequently, the rights of millions of people to food, health and an adequate standard of living were seriously undermined across the African continent.

The report also highlights the failure of global and regional institutions, including the UN Security Council and African Union, to respond adequately to crimes committed under international law in countries like China, Myanmar and Yemen, as well as on the African continent, including in Ethiopia, Burkina Faso and South Sudan.

“While the international community’s attention shifted to Ukraine, Africa continued to suffer from the scourge of conflict, which continued to cause suffering and mass displacements of people in countries such as Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Mali, Mozambique and South Sudan,” said Samira Daoud, Amnesty International’s Director for West and Central Africa.

According to Samira Daoud, “Africa was already facing a long, slow recovery from Covid-19 but the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine has resulted in a spike in global oil prices, which has driven the cost of commodities higher, making it difficult for ordinary people to afford food and basic necessities. Many people are barely surviving in fragile economies such as Zimbabwe, Liberia and South Sudan and this has compromised people’s socio-economic rights.”

It allegedly explained that shameless failure of leadership paves way for further abuses. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine triggered one of Europe’s worst humanitarian and human rights emergencies in recent history, exposing what has been a reality for many in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Mozambique, and the Sahel, and the terrible failure of leadership to resolve these conflicts.

Despite widespread conflict across West, Central, East and Southern Africa, limited progress was made towards ensuring victims’ rights to truth, justice, reparation and accountability for grave violations and abuses of human rights that may amount to crimes under international law.

At least in 2022, the African Union celebrated the 20th anniversary of its founding and establishment. It was a year in which the continental body was expected to double down on its responses to crises and the fight against impunity; to rededicate itself to its ambitious goal of ‘silencing the guns’ and ridding the continent of the scourge of conflict by 2030. Instead, the African Union’s response to grave violations and abuses of human rights committed in conflicts across the region was either absent or timid at best.

It cited example in South Sudan, victims of crimes under international law continued to wait, for the seventh year in a row, for the African Union to decisively act and establish the Hybrid Court for South Sudan. 2022 marked seven years since a peace agreement mandated the African Union to establish the Hybrid Court for South Sudan and nine years since the country descended into conflict.

In the case of Ethiopia, the African Union successfully mediated the signing of a peace agreement in response to the two-year brutal conflict in the northern region. However, it remained eerily silent as the Ethiopian government continued to discredit and deny access to the African Commission on Human and People’’ Rights Commission of Inquiry on the Situation in the Tigray Region. At the same time, the peace agreement mediated by the African Union overlooked rampant impunity in the country and failed to offer a clear roadmap on how to ensure accountability for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

While the African Union mediation efforts resulted in cessation of hostilities agreements in countries such as Ethiopia, many other conflicts continued largely unabated. Emboldened by a lack of attention or decisive action from the African Union and the United Nations, armed groups and government forces alike continued to target civilians in conflicts around the continent, leaving a trail of death and destruction.

In the French-speaking west Africa, Burkina Faso armed groups, the Islamic State in the Sahel (ISS) and the Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims (GSIM), targeted towns and cities, killing people in attacks and violating humanitarian law. In Djibo town, more than 300,000 residents were affected when GSIM destroyed water infrastructure. At least 80 people, mostly civilians, were killed when ISS fighters attacked Seytenga town in June 2022, reportedly going from house to house killing men.

In the French-speaking west African republic of Mali, members of the GSIM attacked three villages in Bankass Cercle, killing at least 130 people in May 2022. In Moura town, several dozen people were summarily executed by Malian soldiers and their allies in March. The same forces killed 50 civilians in Hombori in April 2022.

Similarly in central African recion, Cameroon has suffered from armed separatist groups in the Northwest and Southwest regions as these groups targeted people, healthcare facilities and schools. Armed groups in the Far North region similarly raided villages, killing and abducting dozens of civilians. In the Central African Republic, at least 100 civilians were killed by armed groups and government forces between February and March 2022.

Attacks on civilians also intensified in eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) where armed groups killed more than 1,800 civilians. In Nord-Kivu, fighting between

Avoiding the Rwandan roulette

By Ike Willie-Nwobu

The UN remembers one of the bloodiest spots on humanity’s page in modern history as a way to ensure that it does not happen again. It is important for countries to always remember the cost of ethnic aggravation. African countries especially have to watch it.

On April 7,the United Nations observes the International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

The lessons from the genocide remain that ethnicity and hate should never be allowed to dictate national discourse.

As tension boiled over after the declaration of Bola Ahmed Tinubu as Nigeria’s president-elect, and the subsequent battle for the Lagos State governorship, Bayo Onanuga, spokesperson to the All Progressives Congress Presidential Campaign Council(APC-PCC) said he was a Yoruba man before a Nigerian, in one of his tweets.

If it was something said in the heat of passion, people say much worse when they are angry, he was not alone in making such ethnically charged comments in recent times. But such seemingly innocuous and obvious statements can kindle the tinderbox that is Nigeria’s overrated diversity.

Even leaving the likes of Onanuga aside, a country of at least 500 different ethnic groups was always going to struggle. Experience has shown that in multiethnic resource-rich states like Nigeria, when key players in the politics of patronage get backed into a corner, they weaponize ethnicity, often turning their brothers into the butchers of other people. The lessons have a painful provenance.

Within 100 days in 1994,800,000 people were killed in the Congolese army and M23 rebels forced more than 200,000 people to flee their homes. Data collected by the UN showed that at least 250 internally displaced people were killed during the year as a result of deliberate attacks against their camps in the east, with 180 killed in Ituri alone.

Rwanda when ethnic irredentists of the majority Hutu ethnic group proceeded on a slaughter fest against the minority Tutsis. The world watched for over three months as people who had lived as one in one of Africa’s most aesthetically pleasing countries became killer strangers overnight.

The UN remembers one of the bloodiest spots on humanity’s page in modern history as a way to ensure that it does not happen again. It is important for countries to always remember the cost of ethnic aggravation. African countries especially have to watch it.

As does Nigeria. Those who make decisions for Nigeria need to consciously favour inclusion and avoid the exclusion that breeds bitterness and violence.

The elections of February 25 and March 18 showed a country horribly divided along dangerous ethnic. Voters in key parts of the country and states were only able to see as far as the candidates that represented their ethnic groups, and no more.

Competence, character, and compassion were cast aside as ethnic rhetoricians and their theories became dominant. In the near future, when, not if, bad governance sets in, those whose choices were crafted only by their narrow consideration are predicted to complain the loudest.

As learnt from the Rwandan Genocide, ethnicism presents a clear and present danger to Nigeria with its multiple ethnic groups and religions, which often support ethnic militias in their campaigns of hate and violence. Even the terrorists terrorizing the North have been shown to subscribe to the Hausa versus Fulani division. In the Southeast, the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) movement describes its mission in unabashedly ethnic terms.

In Mozambique, an armed group calling itself Al-Shabaab committed war crimes by beheading civilians, abducting women and girls, and looting and burning villages in the north of the country. On 21 May 2022, they attacked Chicomo, Nguida and Nova Zambezia villages in Macomia district and burned houses, ransacked crops, beheaded 10 people and abducted women and girls.

“Longstanding impunity for human rights violations from Burkina Faso to Central African Republic, Ethiopia to Sudan and Mozambique to Cameroon has added fuel to the fire of conflicts and human rights violations in Africa. Both state and non-state actors cannot continue to violate human rights and international humanitarian law with impunity. There must be consequences for human rights violations,” said Tigere Chagutah, Amnesty International’s Director for East and Southern Africa.

“Parties to armed conflicts must protect civilians by ending deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, and indiscriminate attacks. They must also facilitate the safe and unhindered access to humanitarian assistance for populations at risk,” stressed Tigere Chagutah in the report.

The report made reference to ruthless repression of dissent across the world. It clearly explained that authorities across the world deployed various tactics to silence peaceful dissent. In Africa, journalists, human rights defenders and political opposition also faced repression including in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Eswatini, Guinea, Mali, Mozambique, Senegal and Zimbabwe.

Crackdowns on the right to freedom of peaceful assembly intensified as authorities used national security or Covid-19 as a pretext to ban, suppress or violently disperse protests. In Guinea, judicial proceedings have been launched against activists for protesting against transitional authorities, which have imposed a total ban on demonstrations since May.

The deaths of scores of protesters were reported and attributed to excessive use of force by security forces in Chad, DRC, Guinea, Kenya, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Sudan, among other countries.

In many countries, political opponents, activists, bloggers, journalists and human rights defenders were or remained arbitrarily detained in 2022 simply for exercising their freedom of expression. In Cameroon, more than 100 people from the Anglophone regions or supporters of the main opposition party are detained for expressing their opinion.

In Zimbabwe, senior opposition leader Job Sikhala remains in detention after he was arrested in June 2022, even though he has not been convicted of any crime. Media outlets were suspended or subjected to heavy fines, including in Mali, Togo and Senegal for disseminating or publishing information critical of the regimes. Further in the report indicated that technology was weaponized against many, to silence, prevent public assembly or disinform. In response to growing threats to the right to protest, Amnesty International launched a global campaign in 2022 to confront states’ intensifying efforts to erode the fundamental right to freedom of peaceful assembly.

By assault our dignity, equality and freedom.

Kestér Kenn Klomegâh

is

an Int’l Affiants Analyst.

Some unscrupulous Nigerian politicians have also made a political career out of stoking ethnic tension in Nigeria. When they go on the campaign trail they are content to remind people of their ethnicities, whip up hate and manipulate voters.

It takes very little time for ethnic tension to turn deadly as played out in Rwanda. In 100 days that seemed like an eternity, almost all the members of the Tutsi ethnic group were eliminated by militia from the Hutu ethnic group.

Despite their different ethnicities, those who killed others during the genocide did not become killers overnight. For months, they were peppered with ethnic rhetoric until the dam of ethnic-hate broke open within them, consuming what was left of their humanity.

Rwandan may have miraculously recovered from the genocide and impressively rebuilt the country, but the scars from a historic tragedy remain and continue to bite the psyche of a country that has become synonymous with ethnic hatred.

In recent times, Nigeria’s staggering diversity has become a rod with which to beat it. A lot of this has to do with the fact that the country has not been able to properly harness the dividends of its diversity. This has to change.

Nigeria cannot meet its aspirations to be a developed country if there is no unity of purpose between the different ethnic groups which make up the country.

Managing its multiple ethnicities better will be key if Nigeria is to snap out of the development fuss that currently plagues it. To do that successfully, Nigerian leaders across all divides must be able to preach unity and inspire equanimity despite the clear differences obvious in a multiethnic country.

Ike Willie-Nwobu, Coordinator/President International Federation on Ageing-Nigeria (IFAN)

NGO calls for collaboration to defeat sexual offences

ANon-Governmental Organisation (NGO), Mirabel Centre, has called on Nigerians to join hands to end sexual violence.

In a statement issued in Ikeja on Monday, the NGO urged Nigerians to support survivors by creating a safe and inclusive environment for them to speak out, so that the atrocious crime could be defeated.

It stated that one in every three women had experienced some sort of sexual assault or the other in their lifetime.

“Someone we know, love or work with could be a survivor.

“Rape or sexual assault affects the victims physically, emotionally, mentally and socially, it can be shattering, leaving survivors being scared, ashamed, and alone or plagued by nightmare, flashbacks, and other unpleasant memories.”

According to the statement, Mirabel Centre is Nigeria’s first Sexual Assault Referral Centre (SARC), which provides support services for survivors of sexual assault.

“We provide direct free forensic medical care, legal and psycho-social support for men, women and children, who have either recently or in the past experienced rape or sexual assault.

“In nine years of operations, we have provided direct support for no less than 8,000 survivors, who have gone through the trauma of sexual assault.

“The youngest survivor was a three-month-old baby and the oldest, an 82-yearold woman.

“We look forward to providing help for more survivors,” the statement stated.

The centre appealed to people to stop blaming victims, but to support, encourage and make them realise they are not alone.

The NGO stated that a concerned citizen could report on behalf of a person being sexually abused, so they could rescue the person.

It said that anyone sexually abused should access help on time by going to its centre located inside Lagos State University Teaching Hospital (LASUTH), Ikeja. (NAN)