Kayitesi Berthe - A History of Genocide in Africa

Copyright 2017 by Timothy J. Stapleton

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stapleton, Timothy J. (Timothy Joseph), 1967 author.

Title: A history of genocide in Africa / Timothy J. Stapleton.

Description: Santa Barbara, California : Praeger, an Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016054577 (print) | LCCN 2016055865 (ebook) | ISBN 9781440830518 (hardcopy : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781440830525 (eBook)

Subjects: LCSH: GenocideAfricaHistory. | Genocide (International law) | Civil warAfrica. | AfricaPolitics and government1960

Classification: LCC DT30.5 .S74 2017 (print) | LCC DT30.5 (ebook) | DDC 364.151096dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016054577

ISBN:978-1-4408-3051-8

EISBN: 978-1-4408-3052-5

21 20 19 18 17 1 2 3 4 5

This book is also available as an e-book.

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This history of genocide in Africa was initially meant as a coauthored book involving a historian of Africa and a scholar of genocide studies. The latter was Berthe Kayitesi who had survived the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda when she was a teenager and later completed a doctorate in genocide education at the University of Ottawa. Through extensive public speaking and the publication of her memoir Demain ma vie (Tomorrow My Life), she had become a strong advocate for Rwandan genocide survivors and for preserving the memory of that horrific event. While Berthe was involved in the conceptualization of this book and drafting the proposal, she did not get a chance to write any of the content. She passed away in June 2015. She was 36 years old. The circumstances around her death serve as a cautionary tale about the potentially overwhelming power of the concept of genocide. In the troubled months leading up to Berthes death, some suspected that she was suffering from post-traumatic stress related to her experience of genocide while others who were awestruck by her heroic survival story encouraged her to believe that nothing was wrong with her. Neither view was correct. She died of multiple brain aneurysms.

The mid-20th-century emergence of the concept of genocide and its international legal definition had little to do with Africa, which, at the time, was a colonized continent with almost no autonomous representation in the global community. In 1933 at an international criminal law conference in Madrid, Spain, a Polish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, presented a paper proposing that international law recognize the extermination of national groups as a crime distinct from war crimes, which had already been recognized through a series of earlier conventions. However, Lemkin struggled with coining suitable terms. His proposal to call the destruction of human groups barbarism and the destruction of human cultural heritage vandalism was not well received. During the Second World War (19391945), Lemkin fled to the United States where, as a law professor at Duke University, he collected information on Nazi atrocities in Europe, which included the murder of many of his own family who were Jews. In an August 1941 radio broadcast, British prime minister Winston Churchill famously highlighted the inadequacy of existing legal terminology in describing Nazi outrages in Europe by referring to them as a crime without a name. This void in vocabulary was filled by Lemkin. In 1944 he published a book entitled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, in which he devised the term genocide by combining the Greek genos for race or people with the Latin cide for murder. In doing this, Lemkin was building on existing and widely used terms such as homicide, fratricide, and regicide. When he coined the term, Lemkin understood genocide as a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. As will be discussed throughout this book, the concept of genocide would have an enormous impact on Africa and Africans.

With the circulation of films showing the liberation of Nazi concentration camps at the end of the Second World War, Lemkins term genocide

Since its inception, the 1948 international legal definition of genocide has been the subject of much criticism and debate. For instance, the convention gives no indication of the number of deaths that might be needed to qualify an incident of mass violence as genocide. In the popular imagination, any violent process that results in large numbers of fatalities is often but inaccurately called genocide. In addition, one of the most problematic aspects of the 1948 legal standard is the issue of intent. What type of evidence proves that a regime, organization, or individual intended to commit genocide? Must there be such specific written plans or instructions as the extermination order issued by the German commander in South West Africa (todays Namibia) in 1904, or, in the absence of written plans, can genocidal intent be inferred from such systematic massacres as witnessed in Rwanda in 1994? The relation between war and genocide is also controversial. It is often difficult to differentiate between the tragic death of civilians as a result of war, which is now euphemistically called collateral damage, and a purposeful attempt to exterminate a specific racial, ethnic, or religious group. Confusion often arises when discussing counterinsurgency campaigns or conventional military operations aimed at suppressing regional secessionist movements that can be seen as targeting people based on ethnicity or regional origin. As will be discussed, there are many instances of this in postcolonial African history. Such problems with the UN convention have inspired debates over redefining genocide.

Some scholars have proposed narrowing the definition of genocide, while others have sought to broaden it. For some, a campaign to exterminate a group in part, as stated in the 1948 convention, should not be included in the category of genocide, because it trivializes the crime and degrades the victims and survivors of well-known total genocides. In this view, genocide should refer only to cases in which perpetrators desire the complete elimination of a group such as the Holocaust of the Jews during the Second World War or the methodical killing of Tutsi in 1994 Rwanda. Critics of broadening the definition of genocide point out that doing so will mean that almost any instance of mass violence could be seen as genocide, which will result in the term losing its specific legal and analytical usefulness. As such, this book will employ the existing international legal definition of genocide.

While most countries that created national laws against genocide stuck closely to the wording of the 1948 UN convention, several created broader legal frameworks. Ethiopia, the first country to deposit the 1948 genocide convention officially with the UN secretary-general, promulgated its own genocide law during the 1950s that ignored the objections of other UN member states and defined target groups as national, ethnic, racial,