Aside from the cases discussed in the previous chapters, many horrific instances of mass violence that occurred in colonial and postcolonial Africa have been labeled as genocide. Most of those accusations do not measure up to the international legal definition, and a few have never been thoroughly investigated. They often involved authoritarian regimes, both colonial European and postcolonial African, responding to political opposition and/or regional secessionist movements. Many of the genocide allegations were retrospective in that they were made during the 1990s and 2000s within the context of heightened awareness of genocide issues but related to large-scale violence that had taken place decades, or even centuries, before. Frequently, those genocide charges were sensationalist, meant to vilify political opponents and enhance claims of victimhood among the accusers as a way of achieving separatist or other political aspirations.
In 1948 African intellectuals and labor leaders in Cameroon formed the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon (UPC), led by Ruben Um Nyobe, which criticized the French government for failing to prepare the former German colony and UN mandate for independence. The UPC demanded independence from France and reunification with Southern Cameroons, a small section of the former German colony of Cameroon that had been administered by the British since the end of the First World War. Nyobe’s movement gained popular support in Cameroon’s south and west, sympathized with the liberation struggles being fought against the French in Indochina and Algeria, and was backed by the French Communist Party. The French administration responded by encouraging conservative pro-French Cameroonian groups and having security forces harass UPC activists. As a result, in May 1955, violence broke out in the southwest, including the city of Douala, where UPC activists destroyed the property of regime supporters and military units were brought in from neighboring French territories to restore order. After its banning by French authorities in July 1955, UPC leaders fled to British-ruled Southern Cameroons and organized an armed wing called the National Organization Committee (CNO) that tried to use sabotage to undermine the first territorial elections. In December 1956, moderate nationalists who were willing to work with the French took over Cameroon’s territorial administration, and French paratroopers seized control of the southwestern town of Eseka. The UPC rebellion continued in the west and southwestern areas among the Bassa and Bamileke peoples. In 1957 the UPC was banned in British Southern Cameroons and subsequently moved to Sudan, Egypt, Ghana, and Guinea and received assistance from China. Within southwestern Cameroon, UPC insurgents targeted the economy by sabotaging the railway and created a liberated zone that was meant to serve as a staging area for expanded operations against the French in the rest of the country. French efforts to isolate the UPC by securing roads, railways, and towns failed, and insurgent attacks increased. In December 1957, at the request of Cameroonian prime minister Andre-Marie Mbida, the French military brought in additional troops from Chad and launched an aggressive counterinsurgency campaign that involved relocating the rural population of Sanaga-Maritime region into fortified villages along roads and dispatching patrols to hunt down guerrillas. In September 1958, Nyobe was killed by French forces, which ended the Bassa element of the insurrection, and, during that year, some 2,000 rebels surrendered in Sanaga-Maritime.
In 1958, with a dramatic change in French policy that moved toward granting rapid independence to its Sub-Saharan African territories, including Cameroon, UPC aims became redundant, and the group split. One faction joined the legal political process and gained seats in Cameroon’s assembly, while another continued the insurgency as the Cameroonian Army of National Liberation (ALNK), led by Felix-Roland Moumie, which fought in the predominantly Bamileke West region around the town of Bafoussam. In January 1960, Cameroon gained independence, and its president, Ahmadou Ahidjo, invited the French military to eliminate the rebels. Five French battalions, supported by ground attack aircraft and armored vehicles, initiated an offensive that crushed the insurgency after eight months. The French, who lost 30 soldiers, claimed to have killed 3,000 insurgents, but it is likely that thousands more displaced people died in the forest from disease and hunger. In November 1960, French intelligence poisoned Moumie in Switzerland. Limited ALNK resistance in western Cameroon continued until 1971, when the group’s leader, Ernest Ouandie, was captured and executed. Given the results of a referendum, British Southern Cameroons was reincorporated into Cameroon in October 1961. As with other former French territories in Africa, Cameroon became an authoritarian one-party state, supported by the former colonial power.1
The French military campaign in decolonization-era Cameroon was hardly mentioned by the international media of the time. Accusations that France had carried out genocide against the Bamileke began in the 1960s, perhaps partly inspired by similar accusations during neighboring Nigeria’s Civil War, and escalated over the next few decades given the rise of a Southern Cameroons independence movement within the former British-administered area. With Cameroon’s abandonment of a federal system in 1972, the former Southern Cameroons lost its partial autonomy, which meant that the area’s Anglophone population began to see themselves as unfairly dominated by the country’s Francophone majority. Like other African countries, Cameroon engaged in political liberalization in the early 1990s, which, although the long-time authoritarian and French-sponsored regime of Paul Biya survived, meant that a space was opened for more public discussion of Southern Cameroons secession. The 1988 publication of a memoir by Max Bardet, a French helicopter pilot who served in Cameroon during the earlier counterinsurgency campaign, strengthened the claims of genocide. He wrote that “in two years, the regular army destroyed Bamileke country in the South. They massacred between 300,000 and 400,000 people. A veritable genocide! The race was practically exterminated. Spears against automatic weapons, the Bamileke had no chance of surviving. Villages were erased, much like Attila.”2 Most authors making the case for a French genocide against the Bamileke would employ this quote. Eventually, separatists argued that the Cameroonian state, supported by French neocolonialism, had a long history of perpetrating genocide that, they claimed, had begun with the Bamileke ethnic group of the West region and then applied to the entire people of Southern Cameroons. Within this context of genocide accusation, some Southern Cameroons separatists claimed that France and the Cameroonian government had employed a chemical weapon to kill 1,700 Southern Cameroonians in 1986 and then covered up the incident by portraying it as a natural disaster involving poisonous gas erupting from Lake Nyos. Some have called this the Lake Nyos Genocide. Another conspiracy theory involved rumors that a state vaccination program represented a surreptitious effort to sterilize the young women of Southern Cameroons.3 During the 2000s, with the emergence of a global antigenocide movement and revelations that France had facilitated the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, many more Cameroonians and others, including veterans of the 1950s rebellion, called on the government of France to acknowledge its role in perpetrating a genocide against the Bamileke during the decolonization era, to open long-sealed official records related to the war, and to provide reparations to survivors in Cameroon. That overlapped with and supported broader southern Cameroon separatists’ continued accusations that the Cameroonian state was conducting an ongoing genocide against the people of their region. In 2015, after years of denial by French officials, French president Francois Hollande visited Cameroon and publically acknowledged his country’s role in “tragic events” there during the late 1950s and early 1960s but stopped short of making an apology or describing the campaign as genocidal.4
During the 1950s, the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, called Mau Mau by the British, fought an insurgency against British colonial rule in Kenya. The rebellion mostly involved the Kikuyu people of the White Highlands near Nairobi who, compared to other indigenous groups in Kenya, had been disproportionally affected by white settlement. Imposing a state of emergency between 1952 and 1960, the British government dispatched large military forces to Kenya, mobilized a loyalist Kikuyu Home Guard, detained and tortured thousands of suspected insurgents, and forcibly resettled 1 million Kikuyu into 800 “protected villages” surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers. While the British employed overwhelming military force to crush the Mau Mau movement, the changing international context led to the granting of independence and majority rule to Kenya in 1963. Although a massive literature developed on aspects of the Mau Mau war, the term “genocide” was not applied to the British counterinsurgency campaign until the 2000s. Several factors may have contributed to this lack of genocide narrative, including the marginalization of Mau Mau insurgent veterans in the first few decades of Kenya’s postcolonial history, the lack of a secessionist movement among the Kikuyu, who represent one of Kenya’s largest and most prominent ethnic communities, and the propagation of a myth that such post–Second War British counterinsurgency campaigns as took place in Kenya and Malaya had been conducted with minimal force. The British security forces suffered 600 dead and claimed to have killed 10,500 Mau Mau. That view changed in the mid-2000s, when historian Caroline Elkins estimated the total number of deaths during the Mau Mau conflict at between 130,000 and 300,000, which she presented as a British-perpetrated genocide against the Kikuyu. Elkins’s fatality count was challenged by demographer John Blacker, who put the figure at around 50,000, half of whom were children, and other scholars such as David Anderson and Huw Bennett, who acknowledged the shocking violence of the campaign but maintain that there was no evidence that British officials had intended to exterminate all or part of the Kikuyu. Indeed, the British military in Kenya possessed the means to kill even more Kikuyu than it did and often rejected white settlers’ demands for more severe action. Around the same time that this academic debate unfolded in the 2000s, political change in Kenya led to greater official recognition for elderly Mau Mau veterans and survivors of the detention camps, and some Kenyans took the British government to court in pursuit of damages. In 2011 a British court ruled that some 12,000 Kenyan claimants had the right to make legal claims against the British government, which, two years later, agreed to pay them compensation. That led to another legal case against the British government by 40,000 Kenyans. While those legal claims did not include formal accusations of genocide, the debate over the appropriateness of the term certainly heightened international awareness of British atrocities committed in Kenya during the 1950s. The idea that the British army had liberated concentration camps in 1940s Germany only to build their own in 1950s Kenya seemed extremely contradictory5
The rhetoric of genocide worsened the violence that followed Kenya’s 2007 elections, which involved politicized ethnic mobs of Kikuyu, Luo, and Kalenjin killing members of each other’s ethnic groups and destroying property. Kenyan political leaders, aware of international guilt over the failure to intervene in Rwanda during 1994 and the newly instituted UN doctrine of “responsibility to protect,” attempted to garner Western sympathy and mobilize their followers by accusing each other of genocide and ethnic cleansing. For example, members of President Mwai Kibaki’s ruling and mostly Kikuyu Party of National Unity (PNU) spread rumors that Raila Odinga’s Orange Democratic Movement (ODM), a predominantly Luo party, was in league with former colonial power Britain, which wanted to reverse the recent rehabilitation of Mau Mau veterans, in a conspiracy to conduct genocide against the Kikuyu so as to permanently reduce their population by 1 million and therefore cancel their advantage in electoral politics. As such, many Kikuyu greatly feared becoming genocide victims if the ODM came to power.6 The international media also played a role in fueling the violence as its broadcasts were “stuck in the pornography of mayhem and genocide long after the national media had shifted to more balanced reporting.”7 In 2008 the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights investigated the specific accusation of genocide and found unequivocally that it had not occurred during the disturbances, as there had been no intent to destroy ethnic communities. It did, however, conclude that ethnic cleansing had taken place, in that people from certain ethnic groups had been evicted from specific areas. Although Kenyan politicians reached a settlement and formed a new government, the ICC demanded justice, though this did not involve genocide charges. In 2011 the ICC indicted Kenyan cabinet minister Uhuru Kenyatta, son of the country’s first president, who had been jailed by the British during Mau Mau for crimes against humanity, in that he allegedly directed and funded armed Kikuyu groups that massacred Kenyans from other communities. In 2014 Kenyatta became the first serving head of state (he was elected president the previous year) to appear before the ICC, which later withdrew its charges given lack of evidence; ICC lawyers claimed the evidence was withheld by the Kenyan government. Similar charges were also dropped against other Kenyan politicians, including Deputy President William Ruto, who had entered into a political alliance with Kenyatta in 2013 and who had allegedly directed ethnic Kalenjin mobs against Kikuyu victims during the violence of 2007–2008. Given the continued ethnic orientation of Kenya’s political parties, some observers warn of the dangers of genocide during the country’s next election. The ICC indictment of Kenyan leaders contributed to further complaints that the international judicial body was a racist and hypocritical Western institution that was only interested in pursuing Africans.8
Ethiopia has a long history of regional secessionist insurgencies. The independence of the neighboring Republic of Somalia, a combination of the former British Somaliland and Italian Somaliland, in 1960 provided the context for ethnic Somali separatist movements in Ethiopia’s Ogaden region, including the Ogaden Liberation Front (OLF), which was formed in 1963 and crushed by Ethiopian forces the following year, and the Western Somali Liberation Front (WSLF), which was launched at the end of the 1960s and fought a guerrilla war until the end of the 1980s. In the early 1950s, the United Nations federated Eritrea, a former Italian colony on the Red Sea coast that had been occupied by the British during the Second World War, to neighboring Ethiopia. Consequently, at the start of the 1960s, the Eritrea Liberation Front (ELF), supported by Muslim Arab countries in the Middle East, initiated a guerrilla struggle against Ethiopian occupation forces, which responded with a brutal counterinsurgency campaign that alienated most Eritreans. In 1973 Christian and secular elements within the ELF broke away to form the revolutionary socialist Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF), which began to fight a conventional war to expel the Ethiopian military.
In 1974 the pro-Western Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie was overthrown by a military coup that eventually brought a Soviet-backed military regime called the Derg, led by Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam, to power. In 1977 the Mengistu regime launched the Red Terror campaign, which involved the detention, torture, and murder of political opponents such as intellectuals and university students, with estimates of the death toll ranging from 30,000 to 100,000 and much higher. Although Mengistu’s Ethiopia, with the help of Soviet weapons and Cuban troops, repelled a Somali invasion during the Ogaden War of 1977–1978, the brutal military regime stimulated further regional secessionism. From 1978 to 1983, the Mengistu regime launched at least seven separate offensives against Eritrean independence fighters that pushed them into Eritrea’s mountainous north, destroyed the ELF, and resulted in the death of around 30,000 Eritreans and 50,000 Ethiopians. The most ambitious government offensive in Eritrea was the Red Star campaign, which began in 1982 and involved almost 180,000 Ethiopian troops, mostly conscripts, but completed failed to dislodge the EPLF, which ultimately counterattacked to regain lost territory. During the late 1970s, rebellion broke out in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray Province, where, by the early 1980s, feuding rebel groups had combined into the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), which fought a guerrilla war for the self-determination of all Ethiopia’s peoples. In Tigray, the Mengistu regime alienated civilians by imposing unpopular land reform, forcibly resettling peasants away from insurgent areas, terrorizing urban elites, and persecuting the Ethiopian Church. While Mengistu’s counterinsurgency program in Tigray involved destroying crops and depriving people of international food aid, which created a catastrophic famine in the early 1980s, the TPLF gained international legitimacy by coordinating humanitarian assistance from Sudan. Around the same time, the EPLF and TPLF formed a sometimes shaky anti-Mengistu alliance.
The reduction in hitherto massive Soviet military assistance in the late 1980s fatally weakened the Ethiopian state. In December 1986, the EPLF embarked on an offensive in Eritrea that ultimately led to their decisive victory at the Battle of Afabet in March 1988. Subsequently, the TPLF broke the existing military stalemate in Tigray by embarking on its own offensive. The TPLF offensive prompted a massive August 1988 counterattack from the Mengistu regime, which recaptured Tigrayan towns and massacred civilians. In early 1989, EPLF forces advanced into Tigray and helped the TPLF, which was transforming into a conventional military, to expel Ethiopian state forces from the province. Shortly thereafter, the Soviet Union halted military aid to Ethiopia, and the TPLF and other rebel groups such as the Oromo People’s Democratic Organization (OPDO), which consisted mostly of captured government troops, formed a broad anti-Mengistu coalition known as the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). During the first half of 1991, the EPRDF and EPLF drove Mengistu’s forces out of the provinces of Gondar, Gojjam, and Wollo, and the EPLF continued to gain control of Eritrea. In May 1991, Mengistu fled to Zimbabwe, and, later in the month, the EPLF took Asmara, capital of Eritrea, and EPRDF and EPLF forces captured the national capital of Addis Ababa. The EPRDF and Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) formed a transitional government under TPLF chairman Meles Zenawi, who, under a new constitution that created a multiparty democracy, was elected prime minister in 1995 and 2005. The OLF quickly withdrew from the government and resumed its regional insurgency, while the Zenawi administration was criticized for increasing authoritarianism. In Eritrea, where the EPLF formed a provisional government in May 1991, a UN-supervised referendum was held in April 1993 that resulted almost immediately in independence. The EPLF renamed itself the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) and quickly imposed a single-party state under former rebel leader Isaias Afewerki.9
In 1992 the Ethiopian transitional government established a special prosecutor’s office to address serious crimes committed by the ousted Mengistu regime. The Zimbabwean government of Robert Mugabe refused demands to return Mengistu to Ethiopia, citing the lack of an extradition agreement between the two countries and the former ruler’s contribution to Zimbabwe’s struggle for majority rule and independence during the late 1970s. From 1994 to 2006, officials of the former Ethiopian government were put on trial, and 55 of them were convicted of genocide and crimes against humanity. Of those convicted, 25 had been tried in absentia, including Mengistu, who was initially sentenced to life imprisonment but on appeal was changed to death. Central to those convictions was the fact that Ethiopia, in 1957, became one of the few countries to extend its legal definition of genocide beyond the international norm to include the extermination of political groups and to add “population transfer or dispersion” to the list of illegal genocidal methods. At the beginning of the Mengistu trial, the court addressed the difference between international and domestic law by deciding that the international definition of genocide provided a minimal level of protection, which Ethiopia, as a sovereign state, was free to expand. In a dissenting opinion, one of the three judges maintained that Mengistu was guilty of homicide and not genocide, as his regime had repealed the part of Ethiopia’s genocide law that afforded political groups protection through its decrees in the late 1970s.10 If the international legal definition of genocide had been applied in this case, then Mengistu would likely never have been convicted: the charges focused on the death of some 2,000 political opponents (real or imagined) during the Red Terror of 1977–1978, which did not target national, ethnic, racial, or religious groups.
Ironically, at the same time that Mengistu and others were convicted of genocide, Ethiopia’s Zenawi administration was itself accused of conducting genocide against the Anuak people of Gambella Province in the western part of the country. The marginalized Anuak had long been victimized by successive regimes in Addis Ababa. In the 1980s, violence broke out in Gambella between Anuak communities and people from other parts of Ethiopia, called highlanders, who had been moved there by the Mengistu regime and between Anuak people and ethnic Nuer, many of whom had moved into Ethiopian from adjacent southern Sudan to escape civil war. Indeed, in the mid-1980s, the U.S.-based indigenous rights organization Cultural Survival accused the Mengistu regime of committing genocide against the Anuak. In 1985 the predominantly Anuak Gambella People’s Liberation Movement (GPLM) began a guerrilla war against the Mengistu state and eventually joined the anti-Mengistu coalition that overthrew the dictatorship in 1991. However, in December 2003, the Ethiopian military and state-sponsored militias began a series of massacres of Anuak communities that eventually claimed several thousand lives. This was prompted by continued violence between Anuak, highlanders, and Nuer and discoveries of gold and oil in Gambella. In 2005 members of the Anuak diaspora in North America formed the Anuak Justice Council (AJC) to pursue nonviolent solutions to the problems of the Anuak people, which involved presenting complaints against the Ethiopian government to the UN, the ICC, and various Western governments such as the United States and Canada. Tragically, the outbreak of civil war in newly independent South Sudan in 2013 resulted in many South Sudanese Nuer fleeing across the border into Gambella, where they were allegedly armed by the Ethiopian military and encouraged to attack Anuak people in early 2016. The GPLM called this a “Second Genocide of the Anuak.”11
In recent years, there have been other accusations against the Ethiopian state, dominated by Tigrayans from the north, for perpetrating genocide against marginalized ethnic groups. In 2015 a protest movement among the Oromo emerged to challenge their historic discrimination that has occurred despite the fact that they represent the country’s largest ethnic community. Given the violent government response, there is now talk of an “Oromo genocide.” Some claim that Western governments have been hesitant to criticise genocide allegedly carried out by the Ethiopian state given its support for the U.S. “Global War on Terror” and, in particular, military operations against Islamist extremists in Somalia.12
In 1965 the white minority government of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), led by Prime Minister Ian Smith, unilaterally declared independence from Britain to avoid engaging in political reforms that would grant equal rights to the black majority. Consequently, the African nationalists of the Zimbabwe liberation movement embarked on an armed struggle in pursuit of majority rule and independence. However, in 1964 a disagreement over strategy resulted in the division of the exiled movement, with Joshua Nkomo leading the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) and Ndabaningi Sithole leading the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU). Those groups developed military wings, with ZAPU forming the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA), and ZANU forming the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army (ZANLA). By the 1970s, those organizations had developed differing ethnic orientations, revolutionary ideologies, and external alliances. Based in Zambia, ZAPU-ZIPRA derived its support from the Ndebele minority of Rhodesia’s southwestern Matabeleland region and, given its Soviet support, adopted a Leninist strategy that favored forming a conventional army that would invade Rhodesia and seize power at a key moment that would never take place. Based in Mozambique, ZANU-ZANLA recruited mostly from Rhodesia’s Shona majority in the eastern half of the country, and Chinese sponsorship meant that they focused on peasant mobilization and guerrilla warfare. Several OAU-backed attempts to unify the Zimbabwe liberation movement failed. At the end of the 1970s, with Rhodesian forces unable to control the countryside and the end of the war in sight, ZIPRA and ZANLA insurgents fought over the country’s southwestern region. In 1979 the British-sponsored Lancaster House Talks produced an agreement that ended the war and resulted in universal suffrage and independence for Zimbabwe the following year. Under this agreement, insurgents would report to assembly areas for either demobilization or incorporation into a new Zimbabwean security force structure that would also include former Rhodesian state forces. An election resulted in ZANU-PF (ZANU-Patriotic Front) forming the first independent government under Prime Minister Robert Mugabe in April 1980. Still led by Joshua Nkomo, ZAPU became an opposition party.13
Problems related to the integration of the new Zimbabwe Defense Force (ZDF) led to violence in the early 1980s. In 1981 ZIPRA veterans at Entumbane in Bulawayo rebelled over delays in the integration process, poor living conditions in their camp, and favoritism toward former ZANLA fighters affiliated with the ZANU-PF administration. There were also disturbing rumors that former ZIPRA insurgents were disappearing once they were integrated into the ZDF. The mutiny was crushed by former Rhodesian police and military units. With the discovery of arms caches in southwestern Matabeleland in early 1982, ZAPU-ZIPRA leaders were arrested and charged with treason or fled the country. Some ZIPRA veterans deserted the ZDF or their integration camps and took to the bush as dissidents who targeted state officials. Attempts by apartheid South Africa to destabilize independent Zimbabwe produced paranoia within Mugabe’s fledgling government. In 1982 South African agents blew up aircraft at a Zimbabwean Air Force base in Gweru, and South Africa attempted to form a counterrevolutionary group called Super-ZAPU in Matabeleland that failed to attract much support. In addition, Zimbabwean troops were becoming involved in fighting the South African–backed Mozambique National Resistance (RENAMO) that was destabilizing Mozambique. As such, the Mugabe administration overreacted to events in Matabeleland by dispatching a special ZDF unit called 5 Brigade to suppress a relatively small number of dissidents. Trained by a detachment of North Korean instructors, the 3,500-strong 5 Brigade was composed almost entirely of former ZANLA fighters who were Shona people from eastern Zimbabwe. Commanded by Colonel Perence Shiri, 5 Brigade’s motto was the Shona phrase “Gukurahundi,” meaning “the rain that washes away the rubbish,” and it was likely that the rural Ndebele people came to think this referred to them. Between 1983 and 1987, 5 Brigade imposed a reign of terror on rural Matabeleland and parts of Midlands Province. Local Ndebele and Kalanga people were forced to participate in all-night “pungwes,” in which they sung Shona songs praising ZANU-PF, their crops and houses were destroyed, they were subjected to curfew and collective punishment, and they became victims of public beatings and summary executions. Corpses were disposed of in mass graves or thrown down abandoned mine shafts. It has been estimated that some 20,000 people were killed. In April 1984, Catholic priest John Gough gave a sermon in Harare that accused the Zimbabwe state of conducting genocide in Matabeleland, which government officials strongly denied. The violence ended with the December 1987 Unity Accord, in which ZAPU leaders such as Nkomo agreed to the absorption of their organization into ZANU-PF, and they were rewarded with senior government positions under Mugabe, who became an executive president. In 1988 Mugabe granted amnesty to dissidents—the actual number of whom appears to have been just over 120—and security force members for crimes committed during the period of violence in the 1980s that Zimbabweans have come to call “Gukurahundi.” As a result, there were no official investigations of the violence, and no one was ever charged with any crime related to this episode. While foreign governments knew about the massacres in Matabeleland, including the British, who were selling arms to Zimbabwe at the time, those events were not widely reported in international media. In fact, the media generally portrayed Mugabe in a positive light, given his policy of reconciliation with the white minority.
In 1997 the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe, a human rights organization that had been critical of the Smith regime during the 1970s, published the results of an intensive investigation into the violence in Matabeleland and the Midlands during the 1980s. While the report did “not seek to apportion blame” and sought only to “break the silence surrounding this phase of the nation’s history,” it revealed that at least 3,000 people (and perhaps double that number or more) had been killed, 7,000 people tortured, and at least 680 homes destroyed. The report did not label those events as genocide.14 At the funeral of Vice President Nkomo in 1999, Mugabe broke his usual silence over the Gukurahundi massacres by regretfully calling it a “moment of madness.” Rumors circulated that one reason the elderly Mugabe refused to relinquish power was that doing so would make him and his supporters vulnerable to possible international indictments related to mass violence in the 1980s. Accusations that the Mugabe regime conducted genocide against the Ndebele in the 1980s gained momentum at the start of the 2000s with the emergence of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), Zimbabwe’s first serious political opposition party, and the state-sanctioned occupation of white-owned commercial farms, which crippled the economy and created the worst hyperinflation in recorded history. MDC leaders such as Morgan Tsvangirai and Tendai Biti repeatedly referred to the Gukurahundi massacres as genocide, and the opposition media frequently compared Mugabe to Hitler. Of course, in making those statements, MDC politicians were rallying support within their electoral stronghold of Matabeleland, where bitter memories of Gukurahundi remained strong. Some Ndebele extremists began to talk of the possible secession of Matabeleland from Zimbabwe as a reaction to the attempted extermination of the region’s inhabitants. As Mugabe became an international pariah—around the same time as a rise in international awareness of what had happened in Rwanda a decade before—accusations that he and his regime had committed genocide were taken up outside Zimbabwe. In 2003 and 2004, some Canadian members of parliament and a legal team that included an exiled Zimbabwean lawyer requested that Canada’s minister of justice employ relatively new legislation to indict Mugabe for genocide, though that did not happen. In 2010 Genocide Watch, an American-based group dedicated to preventing genocide, urged the prosecution of Mugabe for genocide related to events in the 1980s and recommended that since the ICC could not address the issue because it had happened before the court’s founding, a special UN-Zimbabwean tribunal could be established, modeled on one in Cambodia that prosecuted members of the former Khmer Rouge regime. Obviously, any potential prosecution of Mugabe for genocide during the 1980s—which is highly unlikely to ever happen—would struggle with the argument that the excessive violence of 5 Brigade was aimed at suppressing ZAPU dissidents as a political group and did not specifically target the Ndebele people on the basis on their ethnicity. Going beyond Gukurahundi, some have suggested that the economic collapse and subsequent sharp decline in living standards caused by Mugabe’s bungled land grab of the 2000s as well as his regime’s political oppression should be considered genocide against all Zimbabweans.15
In precolonial times, the nomadic Tuareg people of Sahelian West Africa used their camels to ferry trade goods north and south across the Sahara desert. They often resisted control by the region’s powerful empires, such as Mali and Songhai. Although French colonial rulers suppressed a number of Tuareg rebellions during the late 19th and early 20th century, they ultimately encouraged and racialized the historic feeling of superiority of the light-skinned Tuaregs over black people who lived further south and whom the Tuareg had enslaved in the past. Upon decolonization in the early 1960s, the Tuareg population of the Sahel and Sahara was split between the new states of Niger, Mali, and Algeria, with small groups also living in Burkina Faso, Libya, and Nigeria. They had never been consulted on this division. In Mali and Niger, the Tuaregs became an impoverished and marginalized minority living in the remote north with little influence in governments based in the relatively more developed south and dominated by the larger southern black population. In 1962 small and poorly armed groups of Tuaregs in northern Mali launched a rebellion with the aim of establishing their own state, to be called Azawad in parts of Mali, Niger, and Algeria. The Soviet-backed Malian government of Modibo Keita crushed the insurgency over the next two years but subjected the Tuareg population to such extreme brutality that many fled to neighboring countries and began to think seriously about secession. In 1968, given economic problems, a military coup replaced Keita with Moussa Traore, who turned Mali toward the West.
A major drought in the 1970s and early 1980s devastated Tuareg communities in Mali and Niger and encouraged many Tuareg men to move north to Libya to work in the oil industry or enlist in Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi’s Islamic Legion, which fought in Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and other parts of Africa. At the end of the 1980s, given the conclusion of the war in Afghanistan and the disbanding of Gaddafi’s legion, many radicalized and militarily experienced Tuareg men returned to Mali and Niger. As a result, Tuareg rebellions broke out in both Mali and Niger in 1990. While Mali’s Traore regime initially embarked on another brutal counterinsurgency campaign, the lack of an external sponsor meant that those operations could not be sustained while the rebels were armed and given sanctuary by Libya. This compelled Traore to negotiate with the rebels, and, in the Algerian-mediated Tamanrasset Accords of January 1991, they agreed to a cease-fire and prisoner exchange, withdrawal of combatants from certain areas, the integration of insurgents into the state military, and the creation of semiautonomous regions in the north. Although the corrupt and oppressive Traore was overthrown by yet another coup in March 1991, some Tuareg rebels who had rejected the accords joined the peace process, which continued. However, violence in northern Mali continued into the mid-1990s as non-Tuareg communities formed an armed group called the Malian Patriotic Movement, also known as Ganda Koi, which attacked Tuaregs. In Niger, the Tuareg rebellion was ended by the April 1995 Ouagadougou Accords, in which the government promised to absorb the rebels into the military and assist others in returning to civilian life.
Delays in implementing the peace agreements led to another series of Tuareg rebellions in the 2000s. Supported by Algeria, Tuareg rebels in Mali attacked towns in 2006 but then quickly entered into another agreement with the government to continue the military integration and to launch development projects in the north. In Niger, Tuareg militias formed the Nigeriens’ Movement for Justice (MNJ), which demanded a greater share of the area’s uranium mining and better representation in the government and military. In February 2007, the MNJ attacked military posts and mining facilities and kidnapped foreign nuclear engineers. In August, the Nigerien government of Mamadou Tandja declared a state of emergency in the Agadez Region, which limited press freedom and personal liberties and restricted access by international humanitarian organizations. Fear of state-sponsored genocide spread throughout Tuareg communities in northern Niger. International human rights activists denounced Niger’s military—trained by the United States in the context of its post-2001 Global War on Terror—for committing atrocities. There were reports that black Nigerien troops were separating civilians based on their skin color and killing those with light skin. In March 2008, British anthropologist and Tuareg advocate Jeremy Keenan, on behalf of Tuareg communities that had been attacked by the Nigerien military, sent a letter to Jan Egeland, special advisor on conflict to the UN secretary-general, reporting that the policy of President Tandja and the Nigerien military constituted genocide under the 1948 convention. He did not receive a response. In June 2008 Niger’s military launched a ground and air offensive against MNJ positions in the Air Mountains that led to intense fighting and accusations of ethnic cleansing against the state. Inspired by events in Niger, Tuareg rebels renewed their struggle in northern Mali in 2007 and besieged the town of Tinzaouaten on the Algerian border, where they fired on an American transport aircraft delivering supplies to the Malian army. In early 2009, a Malian government offensive pushed some Tuareg rebels into Algeria while convincing others to accept the previous year’s peace offer by moving into assembly areas and awaiting integration into state forces. Although prospects for peace looked bleak in Niger, the Malian settlement along with new lucrative mining contracts and diplomatic pressure brought about by the kidnapping of two Canadians and four Europeans led to a negotiated cease-fire in June 2009.
The 2011 collapse of Gaddafi’s regime in Libya meant that many Tuareg members of the Libyan military returned home to northern Mali with heavy weapons. Late that year, they formed the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA), which attracted veterans of the 1990–1995 and 2006–2008 rebellions, as well as disgruntled Fula and Arabs, and deserters from state forces. From January to March 2012, the MNLA captured all major towns in the north as the Malian military, despite resupply by American air drops, was compelled to retreat. Simultaneously, Ansar Dine (Defenders of the Faith), an Islamist group seeking to establish sharia law in the region, took control of northeast Mali. In the capital of Bamako, news of rebel victories in the north incited revenge attacks on Tuaregs, and popular anger toward the administration of Amadou Toumani Toure led to a military coup in March and the formation of a new civilian government that promised to continue the war against the rebels. In early April, MNLA declared the independence of Azawad, though no other country recognized it. Widespread international condemnation occurred when Islamists from the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MOJWA), which clashed with the secular MNLA, captured the famous historic center of Timbuktu, where they vandalized tombs and shrines, which they considered heretical. Intervention by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the UN was delayed, and it appeared that Bamako would fall to the advancing northern rebels. In turn, in January 2013, France, responding to a plea from the Malian government, launched Operation Serval, in which French military units were flown to Mali with the assistance of the United States and Britain. French air power based in Chad devastated rebel forces operating in the open terrain, and that allowed mechanized French forces to quickly recapture northern towns, including Timbuktu, where they were cheered by crowds who were tired of living under sharia law. Revenge attacks on Tuaregs and Arabs, and sometimes on anyone with light skin, by Malian soldiers and civilians prompted concerns over a possible genocide in northern Mali. In February, the UN special advisor on the prevention of genocide, Adama Dieng, issued a warning about the danger of reprisals and urged the Malian military to protect all Malian citizens. Continued insurgency and counterinsurgency in northern Mali, where UN peacekeepers and French troops remain, have not allayed those concerns. Many Tuaregs have now left Mali and Niger for North Africa. Genocide-prevention activist Web sites routinely list the Tuareg minority of Mali and Niger as in danger of extermination, while Tuareg rights activists claim that the Tuareg have been the target of genocidal polices from French colonial times until today. There are also claims that French nuclear tests in the Sahel during the 1960s and more recently the environmental effects of uranium mining, which caused cancer and birth defects, contributed to this process.16 With a more optimistic view, Scott Strauss attributes the Malian political traditions of democracy, pluralism, and national unity with discouraging leaders from engaging in mass violence against Tuareg civilians during those periodic rebellions. Unfortunately, he says little about Niger.17
Granted independence from France in 1960, the Central African Republic (CAR) was initially dominated by leaders from the southern riverine region, whereas communities in the northern savannah, including a Muslim minority in the northeast, were marginalized. From 1965 to 1979, the CAR was ruled by megalomaniacal military dictator Jean Bedel Bokassa. After the oppressive Bokassa had himself crowned emperor in 1977 and began warming to Gaddafi, he was overthrown by the French military, which restored the country’s original president, David Dacko, to power. In 1981, following a disputed election, General Andre Kolingba formed a military regime backed by France that used the CAR as a staging area for military operations across Francophone Africa during the 1980s and 1990s. By the early 1990s, Kolingba had manipulated the composition of the CAR military so that 70 percent of it was composed of soldiers from his own southern Yakoma ethnic group, which constituted only 5 percent of the population. The military became politicized and ethnicized. Given post–Cold War political reforms that France pressured Kolingba to enact, Ange-Felix Patasse was elected in 1993 and became the CAR’s first head of state from the northern region. In turn, Patasse replaced Yakoma members of the military with people from his own northern Sara-Kaba ethnic group. In the late 1990s, the politicized military was riven by a series of violent antigovernment mutinies that were suppressed by French troops. Patasse expanded his presidential guard and recruited militias from the north. In 1998 French forces in the CAR were absorbed into the UN Mission for the Central African Republic (MINURCA), which provided security for elections that Patasse won the next year. Following the withdrawal of MINURCA in 2000, the CAR was rocked by general strikes and attempted coups.
The Second Congo War of 1998–2002 strongly influenced events in the neighboring CAR. In 2002 exiled general Francois Bozize launched an armed insurgency in the CAR, backed by Chad and the Kabila regime in the DRC. Patasse’s brutal counterinsurgency campaign was supported by Gaddafi’s Libya and rebels from the DRC led by Jean-Pierre Bemba, who were implicated in massive human rights abuses. In March 2003, Bozize’s mostly Chadian force seized the capital of Bangui, and Bozize declared himself president. Abandoned by the French, Patasse fled the country. When Bozize won elections in 2005, rebellions broke out in the north, including among supporters of the ousted Patasse. The state military responded with extreme violence toward the northern population. With French military intervention on behalf of Bozize’s government, a number of northern rebel groups signed a peace agreement in 2008 and began a long and troubled demobilization process. The UN again briefly deployed peacekeepers from 2008 to 2010, and, in January 2011, Bozize won elections that gave him a second presidential term.
In December 2012, an alliance of northern rebel groups that eventually called itself Seleka (union), frustrated with Bozize’s failure to implement previous agreements, abruptly seized most northern towns, including the diamond-mining center of Bria, and advanced on Bangui. With France and the United States ignoring Bozize’s calls for assistance, the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) dispatched a multinational force that halted the rebels just 70 kilometers from the capital. In March 2013, a cease-fire broke down, and the rebels again took the offensive, seizing Bangui. Bozize fled the country, and rebel leader Michel Djotodia declared himself president and became the first Muslim to hold the position. Forces loyal to Bozize continued to resist Seleka, and southern Christian civilians formed the anti-balaka (a reference to a traditional protection charm) militia and embarked on massacres of the CAR’s Muslim minority, who began to flee the country. Mosques were destroyed, and many Muslims were forced to convert to Christianity. At the end of 2013, the UN warned that the CAR was at risk of “spiraling into genocide,” and the French foreign minister declared that it was “on the verge of genocide.” Such concerns, widely reported in international media, prompted the UN to authorize the deployment of the International Support Mission to the CAR (MISCA), which would be made up mostly of troops from African countries, supplemented by French forces. The next year, MISCA was absorbed into the UN Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in the Central African Republic (MINUSCA), which was specifically tasked to protect civilians. Furthermore, in January 2014 Djotodia resigned and was replaced by the nonpartisan Catherine Samba-Panza, formerly mayor of Bangui. Those developments reduced but did not completely end the violence. While at least 6,000 people were killed, around 800,000 were displaced, including 400,000 who became cross-border refugees, most of whom were Muslims. Some towns were completely cleared of Muslim inhabitants. Seleka rebel leaders began to call for the permanent partition of the CAR into a Muslim north and a Christian south.
Charged with investigating the previous two years of violence in the CAR, a UN commission reported in January 2015 that, while both sides had carried out terrible human rights violations and that the anti-balaka militia had committed crimes against humanity by ethnically cleansing Muslims from many areas, there was no indication that genocide had taken place. That led to the transitional government’s creation of a special court composed of international judges reporting to the ICC that would conduct trials related to those atrocities. In July 2014, negotiations held in Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, produced a shaky cease-fire, and, in May the next year, perhaps buoyed by the result of the UN report that took the genocide issue off the table, a conference in Bangui produced a peace pact accepted by most rebel groups. In February 2016, Faustin-Archange Touadera, an academic and previous prime minster under the Bozize regime, became president through a mostly peaceful election. A new government was formed and continued the uncertain peace process.18 In this case, the international warnings of genocide may have prompted the deployment of an intervention force that reduced the violence while the withdrawal of such rhetoric then opened space for local negotiations.
Since the 1990s, a view has developed that southern Africa’s hunter-gatherer San societies, particularly those in what is now the Cape region of South Africa where such communities virtually disappeared, had fallen victim to a long history of genocide by European settlers. This view was informed by earlier and similar claims made about settler colonialism and indigenous people in North America and Australia and political change in modern South Africa that raised the possibility of compensation for past human rights abuses. As explained by scholars like Mohamed Adhikari, throughout the 1700s, the expanding Dutch settlers of the Cape Colony conducted repeated armed extermination campaigns against the area’s Khoi herders and San hunter-gatherers. In 1777 the Dutch East India Company that administered the colony adopted an official policy of extermination of the San. Armed settler groups known as commandos killed San men on sight, enslaved San women and children, and drove San people from water sources. While the British occupation of the Cape Colony at the start of the 19th century saw the official colonial policy toward the San shift to cultural assimilation within the broader and subordinate Cape Coloured (or mixed race) society, armed settlers in the region continued to hunt and kill San up until the 1890s. Large agricultural African groups also despised and exploited the San and furthered their extermination. Consequently, most surviving San people were forced into the inhospitable Kalahari Desert within the region’s interior. By the early 21st century, the total number of San people in southern Africa, a region with a population of many millions, was barely 100,000, with only 7,500 in South Africa and 52,000 in Botswana. While some critics argue that this process took place over much too long a period to be considered genocide, there is little doubt that various colonial regimes and societies in southern Africa intended to eliminate the San whether through killing or acculturation.19
Accusations of contemporary genocide against the San became highly controversial in post–Cold War Botswana. In the 1990s, Basarwa, the local name for San or Bushmen hunter-gatherers, from Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR) formed an association called First People of the Kalahari (FPK) that sought to address their historic marginalization and recover land from which the government had recently evicted them. They were assisted by a UK-based global indigenous-rights advocacy group called Survival International that provided funding, legal expertise, and international media exposure. Basarwa activists and their supporters claimed that the Botswana government—dominated by the majority Tswana ethnic group, who had long victimized the Basarwa—had pushed the Basarwa off their land to make way for industrial diamond mining. With a paternalist approach, the government responded that the resettlement had been undertaken to preserve wildlife hunted by the Basarwa and to provide better basic services such as education to the Basarwa community. Basarwa activists and their international allies, including such high-profile personalities as Gloria Steinem, who protested that Botswana’s diamonds were really blood diamonds—akin to those smuggled out of conflict zones such as Sierra Leone or the DRC—that should be boycotted by ethnical Western buyers, and that the eviction of the Basarwa from CKGR represented the latest step in a government-perpetrated genocide against them. Those accusations were particularly galling to the Botswana government because they seemed to jeopardize the country’s economic success, which was built on diamond exports and its reputation as one of Africa’s most peaceful and stable states. In 2006 the FPK won an historic court case in Botswana and were allowed to return to their land, though the state refused to provide them with such infrastructure as running water. For anthropologist Jacqueline Solway, the genocide allegation was irresponsible as it endangered the livelihood of all Botswana’s people and served to further alienate Basarwa from their fellow Botswana citizens and “is not only absurd, but makes a mockery of events such as the 1994 Rwanda genocide.”20