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Global courts, media tragedy for Africa
AFRICAN FOCUS By Tafataona P. Mahoso The betrayal last week of former Liberian President Charles Taylor by Nigerian President Olusegun Oba-sanjo has helped to make clear many issues which were hitherto rather confusing and confused. In 2005 President Olusegun Obasanjo appeared to be a genuine peacebroker and Pan-Africanist when he joined the US in pressuring President Charles Taylor to resign in exchange for an end to civil war in Liberia and asylum for Mr Taylor and his family in Nigeria. A year later, President Obasanjo has reneged on the asylum idea at the instigation of the same United States, which has installed former World Bank officer Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf as President of Liberia and Taylor’s replacement. The US has now proceeded to use Johnson-Sirleaf as its messenger from Washington to Abuja to demand Taylor’s head. All of this treachery is being done in the name of protecting "human rights". But this treachery helps to clarify several issues, including: l First, that the President of Nigeria has become a full partner of imperialism in helping to balkanise West Africa. l Second, that one of the reasons why President Obasanjo opposed the African Union’s demands for veto power in the Security Council was because he would rather have the white apartheid vetoes of the North Americans and the British controlling West Africa than have the African Union itself directing how the United Nations and the Security Council should operate there. l Third, that Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf herself is not the first "iron lady" of Africa she has been greeted as but another Condoleezza Rice or Jendayi Fraser transplanted back from North America to Africa by imperialism. l Fourth, that the continuing refusal by the United States to accede to the treaty setting up a proper International Criminal Court with universal jurisdiction over all war crimes is directly linked to US preference for "separate but equal" Bantustan courts, such as the one which is going to try Charles Taylor for alleged war crimes in Liberia and Sierra Leone but will never be allowed to try the 67 North Atlantic presidents, prime-ministers and commanders responsible for illegal wars and war crimes in former Yugoslavia and in Iraq and Afghanistan now. l And, fifth, that the role of global apartheid media in a situation such as the one obtaining in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Cote D’voire now is one of stigmatising, demonising and isolating Africans and other peoples of the South as people who do not belong to the so-called "international community". While the role of President Obasanjo in keeping Africans weak and divided became clearest when he opposed demands for veto power for the African Union last year, there were many indications before that which raised doubts about the Nigerian leader’s intentions. He was instrumental in 2002 in helping Europe, the US and Israel to remove from the agenda of the UN Conference Against Racism the item on reparations. At the same time he became very active in helping British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Australian Prime Minister John Howard in their campaign to demonise and isolate Zimbabwe. As we write, there are unrepentant white racist farmers who have been paid by the British government to settle in Nigeria’s Kwara State as a way of demonstrating Britain’s and President Obasanjo’s opposition to Zimbabwe’s African land reclamation movement. Even more, President Obasanjo’s relations with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) reflected the Anglo-American rather than the Pan-African agenda on Zimbabwe. Now a strong demand for African veto power within the Security Council means that the African Union wants to determine and control the conduct of all UN agencies and foreign powers on African soil. This is what President Obasanjo discourages and, in the current scenario in West Africa, he has reneged on a promise of asylum and allowed a former African head of state to be kidnapped at the expense of the peace and unity of the peoples of Sierra Leone and Liberia. The demand for Charles Taylor’s head was made to the new Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf when she went to the US, where she was given the rare privilege of addressing a joint session of the entire US Congress. She faithfully delivered the demand to President Obasanjo back in Nigeria and he in turn allowed Charles Taylor to be kidnapped. But the world was told that Taylor was captured on the border while trying to run away! Kidnapping was chosen as the best method so that there would be no negotiations and no question of allowing other African countries to offer asylum to Mr Taylor in the interest of saving the peace agreement on Liberia. As chairman of the African Union, Nigeria could at least have brought the matter to the AU before reneging on the asylum. In other words, Nigeria as chairman of the AU is harbouring former Rhodesian white racist farmers in Kwara State while sending away for persecution a former African head of state. The doctrine of "separate but equal" kangaroo courts to try only certain races of so-called war criminals is an apartheid concept going back to the time of the North American colonies and to slavery. It is also the same concept that produced Bantustans in white South Africa. The kangaroo courts of global apartheid are not meant to protect or promote human rights and deliver justice. They are meant as decoys to turn the world’s eyes away from the continuing and continuous crimes of apartheid man himself which have been going on since the days of the African slave holocaust and which continue today at Guantanamo Bay, at Abu Graib Prison in Baghdad, in Afghanistan and at thousands of secret detention cells being maintained by the British and the North Americans in their phoney wars against terror. Above all, the kangaroo courts of global apartheid are meant to justify the refusal of the US to ratify the treaty setting up one unified International Criminal Court with universal global jurisdiction over all war crimes. There has been one for former Yugoslavia, specialising in trying Serbs while sparing Albanian terrorists of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army which collaborated with Nato. There is another separate kangaroo court for Rwanda. There is a separate kangaroo court just for Saddam Hussein. Now we have yet another one for Sierra Leone. If we add global apartheid media to this scenario — we see tragedy for Africa and Africans everywhere. The role of the global apartheid media in all this was explained in the early 1990s by Professor George Gerbner in a chapter called Violence in and by the media" in a book called Crisis and Democracy: Mass Communication and the Disruption of Social Order. Gerbner predicted and described a "symbolic war" waged by the global media to complement the actual physical wars going on. What we see in the current media uses of Charles Taylor of Liberia and Jacob Zuma of South Africa therefore is a way of finishing the recent actual wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Namibia, Mozambique and South Africa, a way of reversing the limited African victories there. In a way, Sierra Leone and Liberia are occupied countries which have succumbed to both the physical wars and the symbolic wars. They have become victims of both sponsored physical wars and globally orchestrated symbolic wars. The result is that the African populations become victims of both physical terror by assault and psychological "terror by forgetting!". Terror by forgetting is the hysteria created by a media environment where the media’s objective is to prevent the creation and consolidation of a coherent and collective memory of the people. In the place of the coherent and connected memory of a people, the media tell isolated and terrorised individuals which disjointed past "memories" to value and highlight against their own historical memory. In contrast, the historical collective memory of a people is not made up of isolated past events. It is not nostalgia. It is the intuiting and strategising capacity which enables a people to perceive clearly all threats to the foundations of human life and society. In this sense, collective memory includes the symbolising and synthesising capacity which enables a people to remember the past, to read the present and to direct the future. The terror by forgetting, the terror of amnesia, perpetrated by the global apartheid media serves to isolate and alienate people from themselves as a people and from one another as individuals, as families and as communities. But at the same time this terror by forgetting helps to delete slavery, colonialism, apartheid, Soweto, Sharpeville, Chimoio, Kassinga and other crimes of apartheid man. It helps to delete the evil deeds of Ian Smith, P. W. Botha, F. W. de Klerk, George W. Bush and Tony Blair; and to replace them with glimpses of Jacob Zuma being tried by a white judge, Charles Taylor being tired by a white judge, and so many dark freedom fighters being tried as terrorists by white judges all over the South and the East. As victims of terror by forgetting, we fail to ask simple questions: Why were the North Americans and the British not eager to have Idi Amin of Uganda kidnapped and tried? Why did they arrange for him to live and die quietly in Saudi Arabia? Why did apartheid man arrange for Afonso Dhlakama and his entire bandit movement to be absorbed into the Parliament of Mozambique instead of being kidnapped and sent to The Hague? Why did imperialism arrange for apartheid Minister of Home Affairs F. W. de Klerk to be granted a Nobel Peace Prize together with his victim, President Nelson Mandela? And recently we learned that P. W. Botha, one of the key architects of the apartheid policy of destabilisation and aggression against the entire Southern Africa region, is still unrepentant. The war-related death toll from South Africa’s aggression in the Sadc region stood at 1 500 000 persons by 1988. Between 1980 and 1988, the cost to six frontline states from white South Africa’s aggression exceeded US$45 billion. It is this massive destruction by apartheid’s terrorists which greatly explains the poverty of our peoples today. This is the reality against which wise Zimbabweans ought to read the tales they are being told about Slobodan Milosevic and Charles Taylor. In remembering this reality, wise Zimbabweans must always bear in mind the power of the global apartheid media. As Professor Raymond Kent said of the International War Crimes Tribunal for former Yugoslavia: "The International Tribunal for former Yugoslavia at The Hague is a tragi-comic political theatre, draped in judicial robes, engaged in over-blown acting and pompous self-esteem, providing endless perks and high-paying remunerations, a ‘sweetheart deal’ for those ‘pre-selected’ to sit on it and most unlikely to oppose any secret indictments or pre-conceived verdicts against Serbs." This explains why almost all the judges in these kangaroo courts are white men and women. The process Professor Kent objected to in former Yugoslavia is being replayed in Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Rwanda and Iraq. l First, apartheid man announces to the media which individuals in a regional conflict are likely to commit war crimes and to be dragged before one of his Bantustan courts. l Second, apartheid man appoints media houses and spies to start preparing the required evidence against only those individuals he wishes to target — leaving out F. W. de Klerk, P. W. Botha, Ian Smith, Idi Amin, Afonso Dhlakama or Augusto Pinochet. l Third, apartheid man appoints the judges and sets their terms of reference and their pay. l Fourth, apartheid man unleashes the spies and special forces to arrange the kidnapping of only those he has selected as deserving prosecution. The spies and special forces then proceed to execute the capture. l Fifth, by the time the farce is exposed for what it really is, the captive has been convicted so many times through the global apartheid media that he is as good as dead. Lastly, Gerbner’s hypothesis is fulfiled: "They (the Western media) serve as projective devices that isolate acts and people from meaningful contexts and set them up to be stigmatised . . . Stigma is a mark of disgrace that evokes disgraceful behaviour. Labelling some people as barbarians makes it easier to treat them as barbarians would treat them. Classifying some people ahead of time as criminals permits dealing with them in ways otherwise criminal; and it makes it legitimate to attack and kill them . . . Stigmatisation and demonisation isolate their targets and set them up to be victimised." Such a process of dehumanisation cannot be accepted as protection of human rights. |
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