How U.S. Can Help End Africa Genocide

By helping to spread democratic and accountable governance on the African continent, the United States will also help end genocidal killings, fueled by tyrants who exploit ethnic differences in Africa. We urge the President to consider this proposal.

[Black Star News Editorial]

President Barack Obama when he takes office should host annual meetings at the White House with leaders of African countries that hold free and fair elections.

This would be just reward for these countries, which should also receive the bulk of U.S. economic development assistance. This simple approach can become very effective in increasing the demand for democratization in African countries that still deny their citizens the right to freely elect the leaders of their choice.

In all the cases where mass killings are occurring in Africa, tyranny is the consistent factor. In the few countries that have had smooth democratic transitions, such as in South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Senegal, Zambia and Ghana, there have been no massacres or genocidal killings.

By helping to spread democratic and accountable governance on the African continent, the United States will also help end genocidal killings, fueled by tyrants who exploit ethnic differences in Africa. We urge the President to consider this proposal.

Africa can never develop economically, politically, and socially so long as mass killings wipe out generations of Africans and promote the use of child soldiers across the continent. The root and underlying cause of genocide in Africa are tyrannical regimes.

Look at the evidence:

Rwanda’s genocide occurred in 1994. After the Tutsi monarchy was deposed in the 1960s, the majority Hutus committed genocide. Many Tutsi were forced to flee. For decades, there was discrimination against Tutsis but relative harmony.

In 1990, the dictatorship of Yoweri Museveni in Uganda armed and financed a Tutsi invading army. The invasion exacerbated ethnic tensions of old in Rwanda. The Rwanda dictatorship under Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, had for years failed to negotiate the return of the Tutsi refugees.

Then in 1994, the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi were killed when the plane they were travelling in was shot down. The Uganda-sponsored war had already inflamed ethnic tensions so the assassinations triggered the genocide. The U.S., which had trained the officers that led the Rwanda Patriotic Front invasion from Uganda, including Paul Kagame, who is today Rwanda’s president, bears some direct responsibility.

Contrary to the rewritten history the invasion occurred in 1990; the genocide in 1994.

In Darfur, the genocide has been sponsored by the dictatorial regime of President Omar Hassan Bashir in Khartoum, who has been indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

In Burundi, before the historic peace deal and reconciliation, military dictatorships under Tutsi leaders had presided over periodic massacres.

In Congo, the decades of dictatorial regime of Mobutu Sese Seko led to his armed overthrow in 1997. Since then, Congo has been mired in continuous wars, mostly fueled by Uganda and Rwanda -backed militias who serve as fronts for corrupt corporate and government interests from these two countries and the West.

In northern Uganda, nearly two million Acholi civilians, roughly 90 percent of the Acholi population, live in government-operated concentration camps where the World Health Organization reports that 1,000 excess deaths occurred every year, meaning as many as 52,000 per year—the camps have existed for more than 10 years, meaning more than 520,000 civilians have perished.

The civilians are victims of both the brutal LRA and the vicious army of the Ugandan dictatorship.

Ending genocidal killings in Africa must begin by ending tyranny throughout the continent.

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