Deadly Marionettes: State-Sponsored Violence in Africa File:///H:/Publications/Final%20Text/AFRICA/Deadly%20Marionnettes/D
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Deadly Marionettes: State-Sponsored Violence in Africa file:///H:/Publications/Final%20text/AFRICA/Deadly%20Marionnettes/d... DEADLY MARIONETTES State-Sponsored Violence in Africa ARTICLE 19 October 1997 © ARTICLE 19 ISBN 1 870798 34 1 CONTENTS Acknowledgements Preface 1 INTRODUCTION 2 CASE STUDIES 2.1 Zimbabwe 2.2 South Africa 2.3 Kenya 2.4 Malawi 2.5 Rwanda 2.6 Nigeria 2.7 Cameroon 3 SOME COMMON THEMES 3.1 Informal Repression and Propaganda 1 of 33 15/01/2008 16:27 Deadly Marionettes: State-Sponsored Violence in Africa file:///H:/Publications/Final%20text/AFRICA/Deadly%20Marionnettes/d... 3.2 Informal Repression as "Traditional" Conflict 3.3 Informal Repression and "Traditional" Authority 3.4 Informal Repression and Elections 3.5 State Exploitation of Grievances 3.6 Restoring the Rule of Law 3.7 Exchange of Information 3.8 Informal Repression as Early Warning 3.9 The Role of the Media NB This version of the report does not contain footnotes. For a full copy see the pdf version or contact ARTICLE 19 for a hard copy. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Return to contents The bulk of this report was written by Richard Carver, Head of Africa Programme at ARTICLE 19. The case studies on Rwanda and Cameroon were written by Linda Kirschke, Africa Programme Researcher. The entire report was edited to take into account comments by Maina Kiai of the Kenya Human Rights Commission, Innocent Chukwuma of the Civil Liberties Organisation, Jenni Irish of the Network of Independent Monitors and Njonjo Mue, Legal Adviser to ARTICLE 19's Africa Programme, as well as the extensive discussion at Scottburgh. ARTICLE 19 and the Network of Independent Monitors would like to thank the Ford Foundation for the financial support which made the Scottburgh workshop and this report possible. We are also grateful to Comic Relief for its funding of further training for informal repression monitors. Open SADF [South African Defence Force] support to Chief Minister Buthelezi and Bishop Lekganyane will clearly have a negative impact on their power base and must not be overlooked. Any support must be clandestine or covert. Not one of the leaders must, as a result of SADF support, be branded as marionettes of the South African government by the enemy. (South African military intelligence document on secret backing for Inkatha and the Zionist church, December 1985) Evidence has been received that homes and farms of senior government officials, political leaders and administrative officers have and are being used as hideouts for warriors, depots for weaponry, sanctuaries ... where warriors return in the event of facing resistance ... (National Christian Council of Kenya on the Rift Valley "tribal clashes", 1992) I don't think it was purely an ethnic clash, in fact there is really no reason why it should be an ethnic clash and as far as we could determine, there was nothing in dispute in the sense of territory, fishing rights, 2 of 33 15/01/2008 16:27 Deadly Marionettes: State-Sponsored Violence in Africa file:///H:/Publications/Final%20text/AFRICA/Deadly%20Marionnettes/d... access rights, discriminatory treatment, which are the normal causes of these communal clashes. (Professor Claude Ake, Nigerian peace negotiator, on the Ogoni-Andoni conflict, October 1993) PREFACE Return to contents Freedom of expression is a right that is not only to be enjoyed by the literate or those with literary talent. Likewise, there are many more ways to censor than by the blue pencil or the legal injunction. Africa is a continent where the written word still only has an incidental part to play in the lives of most people, but this does not mean that their hunger for information or their wish to express their views are any the less. This report is about censorship of the spoken word. It describes a phenomenon which has no agreed name but one which has become increasingly widespread across the continent in recent years. Governments secretly employ surrogate agencies, such as ethnic or religious militias, to attack supporters of opposition political parties or government critics. Thereby they perpetuate at a local level the restrictive structures of one-party rule, while proclaiming their fidelity to democratic principles at a national level. The name we have given to this phenomenon is "informal repression" — a term which was coined in South Africa in the late 1980s. This report is the product of a workshop at Scottburgh in South Africa in 1996, which gathered 33 human rights and community activists from seven African countries. While there was general agreement on the common characteristics of the phenomenon, on the name there was none. So, in the absence of a better alternative we have stuck with "informal repression", inadequate as it may be. The purpose of the workshop, and of this report, was to help create a common recognition of "informal repression" as a human rights issue. There is a parallel with developments in Latin America in the early 1970s. Under pressure from human rights campaigners to end imprisonment of political opponents, a number of governments in that region began organizing "death squads" composed of security personnel acting informally to carry out the "disappearance" of political opponents. This required both a reorientation of the human rights movement and the development of new techniques of research and campaigning. Now "disappearances" are clearly categorized as a form of human rights violation, with a specific United Nations mechanism created to address the problem. Research methods were developed to deal with the specific obstacles created by such covert means of repression: for example, the use of forensic pathology and anthropology for human rights purposes has evolved immeasurably over the past 20 years. This report examines a similar, but not identical, phenomenon which has developed in Africa, especially over the past decade. It looks in some detail at the evolution of informal repression in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Nigeria and Cameroon, as well as referring to similar phenomena in countries such as Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Sudan and Mauritania. The Scottburgh workshop was organized by ARTICLE 19 jointly with the Network of Independent Monitors, a South African human rights group largely dedicated to research into informal methods of repression. The steering committee for the project also comprised the Kenya Human Rights Commission and the Civil Liberties Organisation from Nigeria. Since the workshop, these four organizations have begun a programme of training human rights and community monitors from Kenya and Nigeria in techniques of monitoring informal repression. 3 of 33 15/01/2008 16:27 Deadly Marionettes: State-Sponsored Violence in Africa file:///H:/Publications/Final%20text/AFRICA/Deadly%20Marionnettes/d... 1 INTRODUCTION Return to contents "Informal repression" — the term may not be a familiar one, but the phenomenon has become only too evident across Africa in the past decade. As governments have come under increasing scrutiny, both domestically and internationally, for their human rights performance, they have resorted to covert and surrogate means of repressing their opponents. Often this has entailed stimulating ethnic violence, either favouring one faction against another in long-standing and latent rivalries or inciting new conflict between communities which had previously lived together in harmony. Sometimes ethnicity is not the issue: in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, communities of the same ethnic background have been set against each other on political grounds; in northern Nigeria the government has fomented religious rivalry. Typically this phenomenon of state-sponsored communal conflict has emerged at the same time as a transition from a single-party political system to a multi-party one. Often it appears to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, justifying the government's claim that democracy would be accompanied by ethnic strife. It also ensures that at a local level a single party continues to dominate, whatever the appearance of pluralism in the capital city. But whatever the precise political context, the attraction of "informal repression" for governments is that they can evade direct accountability. If human rights violations can be characterized instead as "violence" or "tribal clashes", this conceals their real nature and implies that everyone bears an equal responsibility for resolving them. By presenting this violence as the consequence of "traditional" rivalries, African governments also pander to the common Western caricature of a "dark continent" riven with primordial tribal conflict and unready for democratic governance. This has made Western governments — and even some human rights organizations — reluctant to investigate or campaign against such abuses. The following are some examples of the growth of "informal repression" in recent years: • In South Africa, the police and intelligence agencies provided training and funding over a decade for the armed activities of the Inkatha Freedom Party. • In Kenya, warriors from President Moi's Kalenjin ethnic group have attacked and driven a quarter of a million people from their homes in the Rift Valley and Western Kenya, effectively disenfranchising them in the 1992 elections; similar violence in Mombasa threatens the second multi-party elections expected in late 1997. • The Malawi Congress Party, probably acting on advice from Kenya, mobilized members of the nyau secret dance cult to attack and intimidate opposition supporters in the campaign for the country's first multi-party elections in 1994. • In eastern Nigeria, security forces have armed tribal militias from groups opposed to the Ogoni, who are campaigning for compensation for environmental damage caused by oil exploitation. • In Rwanda, before 6 April 1994, the government armed and mobilized extremist Hutu militias at the same time as it engaged in peace talks with rebel forces. It is these militias which were responsible for the genocide of Tutsi after 6 April 1994. • In northern Cameroon, traditional chiefs or lamibe have detained opposition activists and critics using their arbitrary power, as well as using their palace guards to intimidate the local populace.