THE AFRICAN UNION MUST PROTECT ORDINARY AFRICANS – NOT THE CONTINENT’S DESPOTS!

Over the years since the Rwandan genocide was brought to an end, some five million Africans have died in the DR Congo – yet, hardly anyone in the international community expresses their outrage that so many members of the human race have died: largely as a result of the lack of security in their country. Every single one of those millions of Africans who have died as a result of the fighting between the various armed groups in the DR Congo is a victim of the greed of those who seek to profit from the vast mineral wealth of that unfortunate nation – and fan the numerous conflicts in the Eastern DR Congo for that purpose.

As a believer in Nkrumah’s pan-Africanist vision, I am saddened that rather than seeking to protect ordinary Africans from some of the modern-day Adolf Hitlers who rule a number of the nations in the continent, the African Union (AU) rather seeks to protect those evil monsters – who are guilty of some of the most unspeakable and abominable acts of cruelty perpetrated in the 21st century, thus far. As we speak, the AU is actively working to protect President Omar Bashir from the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) reach. Yet, it remains strangely silent about the plight of the millions of black Africans in Darfur whom he is victimizing. The truth of the matter is that Omar Bashir hopes that a majority of them will eventually die from the deprivation caused by the enforced absence from Western Sudan of the international NGO’s he has expelled from his country specifically for that purpose.

Omar Bashir is the leader of a brutal and cruel dictatorship that is engaged in ethnic- cleansing on an apocalyptic scale in Darfur. He is directly responsible for the current humanitarian crisis caused by the expelling of a number of international NGO’s assisting internally displaced persons in refugee camps in Darfur from Sudan – despite the fact that those charitable organizations have been the main source of sustenance for his many victims in Western Sudan. Ever the cynic, Omar Bashir realizes that hunger and starvation will achieve his ethnic-cleansing agenda for him even faster than his armed agents of death the Janjaweed ever could. That is why he promptly decided to expel the international NGO’s the minute the opportunity to do so presented itself to him.

If the victims of the cruelest despots in Africa, such as Omar Bashir, cannot rely on the AU to protect them from their oppressors, why should they not look to the ICC to protect them from their evil tormentors? The idea that millions of unfortunate Africans, who are being slaughtered and brutalized by their leaders on a daily basis, should regard the targeting of those leaders by the ICC (which is only holding those cruel leaders accountable for their crimes against humanity, after all), as some form of Western racism and a conspiracy to re-colonize Africa, is a cruel and sick joke. It is an argument that no African of conscience who cares about his fellow Africans should ever make. Taking such a stand is an affront to the many decent men, women, and children across the globe, who show their solidarity with those suffering at the hands of Africa’s dictators, by insisting that they are their fellow human beings who are deserving of the protection of the international community.

The time has come for world leaders, such as US President Obama, and the leaders of the nations of the European Union, to put diplomatic niceties and political correctness aside, and speak out boldly against the AU for neglecting the many victims of the continent’s cruelest leaders. The international community must condemn the AU in the strongest possible terms for its outrageous stand on the indictment of Omar Bashir by the ICC. Venezuela’s President Chavez in particular ought to think about the awful plight of the victims of Omar Bashir in Darfur – not give succour to a cruel African leader indicted by the ICC for the crimes against humanity he is responsible for in Darfur.

The international community must demand that the AU acts to protect the human rights of the millions of Africans currently suffering in places like Darfur, the northern and eastern parts of the DR Congo, Chad, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Somalia, Eritrea, Mauritania, and Libya. The AU must consider the protection of the human rights of ordinary Africans as its primary mission – and it must demand that Omar Bashir allows the international NGO’s he recently expelled from Sudan to return to Darfur immediately to help alleviate the suffering of the people there. It must stop regarding itself as an exclusive club for African leaders: on whose behalf it feels obliged to lobby the international community from time to time – even when their monstrous actions bring them to the attention of the ICC.