FRAMING THE TERRORISM STORY in Nigeria among private and public commentators has exposed the shallowness of understanding, poverty of ideas and the out-of-touch realities of many otherwise educated, enlightened or influential Nigerians. The rush to comment and characterise the incessant killings, displacements and occupation of lands in ways that diminish the intensity, scale and ferocity show more of knee jerk reactions in response to grave existential threats that require objective and pragmatic approach and actions rather than desperate propaganda.
Consideration for political correctness took a centre stage and was played up in conversations among city dwellers and political elites, ignoring the horrific realities the victims of terrorism are going through. The descriptions of the gory experiences and fatalities took various forms with no definite point of convergence even as official representatives of Nigeria, including the president, chose to downplay the problem. It further exposed the deep-seated bias, bigotry and hypocrisy among many privileged people on a matter of such relevance. The foreign affairs minister, Yusuf Tuggar, exposed a clear lack of grasp on the prevailing crisis in his engagements with foreign media and international organisations, particularly on the European platform.
The story of emerging spate of terrorism and genocide in Nigeria can really befuddle in many different ways. Fundamentally, the very reason for the attacks is being obfuscated while drawing a number of allusions to false equivalence that easily draw attention away from the cause, but concentrating rather on proportionality of attacks and victims. Official responses expose the poor attention to security and safety of lives while at the same time laying bare the underlying corruption, insincerity and clear absence of transparency in public administration in the length and breadth of Nigeria presently. The fact that it took America’s intervention to jolt the federal government and the president of Nigeria into any semblance of responsive action speaks volumes about the tardiness, nonchalance, complicity and hypocrisy of those entrusted with power in dealing with the rising crisis of terrorism and genocide that appears skewed against people of a particular faith. Proving otherwise has been particularly futile and ineffectual, at least for now.
Sadly enough, people try to avoid naming the perpetrators despite enormous proof of their involvement. It suddenly became obvious that the government at the centre in particular and the subnational governments generally do not care about terrorism any more than you care about a goat bleating in your backyard. It became obvious that the government has no reliable database of killings, burning of churches, displacement of rural community victims and the growing number of internally displaced people’s (IDP) camps in many states of Nigeria. Foreign Minister Tuggar amplified this administrative gap in his inconsistencies in official data he began to dish out on international platforms, especially to foreign media. He was also prolific in platitudes rather than providing hard evidence of his government’s policies as he said Nigeria would keep fighting violent extremism, saying it “will continue to defend all citizens, irrespective of race, creed, or religion.”
But he struggled with official statistics in his public comments. At some point, he had to walk back some figures of people killed when challenged. And if that was the case, it should not be surprising that no accurate records are kept of the IDP camps, in spread and population of victims. Nothing exposes a lack of inter-ministerial coordination in a government than this, where endangered lives are not taken into official reckoning. It means no serious database is kept, probably since there is no seemingly felt need for its use.
Even when reports of massacre are mounting, politicians, complicit religious leaders, terrorist sympathisers and financiers as well as the mainstream media tend to ignore the terrible impacts on peace, social security, political stability and the economy. Simplistic explanations and descriptions also tend to justify the casual attitude and disposition to this crisis. With this attitude shown from within Nigeria, external commentators have found an appropriate premise upon which to situate their own opinions, no matter how flawed. Those institutions they represent are also getting things wrong, embarking on denials, obfuscation and conflation of facts. A fortnight ago, for instance, Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, head of the African Union (AU) Commission, openly rejected claims by US President Donald Trump that Christians are being killed in a genocide in northern Nigeria, telling a UN forum in New York that such characterisations distort a far more complex security crisis.
It is somehow bewildering how Youssouf managed to obtain the information he so confidently defended while speaking alongside UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on that Thursday, in his official capacity while clarifying the AU’s position and urging caution in the language used to describe conflicts unfolding across the continent. “There is no genocide in northern Nigeria,” Youssouf said, adding that “we have issued a communiqué making clear that what’s going on in the northern part of Nigeria has nothing to do with the kind of atrocities we see in Sudan or in some part of eastern DRC.” Youssouf posited that extremist violence in Nigeria’s north has affected both Muslims and Christians. He avoided reference to Christian genocide. “I think the complexity of the situation in northern Nigeria should push us to think twice before declaring or making such statements,” Youssouf said. According to him, “the first victims of Boko Haram are Muslims, not Christians, the first victims, and I’m saying it with documented references.”
The AU’s remarks smack of some degree of insensitivity, amid growing international debate on many different issues. One of them is democracy. The same AU leadership is populated by many members who are – more or less – life presidents or those who have altered their countries’ constitutions, breaking term limits to enable them rule indefinitely. The same AU congratulates and allows presidents who rig their ways into office but condemn military juntas when they successfully remove failed presidents through coup d’état. International organisations now seem likely to be abandoning long-held views over some fundamental issue. Genocide is one of them.
The UN in particular seems to be abandoning its own original definition of terrorism, counterterrorism and genocide now. The definition contained in Article II of the UN Convention defines genocide as any of five “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.” in his book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe in 1944, Polish lawyer Raphäel Lemkin first coined the word “genocide” as consisting of the Greek prefix genos, meaning race or tribe, and the Latin suffix cide, meaning killing. Lemkin developed the term partly in response to the Nazi policies of systematic murder of Jewish people during the Holocaust, but also in response to previous instances in history of targeted actions aimed at the destruction of particular groups of people. Later on, Raphäel Lemkin led the campaign to have genocide recognised and codified as an international crime.
Two years after Lemkin’s book, genocide was first recognised as a crime under international law by the United Nations General Assembly (A/RES/96-I) in 1946 and was codified as an independent crime in the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the Genocide Convention). As of April 2022, the Convention has been ratified by 153 States. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has repeatedly stated that the Convention embodies principles that are part of general customary international law. This means that whether or not States have ratified the Genocide Convention, they are all bound as a matter of law by the principle that genocide is a crime prohibited under international law.
Although the Genocide Convention establishes in Article I that the crime of genocide may take place in the context of an armed conflict, international or non-international, but also in the context of a peaceful situation. The latter is what has become common in Nigeria, particularly already rampant in the Northern and Middle Belt region lately. The same article establishes the obligation of the contracting parties to prevent and to punish the crime of genocide. The occurrences in Nigeria have fulfilled the condition laid down as qualified attributes of genocide. These involve killing members of the target group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Until there is a convergence of opinions among individual commentators and a strong political will on the part of the political leadership of Nigeria, the issue of terrorism or genocide will continue to be neither here nor there in terms of policy response and a definite end to the crisis.
