Photo: YouTube
The highly anticipated and much ballyhooed US-Africa Summit (Dec 13-15) has come and gone. The US pledged $55 billion in investments in Africa. The full economic and political impact as well as security and geostrategic implications of this high level summit that brought 49 African heads of state and government to Washington is yet to be assessed and I will leave the analysis to the experts in the field.
What drew my attention was the 5 countries that did not get invited. The reason given by a senior White House official for excluding Sudan, Mali, Guinea and Burkina Faso was that these countries ‘changed their governments unconstitutionally’ and were suspended by the African Union. No formal ties exist with Eritrea.
The hypocrisy of the African Union and the United States is glaringly apparent when one considers that a significant number of the leaders in attendance came to power unconstitutionally and maintained themselves in power beyond the expiration of their term by amending the constitution. The case of Museveni and Kagame are illustrative. Both seized power by force and they are both in their fourth and third decade in power respectively prolonging their hold on power through amendments of the constitution at will and conducting sham elections to satisfy their sponsors.
The most recent case of unconstitutional seizure of power is that of General Mahamat Deby, who simply appointed himself to the presidency of the transitional council of Chad upon the death of his father, Idriss Deby, the long serving authoritarian president who also seized power by coup d’état. Mussa Faki Mahamat the AU chairman was Idriss Deby’s foreign minister and has ambitions of running for president someday. No suspension of Chad from this AUC Chairman. Be that as it may, Mahamat Deby is one of the honored guests of President Biden at the Summit, commitment to constitutionality be damned. Oil buys legitimacy.
What I found most reprehensible however is that President Biden hosted some of the worst in the pantheon of rogues, gross human rights violators, murderers and bona fide genocidaires thus making a mockery of the stated US commitment to human rights and good governance in the conduct of its foreign affairs.
“Secretary Blinken commended steps taken by the Ethiopian government to improve humanitarian access and begin restoration of essential services,” said the State Department spokesman Ned Price, although the humanitarian assistance is still sporadic at best and the region remains cut off from the rest of the world without internet and banking services which were to have been restored immediately upon the signing of the ‘peace’ agreement. The government of Ethiopia was also required to ensure the withdrawal of foreign troops (Eritrean forces and their Amhara allies) who continue to occupy Western Tigray and are expanding their occupation into Northern Tigray.
Video images of President Biden with PM Abiy Ahmed watching the World Cup was nauseating and was tantamount to legitimizing a leader who has for two years conducted a genocidal war in Tigray. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty international in a joint statement earlier this year have accused his government of ethnic cleansing, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The war is far from over as Eritrean troops and Amhara militia continues their campaign of extermination with massacres, rapes of women deliberately infecting them with HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases and inserting foreign objects to inflict trauma to their pelvic organs to render them sterile.
Another leader at the table was the longtime ally of the US, president of Uganda Yoweri Museveni, who ranks high among human rights violators and has been accused of war crimes and genocide against the Acholi people in the 1999-2000s. Under the guise of protecting them from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), he herded Acholi civilians into what were called protected camps but were really unsanitary overcrowded concentration camps where diseases like Ebola, cholera, HIV/AIDS spread quickly. At the height of this campaign there were 1.8 million people in the camps with over a thousand dying every week. It was called a silent genocide but no one has as yet held him accountable. https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/19/the-secret-genocide/
A Genocide in Northern Uganda? – The ‘Protected Camps’ Policy of 1999 to 2006
Yes he too was at the table, so was Paul Biya of Cameroon who has been waging his own campaign of extermination of the Anglophone Cameroonians in the south. https://panafricanvisions.com/2021/03/genocide-africa-and-the-french-connect
These are the leaders with blood of their innocent fellow citizens on their hands, sitting at a blood stained table hosted by the President of the United States. Shame! Shame! Shame!
Mohammed A. Nurhussein MD
