Let’s end communal violence

December 7 has been marked as the International Day of Commemoration and Dignity for the Victims of the Crime of Genocide and the Prevention of this Crime. This day calls for the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide, which was the first human rights treaty adopted by the General Assembly.

The convention signifies the international community’s commitment to never again tolerating such crimes and provides the first international legal definition of genocide widely adopted at national and international levels. It also establishes a duty for state parties to prevent and punish the crimes of genocide.

As the world celebrates this day, governments are also reminded not to allow this inhuman act of systematic killing, where one community targets another community, as it happened among the Tutsi and Hutus of Rwanda. 

Fortunately, after coming to power, President Paul Kagame was able to ensure that no Tutsi revenged against the Hutu. This was possible because he did not consider himself a faction or community leader but rather a leader of the nation.

Many countries are currently experiencing violence simply because some of their leaders see themselves as faction leaders and community leaders instead of national ones. They have made tribal identity more important than what unites all citizens together. This wrong ideology of tribalism is causing more killings among communities on the continent, especially in countries that have high illiteracy rates. Thus, it has delayed the African Union campaign to silence guns by 2020.

Wars are continuing in most countries, either within the parties in the country or in neighbouring countries. There are also subnational conflicts, mainly among the armed communities, especially the pastoralist ones. The proliferation of small arms among the civilian population has fueled deadly communal violence in most countries that is more deadly than genocide.

Although there has been no other genocide since the 1994 Rwanda genocide that killed about 800,000 people, most countries on the continent have continued to experience conflicts characterized by the brutal killing, torture, and rape, which could be more horrible than the genocide itself. We have heard of people being attacked in their villages and their property being burnt, and people being killed along the roads within the continent.

In 2019, for example, 160 people were killed by armed men in a Malian village close to the border with Burkina Faso in what local media described as the “worst ethnic bloodletting in living memory.”

This is just one example of the kinds of communal conflicts happening in many countries in Africa, and South Sudan is not exceptional. Such violence may have an element of genocide, but most of the time it is ignored, making it impossible for the victims to get justice.

Every government is bound by the law, though they are not signatories to the UN  Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.