We saw nothing, heard nothing, did nothing

By former President Olusegun Obasanjo

Chief Olusegun Okikiola Obasanjo, GCFR

Chief Olusegun Okikiola Obasanjo, GCFR, former military head of State and former president, delivered this lecture entitled The Rwandan genocide: We saw nothing, we heard nothing and we did nothing as a Keynote Message at the Public Presentation of Rwandan Genocide: Historical Background and Jurisprudence authored by Segun Jegede; at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, Lagos On Wednesday, October 13, 2015.

WHENEVER I contemplate the Rwandan Genocide, in my capacity as a former President of Nigeria, or as a former Army General or just simply as an African, I always feel that, in a profound sense, the contemporary state system, at the national, regional or international community levels, needs to be radically rethought. The reason for this cannot be far-fetched: the global community had seen nothing. It has heard nothing. It has done nothing that can suggest that genocide has been thrown into the dustbin of history. Consequently, the world and its current democratic values are still under threats of political uncertainties and irrationality.

What led to Genocide?

The question that continues to elicit attention is simple: how did Rwanda get to the point of commission of acts of genocide? Rather than being the disparate ethno-cultural groupings which the Tutsis, the Hutus and the Twas are said to be, history clearly shows that ethno-cultural, as well as socio-political cleavages in Rwanda, were markedly insignificant, if not non-existent.

In fact cultural, linguistic and religious homogeneity overlaid the indigenous vocations of pastoralism, agriculture and hunter-gathering vocations.

It is known, however, that it was colonial intrusion which served to disrupt in very profound ways the hitherto existing inter-communal harmony and amity. Arbitrary classification of social groups, based on their material status and conditions, was the colonial and post-colonial considerations which informed the evolution of the Rwandan state, as well as the processes of its subsequent political development.

We find in Africa diverse manifestations of this kind of arbitrariness, which on the whole has driven wedges between and among communities and in the process fuelled distrust, hate and above all the ambers of internecine conflicts between and among groups. The Rwanda crisis is only but an illustrative instance of the enduring realities of colonial legacies which in several contexts, have exacerbated the problems associated with asymmetric access to economic resources and to political power hastening the descent to dismal levels of depravities such as war and the genocide that is the subject matter of the book under consideration.

To my mind, the Rwandan Genocide challenges African people and political elites to rise to the billings of seizing their destinies in their hands and initiating far-reaching processes of socio-political (re) engineering. It goes without saying of course that economic equity, as well as socio-political integration and inclusiveness remain critical to this process.

A keynote address on this subject must not fail to address in significant parts the international dimensions of the issues at stake. Clearly the Rwandan Genocide can, without any equivocation, be said to remain blight on the conscience of humanity. For under the very watch of the international community, a total of over 800,000 people were massacred in a period of about just 100 days. The monumental scale of the social dislocation that accompanied this unparalleled African tragedy raises one critical question about many others begging for answers: why was the reaction time of the international community so incongruous with the intensity of the mayhem that was being unleashed on defenseless civilians mainly of the Tutsi extraction?

A civil war, an ethnic cleansing process actually, had been ongoing in Rwanda in 1990. The halting attempt at peace, after three years, under the Arusha Accords of August 1993, did have all the trappings of a workable roadmap for a resolution of the conflict and, perhaps the realization of sustainable peace: the creation of demilitarized zones, the demobilization and integration of the opposing armed forces, the phased deployment of the UNAMIR (the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda), and most importantly, the establishment of a Broad Based Transitional Government.

But even while a section of the international community was celebrating the Accord, it was clearly obvious that the political will, as well as state capacity to implement it was just simply not there. That much was evident even to the casual observer. Yet the world stood akimbo as the streets of Rwanda turned crimson with the blood of the defenceless.

Yes, the Rwandan Genocide has led to the consideration and adoption of the International Responsibility to Protect (IR2P), a principle now widely accepted as providing a valid basis for bypassing the sovereignty of states that fail to protect their citizens from mass atrocities and gross human rights violations, including genocide, ethnic cleansings, war crimes and other crimes against humanity.
The IR2P necessarily complements the December 9, 1948 Genocide Convention. In this regard, the rationale for the IR2P is largely predicated on two basic principles. First, 'state sovereignty implies responsibility and the primary responsibility for the protection of its people lies with the state itself.' Secondly, it is considered that 'where a population is suffering serious harm as a result of internal war, insurgency, repression or state failure and the State in question is unwilling or unable to halt or avert it, the principle of non- intervention yields to the international responsibility to protect.'

Perhaps more interestingly, the IR2P is made up of three responsibilities: responsibility to prevent by addressing the root and direct causes of internal conflict and man-made crises; responsibility to react by responding 'to situations of compelling human need with appropriate measures; and the responsibility to rebuild by providing 'full assistance with recovery, reconstruction and reconciliation' after military intervention and by 'addressing the causes of the harm the intervention was designed to halt or avert. '

Thus, the international community could so intervene under such circumstances via any appropriate means, militarily if need be. This is indeed a radical, but absolutely necessary, reformulation (some would say assault) on the principle of sovereignty. To my mind, the most critical issues in any humanitarian crisis situation, especially anyone that will warrant the eventual recourse to the principle of IR2P, are timing and the mechanism for intervention. The point has been made earlier about the inauspicious time lag in the global response to the Rwandan Genocide. Preemptive intervention, no doubt, is the most moral and politically expedient thing to do.
But what are the most propitious point and time of intervention? Who decides when this moment has been arrived at? Assuming even that efficient early warning systems deployed across the African continent could effectively flag off the onset of potentially deleterious conflicts within or between states, can we be agreed on the set of objective criteria (and the relative weight or significance of the constituent variables) the presence of which would signal decisive intervention? The high political consequences of intervention dictates that these questions be approached with seriousness even as we are agreed that, in themselves, they are not enough to keep us fixated while conflicts fester and degenerate.

The twin component of this concern pertains to the mechanism for intervention. In the case of UNAMIR, the verdict is self-evident: It was too little too late. I am however somewhat consoled by the several multilateral efforts in Africa, over the past two decades since the Rwandan Genocide, to ensure that there is no respect of self-annihilation. Beginning from the most recent and walking backward in time, you will all recall that Nigeria, the ECOWAS and the AU have been actively involved in either outright conflict situations or the decisive nipping in the bud all manner of potentially combustive political situations.

JUST a few weeks ago, Mr. President nominated me as his Special Envoy to Guinea Bissau; last month, in Mali, Nigeria and other ECOWAS leaders stood true to their commitment to a zero tolerance for unlawful takeover of government, a situation which, as the case of Cote d' Ivoire has shown, easily degenerates into civil strife and internecine conflicts and wars, to mention but just a few. What these illustrations and their accompanying successes suggest is that regional and continental multilateral intervention mechanisms have only been able to rise to the challenges of peace and security at the level of reaction, and not prevention.

In other words, I am by no means suggesting that we have arrived. It is far from it. There are myriad of technical, economic, as well as politico-diplomatic issues that either exist or could crop up in the process of attempting to rise to the billings of generally safeguarding peace and security in Africa or particularly discharging the Responsibility to Protect Africa's peoples. And it is in this vein that this book on the Rwandan Genocide, by Mr. Jegede for whom I have a lot of respect, will prove very useful. Segun Jegede engages impressively with the historical background, as well as the jurisprudential dynamics, and the subsequent trial of the dramatist personae of the Rwandan Genocide. The author writes persuasively, with the lucidity that comes only to one who combines a profound appreciation of theory and practice with privileged insider knowledge.


Without scintilla of doubt, the 20th Century is on record to be the most violent in human history, especially with the two World Wars. Genocide which was coined in 1944 by a Polish-Jewish legal scholar, Raphael Lemkin, to describe Hitler's attempts to exterminate the Jews and Roma of Europe, is not simply about repression, slaughter, massacre, carnage or torrent of violence. It is about extermination. It is a resultant from human capacity to destroy in the 21st Century. Genocide is extreme wickedness. If the capacity to destroy in the 21st Century is increasing and genocide is also enabled by increasing capacity to destroy, what is the future of genocide in Africa? Is the challenge really the capacity to destroy or the political will not to take advantage of the capacity? Is the solution not to avoid the politics and policy of hate for one another? Is violence really avoidable? If it is, which category of violence is preventable?


As noted in the Report of the Secretary General on the Establishment of an International Panel of Eminent Personalities to Investigate the Genocide in Rwanda and the Surrounding Events (CM/Dec.379 (LXVII), former Prime Minister Meles Zenawi of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, noted on 20-21 November 1997 that 'Africa's ability to move forward will always remain in vain and fatally crippled unless and until the continent manages to develop the capacity to anticipate conflicts and the ability to prevent them before they occur.' Can African leaders, as at today, beat their chest and say they have the ability and capacity to prevent conflicts before they occur? Can Africa prevent conflict-inducing genocide? Can the people of Nigeria and Africa learn from the historical and jurisprudential analysis of the Rwandan Genocide? These questions clearly show the relevance and importance of Mr. Segun Jegede's book, The Rwandan Genocide: Historical Background and Jurisprudence.


More significantly, Article 1 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide says 'genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law,' which the Contracting Parties ;undertake to prevent and to punish.' In this regard, genocide is any act 'committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as killing members of the 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, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.'


Consequently, the Genocide Convention not only sanctions under Article III, genocide but also 'conspiracy to commit genocide, direct and public incitement to commit genocide, attempt to commit genocide,' as well as 'complicity in genocide.' What should also be noted is that Article IV of the Convention says 'persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.'

Genocidal acts are often tried by a Competent Tribunal in the territory where the act is committed, 'or by such international penal tribunal as may have jurisdiction with respect to those Contracting Parties which shall have accepted its jurisdiction. In fact, the seriousness with which the international community takes genocide is now to the extent that' genocide and the other acts enumerated in Article III shall not be considered as political crimes for the purposes of extradition.


Mr. Jegede has not only provided an analysis of the historical background to the Genocide in Rwanda and the rationale for the establishment of a tribunal to try genocide and other related crimes, but has also explicated the issues involved in the trial, especially criminal responsibility, the admissibility of evidence, the right to fair trial, double jeopardy issues, as well as cumulative charges and cumulating convictions.

In conclusion, therefore, I earnestly commend Segun's effort and recommend for further discussion all the issues raised in the book because it has brought to the fore some of the ground breaking, but very little known, decisions of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the court that tried the masterminds of one Africa's darkest crimes against humanity. Even more importantly, the further discussion and exposition of the issues has the potential to provide insights and lead the way towards other locus classicus in the prosecution of crimes against humanity. It is by so doing that we can make the future of genocide bleak and preventable in Africa.


Before concluding, let me also note that Africa cannot be free from toga of irrationalities and genocidal crimes if lessons are not learnt from the Rwandan experience. The doctrine of African solutions to African problems cannot but remain at best a myth, especially if greater emphasis is not seriously placed on strengthened democracy-induced good governance and promotion of international cultural understanding as a framework for the conduct and
management of international affairs in Africa. Africa will need to quickly go beyond reacting to international crimes. The derivative factor for urgent attention now should be how to prevent genocide.


On this note, I thank you all for your kind attention.