The desert interior of West Africa, from Mauritania to southern Algeria and from northern Niger to northern Mali covers around 3.5 million square kilometres – an area sixteen times the size of the UK with a population of less than four million. This remote region is barely under the control of the governments in Nouakchott, Algiers, Niamey and Bamako: there are few tarmac roads, the borders are unmarked, police posts are few and far between, and supplies of water, food and fuel are often hundreds of kilometres apart. Despite its inhospitable nature, the Sahara is popular with adventure travellers and significant numbers of tourists have visited it since the 1960s for its extraordinary landscapes, varied cultures and unique natural heritage. The region also holds barely tapped reserves of oil and minerals, including gold and uranium.

By Richard Trillo – travel writer, journalist and PR consultant with a special interest in Africa http://theroughguidetowestafrica.blogspot.com

The killing in January 2011 of two French men in eastern Mali, kidnapped from a restaurant in Niamey, Niger, was widely treated by the media as an example of a brazen new audacity by southern offshoots of “Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb” (AQIM). As a result, foreign ministries in many countries, including Britain, France, the USA and Australia, beefed up their advisory notices to travellers in Mali and other parts of the Sahel. Evidence for the size and nature of the threat as reported by the media often comes from unspecified “intelligence sources” and “terrorism experts”. The extent of the threat and its true nature are, however, rarely assessed using publically available data.

Killings and abductions

Although the earliest major incident took place in 2003, when 32 tourists in different groups were kidnapped in coordinated attacks in Algeria and held for ransom (one woman died of heat stroke and 31 were released), the 32 cases involving foreign nationals described below (nine killed, five in assaults by gunmen; sixteen freed; seven still held) date back to 2007 and cover Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania, Mali, Niger and Nigeria.

The current perception of a crisis began in December 2007 when four French tourists were murdered during a roadside robbery in southern Mauritania. In 2009 a British tourist kidnapped in southeast Mali was executed. In 2010 an American aid worker was shot and killed in Nouakchott and an elderly French kidnap victim died or was executed in Niger. And then in January 2011, two French men were abducted in Niamey and killed less than twenty-four hours later over the border in eastern Mali, either before or during a rescue raid by French and Nigérien forces.

Between early 2008 and May 2011, 23 travellers and expatriates were abducted, of whom sixteen have been released unharmed (some after more than a year in captivity) and seven are still held hostage.

Of the sixteen people released, two were tourists kidnapped in southern Tunisia early in 2008 and eventually released in Mali; two were Canadian diplomats kidnapped in Niger in December 2008; four were abducted in Mali in two different incidents in 2009; and five were abducted in Mauritania, again in two different incidents, also in 2009. In September 2010, seven employees of the French energy company Areva (four French men, a French woman, a Togolese man and a Malagasy man) were taken hostage in Niger. Of these, the woman and the African employees were released in February 2011. In the same month, an Italian tourist was kidnapped near Djanet in southern Algeria. She and the four French men remain in captivity.

In May 2011, two expatriate workers (a Briton and an Italian) were abducted in Birnin-Kebbi, in northwest Nigeria, by unknown attackers. They remain unaccounted for, although their families may have deliberately avoided speaking to the media.

Although the full story about hostage negotiations and ransom payments is never made public, it is widely believed that millions of Euros have been paid by government intermediaries on behalf of the Italian, Spanish, Swiss and Canadian hostages. The French and British governments are notable for publically declaring they will not pay ransoms to hostage-takers.

Of the four hostage victims who have lost their lives in the Sahel since 2007, one British man was definitely murdered by his abductors, two French men were shot either in cold blood or during an attempt to rescue them, and one French man died or was murdered by his abductors.

Sahel travel in the balance

When measured against attacks attributed to Al-Qaeda over the last decade, including bombings and other attacks in Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Turkey, Kenya, Tanzania, London, Madrid, Bali and the USA, which together have killed more than 4000 people, the number of incidents in the Sahel is minutely small.

Although kidnap victims report their attackers as generally behaving devoutly, ransom money rather than ideology is the main factor in the Sahel abductions. Rather than planning coordinated suicide bomb attacks on iconic targets such as embassies and hotels, AQIM is content to extort money from susceptible European governments and private sources, much after the style of Somali pirates hijacking tankers in the Indian Ocean. Perhaps surprisingly too, AQIM terrorists do not appear to be spending their millions on new attacks (although they did launch an abortive assassination raid in February 2011 on the president of Mauritania) or even on ramping up their hostage-taking.

The initial capture of hostages appears often to be carried out by freelance bandits who sell their victims on to AQIM, who then run the propaganda and negotiations, usually in the same remote region of northeast Mali. The freelance gangs, who may sometimes be indistinguishable from AQIM units, also traffic cannabis, weapons and migrants across the desert and run major cocaine rackets, participating in the shipment of South American cocaine consignments from coastal creeks in Guinea-Bissau to North Africa and Europe.

Tuareg Influence

Somewhere in all this, one also has to reckon with the deep-seated and well-founded resentment of many of the Tuareg nomad communities of the southern Sahara over their treatment as second-class citizens by the national governments of Algeria, Mali and Niger. Major Tuareg uprisings in the 1990s in Mali and Niger ended with a successful peace agreement in Mali, but fizzled out inconclusively in Niger, only to rage into life again as a full insurrection in 2007. Since then, anti-government hostilities, banditry and hostage-taking in both countries have often been ascribed to Tuareg perpetrators, without much clear evidence. Tuareg websites have been vociferous in dissociating their community from any links with AQIM and there is certainly no cultural affinity between hardline interpretations of the Koran and the more pragmatic and tolerant lifestyle of Tuareg communities.

AQIM the ‘false flag’ in the War on Terror

Some Sahara analysts believe that AQIM, which was formed in 2007, is a false flag organisation. In this scenario, many of AQIM’s members may be genuine Islamic ideologues from Algeria, with a background in the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) and the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC) that were formed after the cancellation of Algeria’s 1991 elections in which the Islamic Salvation Front won a sweeping victory. The activities of these AQIM ground troops, however, are said to be coordinated by none other than the Algerian intelligence service itself, in a strategy aimed at justifying the country’s authoritarian government, procuring arms and drawing their American military partners into the region in the “Global War on Terror” (there is a significant American military presence in the Sahel, notably a large US training base at Gao, in Mali). Professor Jeremy Keenan, professorial research associate at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, who has lived in the region and also acted as a hostage mediator, is a well known exponent of this view.

Keenan’s outspoken commentary on the murder of Edwin Dyer in The Independent in 2009 exposed the popular view of what AQIM represents to a harsh re-evaluation, in which the terrorist threat in the Sahel has been cynically fabricated to open a new front in the “war on terror”. Hard to stomach as this view may be, it cannot be denied that the public stance of the Sahel governments and their allies in London, Paris and Washington – that AQIM poses a serious threat to the security of the states in which it operates, and by extension is a threat to global peace  – is simply not congruent with the prima facie evidence on the ground: instead of the coordinated, media-savvy attacks on iconic non-Islamic targets that one would expect from an organisation calling itself Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, AQIM engages in soft kidnappings for ransom, and infrequent, sometimes unsuccessful attacks on vulnerable targets in remote regions.

While the regional states and their international allies proclaim the dangers posed by AQIM, and vie to demonstrate which of them is more effective in countering it (and indeed some other regional states are claiming they also have an AQIM problem), the name of the group would appear to be an opportunistic effort to rebrand a poorly performing syndicate, and one whose political purpose – post-bin Laden, post-Arab Spring – must look increasingly unclear to its members.

If AQIM might otherwise look washed up (and the AQIM brand is greatly assisted by the willingness of its adversaries to ascribe every security incident to it), there is some foundation for the widely held view that the Libyan crisis is causing significant quantities of arms to be released into the desert region – although the demand for weapons on both sides of the war in Libya ought to keep most of them in the country. Concurrently, the return home to Mali and Niger from Libya of disgruntled migrant workers may produce a new AQIM recruitment pool while at the same time losing their jobs closes down a major source of remittances to desert communities.

Repercussions for travellers

Whatever the truth about AQIM’s membership and origins – and current best estimates are of a “membership” of just a few hundred men, most of them Algerian –  the repercussions for travellers have been many: closed routes across the Sahara; threats to Mali’s music festivals*; a very uncertain future for the nascent tourist industry in Mauritania, which was just beginning to enjoy some success with the opening of the new tarmac road from Nouadhibou to Nouakchott, allowing overlanders to drive on tarmac all the way from Europe to Dakar; and the suspension of charter flights from France to Tamanrasset and Djanet (Algeria), Atar (Mauritania), Gao and Mopti (Mali), and Agadez (Niger).

Niger’s tourist industry dried up almost completely after the second Tuareg rebellion in 2007, because so much of the country was deemed unsafe for travel. Until 2011, however, the relatively healthy tourist industry in Mali had been steadily growing for many years, fuelled by the attraction of the Niger River, the country’s music festivals and the scenery and culture of the Dogon country east of Mopti. The new travel warnings, especially the British FCO’s lurid map of Mali, treat apparently safe regions, including Mopti and the Dogon country, as “too unsafe to travel”. This sledgehammer approach to travel advice is confusing to travellers who cannot see its logic and assume an underlying political motive, and damaging to local communities that rely on a steady trickle of tourist income for much of their cash needs. Until recently, the FCO’s Mali travel advice noted “No British nationals required consular assistance in Mali between April 2009 and August 2010”. Inexplicably, that remarkably positive statement has now been removed.

Boko Haram, Nigeria

In northeast Nigeria, the insurgency and Islamization campaign by the followers of the urban Boko Haram** sect does not so far appear to have any connection with AQIM. Unlike AQIM, Boko Haram has a political rather than a monetary agenda: attacks are carried out in broad daylight, and have hit multiple locations in Nigeria. The sect’s frequent attacks are usually political assassinations and weapons raids on police stations and it does not undertake banditry or kidnappings for ransom. Boko Haram has not targeted foreigners (with the possible exception of the Birnin-Kebbi abductions, which have yet to be explained), but the group’s conflict with the secular military and with northern Nigeria’s moderate-Muslim state governments is steadily ramping up. Hundreds of people were killed when police and army units brutally crushed Boko Haram protests in 2009, but their bomb and gun attacks – on alcohol users and state employees as well as on targeted individuals – are intensifying while the security forces’ response is increasingly violent and indiscriminate.

There is no reason for travellers in northern Nigeria to be complacent. The potential exists for the sect’s online rhetoric to transform rapidly into crowd violence against whichever targets might be deemed appropriate.

Sahel safety statistics

Something in the region of 100,000 non-African tourists, business travellers and expatriate workers visit Mauritania, Mali and Niger annually (World Tourism Organisation). The total area of the three countries, including the empty desert areas, is more than 3.6 million square kilometres, and although their combined population of 33 million people live in only about a third of that area, that inhabited third accounts for an area that is twice the size of Texas and five times as big as Britain. Based on the nine visitors who have been killed by terrorists since December 2007, the annual “tourist murder rate” in these three Sahel countries is around 2.5 per 100,000. This can be compared with the homicide rate in the USA, which is currently 5 per 100,000, or the UK and Australia, where the rate in both countries is 1.3 per 100,000.

Oil and mineral exploration companies can afford to buy inside information, on-the-ground security and insurance cover – all at a high price. Ordinary business travellers and tourists, however, have to do as they are told by official advice, or read between its lines and make a judgment about the risks to which they are exposing themselves.

***

*The  Festival au Désert at Timbuktu takes places each January, and hundreds of foreign visitors attend, so far without incident. The lesser known Festival sur le Niger, in Ségou, is acquiring a similarly devoted following. There are other festivals: the Tamasonghoï festival at Bourem north of Gao and the Tamadacht festival at Andéramboukane in the far southeast of Mali. Four Europeans leaving the latter festival in January 2009 were held hostage for a number of months before their respective governments paid ransoms for three of them. The fourth, a Briton named Edwin Dyer, was executed.

**“Boko Haram” is a Hausa nickname for the movement, meaning “Western education is immoral”. The group’s real name is Jama’atu Ahli-Sunnah Lidda’awati Wal Jihad, meaning Sunni Association for the Promotion of Islam and Holy War and its avowed aims are to install hardline Islamic governments in Nigeria’s northern states.

By the peaceful standards of modern Malawi, the 20th of July was a very bloody day indeed. At least 19 people were killed and many more were injured, in demonstrations against the Mutharika government that took place in and around the main cities of Lilongwe, Blantyre, Zomba and Mzuzu. Having begun in a peaceful, carnival, atmosphere of red shirts and banners, they quickly turned violent as the heavily-armed police and army, finding themselves in a period of indecision over the legality of these protests, responded characteristically with live bullets and tear-gas.

The old men who lead the Malawian Opposition parties, John Tembo for the Malawi Congress Party, and Friday Jumbe for the United Democratic Front, quickly melted away from the angry streets, leaving the escalating riots to a a few hard-pressed protest marshals  and the party-youth of the governing, Democratic Progressive Party. As always, there were large numbers of angry young men, freed by Malawi’s huge unemployment crisis and eager to express their multitude dissatisfactions.

President Bingu wa Mutharika, himself a nervous and irascible old man, now ruefully contemplates the burned-out houses and the looted shops of this “Warm Heart of Africa” and he blames western interference, along with “satanic” local Civil Society groupings, for the disaster. His rhetoric is becoming increasingly incoherent and apocalyptic.

Bingu’s massive first-term (2004-2009) popularity on the domestic and international fronts, now seems very distant. It was based on his decision to channel Malawi’s scarce foreign exchange reserves into the purchase of foreign chemical fertilisers and hybrid seeds for subsidised use by Malawi’s millions of smallholder, maize-growing, farmers. That bold presidential decision propelled Malawi from regular food deficits to a permanent over-production of the maize food staple. It made Bingu — who was only copying what the USA and the EU had been doing for decades — into an overnight expert on food security and, for many Malawians, their very own “economic engineer”. Even the bilateral and multilateral aid agencies which have kept the Malawian economy unsteadily on its feet since Independence in 1964 and have been temperamentally suspicious of such “unsustainable” economic strategies, were prepared to contribute regularly, through “Budget Support”, to this subsidy, on the principle that emergency food-aid is even more unpredictable and costly.

Bingu, however, lacks political subtlety. He has managed simultaneously to alienate Malawi’s two main generators of foreign exchange: the international donors and the international tobacco-buyers. However understandable it may be, his very public hostility towards their representatives in Malawi: the diplomats of the western embassies in Lilongwe and the American executives of the tobacco-buying companies, Alliance One and Limbe Leaf, has been nothing short of reckless. It has shaken even the British government’s unwavering attachment to its swollen Department for International Development in Malawi. Other bilateral and multilateral agencies are taking their cue from Britain by withholding aid. Furthermore, the market for Malawi’s export staple, burley tobacco, already in serious decline, is more than a little impatient with Bingu’s futile attempts to set minimum prices on the auction floors and interfere in personnel management.

These anxieties and uncertainties have fed into the July 20 riots through the recent austerity budget of Finance Minister Ken Kandodo. Urban Malawians, who gave Bingu and his DPP-party a landslide majority in 2009, and called him the Modern Moses, now blame him for every long queue outside petrol-filling stations, every price–rise in the shops, every interruption in electricity-supply and water-supply, every time foreign exchange is unavailable in the banks, every tax-rise. Such things are becoming daily more frequent. Because of Bingu’s public face as a finger-waggng All-Wise and All-Knowing Leader, he now must personally accept the major responsibility.

Nick Wright has worked in the History Department at Adelaide University (1975-1991) and for Africa Confidential as its Malawi correspondent (2003-2010).

Kenya PM Raila Odinga meets Laurent Gbagbo to discuss solutions to Cote d’Ivoire’s political paralysis

In Tunisia, street protests; in Ivory Coast, a call for a general strike meets limited success. In one country, a long-time president leaves power, in the other he’s holding on…for now. 

 Laurent Gbagbo became president in 2000 on the back of a popular street movement after disputed elections. At the moment it seems unlikely that he’ll leave in the same way. The lack of a popular outcry after his widely-recognised election defeat (by more than eight percentage points) to opposition politician Alassane Ouattara has certainly helped strengthen his hand and confounded those hoping for an Ivorian solution to an Ivorian crisis.  

 It probably comes down to a number of factors; bloody crackdowns on what protests there have been, a widespread fatigue after ten years of crisis, the concentration of Gbagbo support in Abidjan – the country’s only major city – and the incumbent’s control of the state propaganda machine. 

 So, what next? Gbagbo has publicly said that talk of a military intervention to oust him makes no sense when you study the African political map and ask how many decent elections actually take place. You’d have to intervene in almost every country he says. So why are the Ivory Coast elections causing such a stir? While other elections have certainly been worse and received barely a whisper of criticism, there seems to be a remarkable international will to see the independent election commission’s results respected. Not since the Second World War, one western diplomat told me, had the world been in such strong agreement on one thing. 

There were a number of factors that were special about these elections. They were one of the most expensive ever held per voter, coming five years late and billed as the real watershed moment for a country emerging from its worst decade since independence. Secondly, the United Nations had a unique role in overseeing and certifying elections, transporting all the results sheets, many of them all the way from the polling stations to Abidjan, and receiving a copy of all the 20,000-plus results sheets. Within several hours of the close of polling, the UN say they knew Ouattara had won. 

So why in a nation about to close a chapter on a decade of strife, did Gbagbo apparently fix the verdict in the face of an international community that had the results, and that had been present in large numbers on the ground throughout the country? Partly the international outcry was unexpected; former colonial power France opting for stability and the protection of its own economic interests could have let Gbagbo stay on. The African Union and ECOWAS could have been expected to take sides with one of their own, who has played the imperialists vs. Africa card on a number of occasions over the past ten years. Maybe Gbagbo thought he could escape from the zero of losing an election, to coming out with at least something; a share of government posts, whatever the risk to the country’s stability. 

Two recent developments on the continent have influenced the crisis; the rise of international law and post-election power-sharing. On the latter, Gbagbo thought mediators would offer him some sort of deal in which he stayed on as president, while Ouattara would be prime minister or vice-president. Unfortunately for him, the African Union sent the Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga to mediate; a man with personal experience of such a deal and who immediately dismissed the idea. Secondly there’s the fear that Gbagbo, or at least his more hard-core allies, could face international prosecution for some of the atrocities committed during the Ivorian crisis. Leaving power has become a riskier business in Africa, and Nigeria’s offer to Gbagbo of amnesty and a luxurious exile wasn’t quite as attractive post-Charles Taylor. 

Western diplomats say the only way this crisis can end is with Ouattara as president. But can Laurent Gbagbo succeed? Will the world lose interest, fail to back up their words with action and accept a fudge? If this was just about Gbagbo and Ivory Coast that could well be possible. But with around twenty elections in Africa this year, the crisis has become a point of principal; success would establish a roadmap for future election disputes and make other incumbents think twice. Failure would show others that even in the most-supervised, transparent conditions, you can still fix an election, even after the results have been given, and get away with it. 

John James is the BBC correspondent in Ivory Coast and studied African Studies at St Antony’s College, Oxford University.

See also

Richard Dowden: Gbagbo’s bloody gamble

An RAS Guide to… Political crisis in Cote d’Ivoire

I concede that prosecuting perpetrators of human rights violations is definitively a viable mechanism for combating impunity. In appropriate cases, the criminal process can be deployed to engineer compliance with the law and to deter would-be perpetrators of human rights violations. In this essay, however, I argue that the objectives of using criminal prosecution to reestablish social equilibrium and promote reconciliation, though laudable and rhetorically inspiring, are simply unattainable. The hope that international criminal prosecutions will reconcile mutually distrustful ethnic groups with a long history of reciprocal antagonism is quaint, perhaps even naive. International criminal prosecutions launched in Africa amid much publicity and high expectations are on the verge of irrelevance. After more than ten years of international criminal prosecutions in Africa, it is becoming increasingly obvious that criminal prosecution is a weak reed on which to hoist the strategy of reestablishing social equilibrium and reconciling intergroup hostilities in post-conflict African societies. A confluence of systemic and environmental factors has whittled down the influence of international criminal prosecutions in Africa.

First, efforts to use criminal prosecution to modify behavior and contribute to social equilibrium rest on a failure to appreciate that causes of conflict in Africa cannot be resolved through the criminal process. The overarching goal of criminal prosecution is to apportion blame and punish the guilty. Criminal prosecutions are not designed to address or alleviate the underlying social problems that lead to and perpetuate violence. Violence may be more pronounced in some parts of Africa, but its causes remain mostly the same in virtually every African country: ethnic distrust, corruption, marginalization of ethnic groups and inequitable allocation of a nation’s resources. The frequency, resilience and indeed the incentive to resort to violence will shrink by addressing the underlying causes of violence. These problems cannot be addressed comprehensively through the prosecution of selected perpetrators of human rights violations. The underlying culture that sustains social disequilibrium must be counteracted if accountability is to take roots in Africa.

Second, criminal prosecution is a poor vehicle for restoring social equilibrium in increasingly fragmented societies where violence is viewed as a legitimate means to attain desired objectives. In a fledgling democracy fractured along ethnic lines with a history of mutual ethnic hostilities, international criminal prosecutions may end up becoming an impetus for, not a deterrent to, extra legal violent conduct. Some warlords have apocalyptic goals and readily resort to violence to mould the society according to their image. Faced with the threat of prosecution, and sensing their inability to negotiate with a determined world community, warlords with everything to lose may decide that it is in their best interest to fight till the end. Also, criminal trials can have adverse impacts on relationships. They can often involve accusations and counter accusations, rehashing of facts that rekindle old hostilities and reigniting passions that ultimately make reconciliation difficult.

Third, the causes of violence in Africa are considerably different from what leads to deviant behavior elsewhere, and are therefore more difficult to address via criminal trials. The dynamics of violence in Africa challenge the expectations of a Western-type criminal justice system and raise serious questions about the assumptions that undergird criminal prosecution. Violence in Africa is the product of a different phenomenon; Rwanda, Sudan and Sierra Leone result not from deviant behavior of citizens but from tensions at the armature of the society: ethnic distrust. Its dynamism is sustained by the belief that violence in defense of ethnic interests is a moral imperative, even a legal obligation. Decades of ethnic distrust and rivalries coupled with the central government’s inability to deal fairly with the ethnic groups provide further impetus for the apocalyptic dynamism of violence. The traditional criminal process fails to address the broad range of ways in which situational cultural pressures exacerbate violence. Violence created by underlying social problems and perpetrated by several citizens with varying degrees of culpability cannot be addressed by criminal prosecution designed to address individual misconduct, especially in cases where the causes of deviant conduct reside not at the individual level but at the communal level. Moreover, whether international criminal prosecution actually serves as deterrence is unclear because its effect cannot be empirically verified.

Fourth, the effectiveness of international criminal prosecutions depends on support both from the public and state governments. In Africa, public support has been low because of negative attitudes of African leaders towards the West shaped by historical circumstances, especially the adverse effects of colonialism. Public support continues to dwindle because of prevailing attitudes which view international criminal tribunals as agents and symptoms of imperialism, and as attempts by the West to reestablish influence over Africa. The effectiveness of international criminal prosecutions also depends on support from African governments which has been less than enthusiastic. African leaders are reluctant to support the prosecution of their benefactors, tribesmen or warlords who have the capacity to cause troubles for the fledgling government. Whether ad hoc or permanent, international criminal tribunals based on Western notions of justice, can do very little to reestablish social equilibrium and arrest the advancing decrepitude threatening to engulf Africa.

I acknowledge that international criminal prosecution can play significant roles in promoting accountability in Africa, so long as it is properly structured and undertaken with some sensitivity to the sentiments and feelings of Africans who live with the painful realities of violence. But, for all the above reasons, international criminal prosecutions have neither delivered on the promise of social equilibrium nor served as a chastening influence on impunity in Africa. Wholesale adoption of Western models of justice may not work in Africa given the prevailing social, political and cultural realities. Concerns for accountability offer no license for the international community to arrogate to itself the right to determine what is best for Africa. Imposing the preferences of the international community without due consultations with affected African nations will revive poignant painful memories of colonialism and reignite negative sentiments that will ultimately undermine efforts to promote accountability.

I urge all those involved in the fight against impunity in Africa to rethink the deeply flawed assumptions about the capacity of international law to bring about transformative changes in the conduct of citizen and group relations in Africa. Violence is so interwoven with the maladies in the continent – corruption, poverty, ethnic tensions – that it is doubtful that criminal prosecutions alone can serve as a chastening influence on the behavior of the leaders or the citizens trapped within the society. Building an effective strategy to reestablish social order in post-conflict African societies requires an understanding of the idiosyncratic environmental factors that animate violence, as well as recognition that criminal prosecutions cannot address the social pathologies that have disfigured Africa. It is these pathologies that will define and shape Africa’s future, not the legacy of criminal prosecutions.

It is my submission that a single-minded pursuit of criminal prosecutions as the panacea to impunity in Africa, regardless of the anguishing realities, carries the dangerous and unacceptably high risk of further deterioration, anarchy and bloodshed in Africa. It is important, therefore, to confect a strategy that can simultaneously promote accountability and address the social pathologies that undermine efforts to reestablish social equilibrium and reconciliation.

*Okechukwu Oko is a Professor of Law at the Southern University Law Center, Louisiana.

( For a PDF file of this essay, please click here)