Transition difficile au Soudan

Avec la mort le 26 novembre 2020 de Sadeq Al-Mahdi, une figure majeure de la politique soudanaise moderne quitte la scène à une époque de transitions profondes au Soudan. Sadeq était l'arrière-petit-fils de Mohamed Ahmed qui, dans les années 1880, s'est proclamé Mahdi dans la lutte contre les Égyptiens et les Britanniques. Quand l'impiété progresse, Dieu inspire le Mahdi, le Messie, à établir la justice. Ainsi, le Mahdi est à la fois un dirigeant politique et spirituel.

Sadig ne s'est jamais déclaré le Mahdi, mais la famille avait pris Al-Mahdi comme nom de famille. Il était un dirigeant politique ayant été premier ministre deux fois, 1966 -1967 et de nouveau 1986 -1989, les deux fois chassés par les militaires qui ont mis en place des dictatures militaires de longue durée; la première fois par le général Jaafar Nimeiry, et la deuxième fois par le général Omar Al-Bachir.

Sadig était à la tête d'un important ordre soufi, une tariqa comme les ordres soufis sont appelés au Soudan. Sa base politique était l'ordre soufi. Il a fait ses études à l'Université d'Oxford en Angleterre et avait de grands espoirs de moderniser le Soudan. Pourtant, les deux fois où il a été Premier ministre, il s'est enlisé dans des tensions socio-économiques qui mèneraient peu après à la guerre. La première fois, les tensions et la guerre qui ont conduit à la création de l'État séparé du Soudan du Sud, la deuxième fois la scission continue du Nord-Sud du pays et les tensions qui ont conduit au conflit armé dans la province du Darfour. Dans les deux cas, les militaires ont pu se présenter comme plus aptes à gérer les conflits que comme civils.

J'ai invité Sadeq Al-Mahdi en tant que membre de l'équipe de l'Association des citoyens du monde à participer à un séminaire aux Nations Unies à Genève sur les droits de l'homme et l'islam. Nous avions longuement discuté de ses expériences et de la nature des mouvements mahdistes.

L'une des ironies de la politique soudanaise était que son principal opposant, le cerveau idéologique du Front national islamique Al-Bachir, Hassan Al-Turabi était son beau-frère, les hommes ayant épousé deux sœurs de la même famille. Alors que Sadeg était un soufi soulignant une relation personnelle avec Dieu sans insister sur le code juridique islamique ou le Coran, Hassan Al-Turabi, influencé par les Frères musulmans égyptiens, a souligné le code juridique et a promu l'idée d'une fraternité panislamique basée sur une compréhension commune du code juridique.

Aujourd'hui, le Soudan est dans une période de transition. Le Sud est devenu un pays à part avec un bon nombre de difficultés. Un bon nombre de problèmes, y compris les revenus pétroliers, doivent être réglés entre le Soudan et le Soudan du Sud. La guerre au Darfour se poursuit, mais les négociations sont très difficiles car les groupes d'opposition se sont divisés selon des lignes tribales et idéologiques. Le nouveau gouvernement soudanais est une coalition mal à l'aise de membres militaires et civils de syndicats et de sociétés professionnelles. Le rôle que joueront les ordres soufis, qui sont pour la plupart ruraux, n'est pas clair. On ne sait pas non plus dans quelle mesure de nouveaux partis politiques seront formés sur la base des forces de la société civile qui étaient largement extérieures aux partis politiques antérieurs. Le Soudan reste un pays en transition, à surveiller de près.

René Wadlow , président, Association des citoyens du monde

Sri Lanka: Still Fire under the Ashes

René Wadlow – TRANSCEND Media Service

4 Dec 2020 – With the military defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelan (LTTE) in mid May 2009, their proposal of a two-State solution for the island is probably dead forever. The idea of creating a Tamil State from the north and part of the east of Sri Lanka was unrealistic from the start as Tamils live in all parts of the country even if there are concentrations in the north and east.

Sinhalese comprise 74 percent, the Tamils 18 percent and the “Moors” some 4 percent. But reality is always more mixed than the impression given by statistics. There has been a good deal of intermarriage, especially among the educated. Moreover, all population statistics are contested. However, the LTTE was able to become the “voice” of the Tamil population and effectively silenced all serious discussion of other avenues of structuring the State.

The policies of the current President of Sri Lanka Gotabaya Rajapaksa are seen by some as a path to Sinhalese dominance which will reignite Tamil discontent. As live coals under the ashes, the discontent is there but has not taken the violent form that it had taken under LTTE leadership from 1983 to 2009.

Conflict in Sri Lanka results from seeds planted at independence in 1948 if not before. The conflict is centered on the appropriate structures of government. Sinhalese leadership has stressed a unitary State with Sinhalese dominance. The Tamil opposition proposed different forms of con-federal approaches with a devolution of authority to the provinces. The more radical LTTE demanded a two-state structure.

One can date the start of the violence between Tamils and Sinhalese from 1977 when a large number of Tamils gave up believing that their interests would be defended by a parliamentary system in which they were a permanent minority. It was July 1983 when using the pretext of LTTE killing 13 soldiers near Jaffna, Sinhalese directed widespread violence against Tamil men, women and children. The July1983 events led to the departure of many Tamils for India, Western Europe and North America where many became supporters of LTTE.

The Indian government which had many Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka as well as a large Tamil population in south India became increasingly concerned with the violence in Sri Lanka. Thus from mid 1987 to March 1990 the Indian government sent a military peace-keeping force to Sri Lanka. The Indian effort is estimated to have cost the government of India over one billion US dollars and some 1000 soldiers killed – enough to discourage that form of peace keeping. The Indian military presence, exacerbated by socio-economic factors such as unemployment and inflation, led to a violent revolt of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) a largely Sinhalese movement against the Sri Lankan government especially in the south of the country from 1987 to 1990. Both the government forces and the JVP adopted a tactic of “exemplary killings” as a means of instilling terror into the civilian population.

With the failure of the Indian peace-keeping effort, the government of Norway proposed an approach based on a negotiated Cease Fire Agreement with a multi-national Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) which would report to the United Nations. The Cease Fire Agreement lasted officially from 2002 to 2008. The Agreement was repeatedly violated with impunity both by the government forces and the LTTE. The monitors were unable to prevent acts of war or human rights violations. The monitors never had sufficient powers, size, capacity or political backing to play an effective protection or confidence-building role. Finally in 2009, the LTTE was defeated militarily in a series of bloody battles.

The issue of appropriate governmental structures remains. There is a deep heritage of bitterness and fears in the minds of many with individual and family traumas. This heritage makes calm discussion of governmental structures difficult. However, if an earlier effort of reform were put into place, this could be an important contribution to peace. In 1987, there was a 13th amendment to the Constitution which allows for the creation of “provincial councils”. In practice these provincial councils have not been able to function as avenues for popular aspirations. However, the structure exists. The hope is that wise leadership will manifest itself in these provincial councils and thus prevent a new round of violence based on desperation.

Anniversary of the Genocide Convention: 9 December 1948

An Unused but not Forgotten Standard of World Law

René Wadlow – TRANSCEND Media Service

Genocide is the most extreme consequence of racial discrimination and ethnic hatred. Genocide has as its aim the destruction, wholly or in part, of a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such. The term was proposed by the legal scholar Raphael Lemkin, Anniversary of the Genocide drawing on the Greek genos (people or tribe) and the Latin cide (to kill).(1) The policies and war crimes of the Nazi German government were foremost on the minds of those who drafted the Genocide Convention, but the policy was not limited to the Nazi. (2)

The Genocide Convention is a landmark in the efforts to develop a system of universally accepted standards which promote an equitable world order for all members of the human family to live in dignity. Four articles are at the heart of this Convention and are here quoted in full to understand the process of implementation proposed by the Association of World Citizens, especially of the need for an improved early warning system.

Article I

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring chil.dren of the group to another group.acts shall be punishable:

(a) Genocide;

(b) Conspiracy to commit genocide;

(c) Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;

(d) Attempt to commit genocide;

(e) Complicity in genocide

Article IV

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.

Article VIII

Any Contracting Party may call upon the competent organs of the United Nations to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article III.

Numerous reports have reached the Secretariat of the United Nations of actual, or potential, situations of genocide: mass killings; cases of slavery and slavery-like practices, in many instances with a strong racial, ethnic and religious connotation — with children as the main victims, in the sense of article II (b) and (c). Despite factual evidence of these genocides and mass killings as in Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sierra Leone and in other places, no Contracting Party to the Genocide Convention has called for any action under article VIII of the Convention.

As Mr Nicodene Ruhashyankiko of the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities wrote in his study of proposed mechanisms for the study of information on genocide and genocidal practices “A number of allegations of genocide have been made since the adoption of the 1948 Convention. In the absence of a prompt investigation of these allegations by an impartial body, it has not been possible to determine whether they were well-founded. Either they have given rise to sterile controversy or, because of the political circumstances, nothing further has been heard about them.”

Yet the need for speedy preventive measures has been stressed by United Nations Officials. On 8 December 1998, in his address at UNESCO, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said “Many thought, no doubt, that the horrors of the Second World War — the camps, the cruelty, the exterminations, the Holocaust — could not happen again. And yet they have, in Cambodia, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, In Rwanda. Our time — this decade even — has shown us that man’s capacity for evil knows no limits.

Genocide — the destruction of an entire people on the basis of ethnic or national origins — is now a word of our time, too, a stark and haunting reminder of why our vigilance must be eternal.”

In her address Translating words into action to the UN General Assembly on 10 December 1998, the then High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mrs Mary Robinson, declared “ The international community’s record in responding to, let alone preventing, gross human rights abuses does not give grounds for encouragement. Genocide is the most flagrant abuse of human rights imaginable. Genocide was vivid in the minds of those who framed the Universal Declaration, working as they did in the aftermath of the Second World War. The slogan then was ‘never again’. Yet genocide and mass killing have happened again — and have happened before the eyes of us all — in Rwanda, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia and other parts of the globe.”

We need to heed the early warning signs of genocide. Officially-directed massacres of civilians of whatever numbers cannot be tolerated, for the organizers of genocide must not believe that more widespread killing will be ignored. Yet killing is not the only warning sign. The Convention drafters, recalling the radio addresses of Hitler and the constant flow of words and images, set out as punishable acts “direct and public incitement to commit genocide”. The Genocide Convention, in its provisions concerning public incitement, sets the limits of political discourse. It is well documented that public incitement — whether by Governments or certain non-governmental actors, including political movements — to discriminate against, to separate forcibly, to deport or physically eliminate large categories of the population of a given State, or the population of a State in its entirety, just because they belong to certain racial, ethnic or religious groups, sooner or later leads to war.

It is also evident that, at the present time, in a globalized world, even local conflicts have a direct impact on international peace and security in general. Therefore, the Genocide Convention is also a constant reminder of the need to moderate political discourse, especially constant and repeated accusations against a religious, ethnic and social category of persons. Had this been done in Rwanda, with regard to the radio Mille Collines, perhaps that premeditated and announced genocide could have been avoided or mitigated.

For the United Nations to be effective in the prevention of genocide, there needs to be an authoritative body which can investigate and monitor a situation well in advance of the outbreak of violence. As has been noted, any Party to the Genocide Convention (and most States are Parties) can bring evidence to the UN Security Council, but none has. In the light of repeated failures and due to pressure from non-governmental organizations, the Secretary-General has named an individual advisor on genocide to the UN Secretariat. However, he is one advisor among many, and there is no public access to the information that he may receive.

Therefore, a relevant existing body must be strengthened to be able to deal with the first signs of tensions, especially ‘direct and public incitement to, 

commit genocide.” The Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) created to monitor the 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination would be the appropriate body to strengthen, especially by increasing its resources and the number of UN Secretariat members which service the CERD. Through its urgent procedures mechanisms, CERD has the possibility of taking early-warning measures aimed at preventing existing strife from escalating into conflicts, and to respond to problems requiring immediate attention. A stronger CERD more able to investigate fully situations should mark the world’s commitment to the high standards of world law set out in the Genocide Convention.

NOTES:

1) Raphael Lemkin. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, 1944).

2) For a good overview see: Samantha Power. A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002)

3) E/CN.4/Sub.2/1778/416 Para 614

René Wadlow is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment. He is President of the Association of World Citizens, an international peace organization with consultative status with ECOSOC, the United Nations organ facilitating international cooperation and problem-solving on economic and social issues..