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Africa, Europe, and Accountability |
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As the Chadian government sentenced six French aid workers to hard labor today on the charge of kidnapping orphan children whose parents were in fact still living, I thought back to a string of roughly similar incidents this year. In July, the Libyan government released Bulgarian medics accused of deliberately infecting patients with HIV. This fall, a British teacher in Sudan was famously arrested on the charge of insulting Islam. At the close of 2006, France and Rwanda traded accusations over who bears responsibility the 1994 genocide, igniting serious tensions between the two nations. While France’s Sarkozy and Rwanda’s Paul Kagame recently began to sort out their differences, Rwanda also recently called for the extradition of a French citizen, Isaac Kamali, so that he may serve a life sentence in Rwanda for involvement in the genocide.
Even the controversy surrounding Madonna’s adoption of a Malawian baby falls into this broad pattern.
These incidents share a common theme: African countries are asserting the right to hold Europeans accountable.
When we hear of events like the current situation in Chad, many of us tend to assume that the story will follow a familiar course: the Africans will back down, and the Europeans, exonerated, will return home safely but with a harrowing story to tell. Moreover, when media sources present these stories to us as isolated incidents and not symptoms of a deeper problem, the narrative reinforces the commonly-held prejudice that Africans’ claims against Europeans are frivolous.
The teddy bear incident was not only frivolous on the part of the Sudanese government, but also vicious. In the case of the Bulgarian medics and the French aid workers in Chad, however, matters become murkier. These incidents raise serious questions about what rights African countries have in controlling the activities of outsiders within their borders. In the case of Rwanda and France, the stakes are even higher. Cases such as the pending extradition have the potential to shape international law at a fundamental level.
We cannot assume that all criminal charges brought by African governments against Europeans are frivolous. As paradigms of what aid and development mean shift, Africans and westerners are realizing that “development” hasn’t always benefited Africa. The French aid workers’ actions may not turn out to be criminal, but they are at the least suspect:
The United Nations children’s charity, Unicef, has described the French charity’s mission to fly children out of Chad as illegal under international law. French officials also described Zoe’s Ark’s actions as “illegal and irresponsible”.
It seems, then, that African governments should have a way to ensure that foreigners are not exploiting or harming their citizens.
The main problem, however, is incoherence and inconsistency in the application of international law. All of these problems, from the Gibbons incident to Madonna’s adoption to the deadly serious conflicts between France and Rwanda, are solved - or left unsolved - in a kind of haphazard fashion. Without a systematic and universal set of guidelines dictating how to handle a government’s accusations against foreigners, these incidents will multiply yet justice will remain elusive.
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