Dar es Salaam-based political and social commentator
Captain Moussa Dadis Camara — remember him?—is back in Conakry, Guinea, claiming that he has chosen to come back to “clear my name which has been dragged through the mud.”
Does this kind of action depict a man so full of bravado that he can come back to a place which is literally his crime scene and claim innocence, or does he want to tell us something we have not been told as yet.
Three years ago when Dadis was head of the military junta ruling over Guinea, hundreds of men and women gathered in that stadium in Conakry at a rally protesting military rule that has plagued the country since the founding president of that country, Ahmed Seku Ture, was overthrown after his death in 1989.
Yes, I am saying that on purpose, for Ture had been such a terror to his people that they had to wait until he was taken sick and then flown to Morocco where he died, and his people could now overthrow him! That is how a military coup d’etat was carried out on a dead president!
Relinquish power
Now, this Dadis had come to power courtesy of another military coup and had shown no sign he was planning to relinquish power any time soon, and his people had gathered in the stadium to tell him he had to leave.
Instead he ordered his soldiers to open fire, and a bloodbath ensued; more than 150 unarmed civilians lost their lives. Apart for the deaths — themselves horrendous enough—the soldiers unleashed a raping spree in which tens of young women and girls were gangraped, tortured and maimed — many dying on the spot or shortly thereafter, succumbing to the ordeals they had suffered.
According to many eyewitness accounts by even people who had become inured to the barbarousness of West African military thugs, that day had not been experienced before.
After that horrific incident, Dadis fled to neighbouring Mali, where he has been living in soft-cushioned exile until he decided to come back home “to clear my name”.
It certainly will be interesting to hear what he has to say in his defence, and it will certainly be a riveting story as prosecutors lay down the charges and call to the stand as eyewitnesses those who saw and experienced the massacres and the rapes first-hand.
We all know what a bloodbath looks like, or we think we do. We have recollections of Sharpeville in 1961 and Marikana in 2012, for instance, two incidents in one country, perpetrated by forces supposedly diametrically opposed but unfortunately bound together by a shared callousness where black lives come into collision with the interests of capitalism.
Onto the bloodbath in the Conakry case, add the scenes of mass rape, and a scene emerges that is hard to visualise.
Some of the women who have gone on record have shared stories of untold brutality and suffering which have had repercussions on their reproductive health ever since, heart-rending narratives that would make a brute monster break down and cry bitter tears.
Law and order
I am intrigued and want to know what this Didas will want to say in his defence.
Was it a case of trying to re-establish ‘law and order’ as we hear our rulers say so often, that people were threatening to sow chaos and disrupt normal lives? Had the military junta at that time received intelligence suggesting the protesters were enemy agents sent to bring their (itself illegitimate) government down?
Hardly. Neither of these feeble excuses would hold water, because there is no evidence to suggest there was interference from outside, and clearly indiscriminate shooting of unarmed civilians and rape are no way to establish “law and order”.
But Dadis could benefit from an unstated defence that would be understood in some quarters, even if not spelt out. That he gave orders to shoot because he saw a threat represented by the demonstrators in the stadium as an attempt to reinstate so-called civilian regimes are in fact all military except in name.
Any time
They have given up any attempt to persuade their people to approve their policies, of which they actually have none; they have ruled by issuing orders that their people dare not oppose; all too often when their people showed signs of wanting to rebel, they were kept in check by the same brute military force that the likes of Dadis and others are now using. Morally, there is no justification for castigating Dadis and his boys.
But all that does not explain the overkill in civilian body counts, and the rapes. Dadis will still be up shit-creek without a paddle.
Jenerali Ulimwengu is now on YouTube via jeneralionline tv. E-mail: [email protected]
