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In the 1970s, President Francisco Macias Nguema of Equatorial
Guinea felt genocide was the best way to consolidate his power. He
established the domination of his tribal group, the Fang, by killing
50,000 of his countrymen. A third of the nation's population fled into
exile. Many who stayed behind died in forced labor camps.
Sékou Touré, President of Guinea (a country far to the north of
Equatorial Guinea), once said, "get rid of the vermin...there is no room
for half measures." The vermin he wanted to exterminate were
primarily members of the Fula tribe, especially those whose last names
were Barry or Diallo.
From January, 1971 (when the Moslem military leader Idi Amin
staged his coup) to 1981, between 100,000 and 300,000 black Ugandans
were executed. The majority of those who died were members of the
Acholi and Langi tribes who had supported Amin's predecessor,
President Milton Obote. The heads of black Ugandans were beaten in
with hammers, their legs were chopped off, and they were forced to eat
the flesh of their fellow prisoners before they were put to death. To
picture the nature of the event, imagine that when Bill Clinton won the
presidency from George Bush in 1982, Clinton's followers had
cemented their power by torturing and murdering registered
Republicans. In an ominous echo of Adolph Hitler's genocidal
rhetoric, a former Ugandan civil servant explained that President Amin
was simply pursuing a "final solution" to the "Acholi and Langi
problem."
But Idi Amin was not just one isolated madman in an otherwise
peaceful country. When the bloodthirsty leader was deposed and
Milton Obote returned to power, the newly restored president
continued Amin's policy of slaughter. Obote killed 100,000 more Black
Ugandans. He simply did it with less press coverage.
Africanologist Ken C. Kotecha, in his book African Politics, calls
the atrocities afflicting the continent, "a policy of annihilation."93 And
that policy was rampant in the '90s in countries from Liberia to
Somalia, the Sudan and Mozambique.
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