Symposium on Unbroken Bond: Tracing the Ties Between African and Palestinian Anti-Colonial Struggles – Solidarity Between the Palestinian Al-Haq and Congolese Action Youth Platform’s Campaigns against Genocide: A Focus on the Politics of Language and Naming

[Rugenge wa Nciko is an LLB student at Kabarak University Law School, a Kabarak Legal Aid Clinic (CLACLE) board member and a Trainee Editor at the Kabarak Law Review. He was born in the war-torn Eastern DRC and a citizen of DRC and interested in contributing to addressing the human rights and humanitarian situation in his country, across Africa.]

International law and its vocabularies lack the appropriate language to fully capture and convey the totality of the Congolese and Palestinian conditions. Congolese and Palestinians have adopted novel terms to describe the historical context of their ongoing suffering and struggle: “Genocost” and “Nakba”. These terms highlight that “genocide” for both Congolese and Palestinians is a continuous process, not a singular event.

Many organisations are pushing for campaigns against genocides in DRC and Palestine, particularly Al-Haq and the Congolese Action Youth Platform (CAYP). Due to the campaigns by Al-Haq and CAYP, the term “genocide” has gained traction among social media users globally, deployed to describe the atrocities in both Eastern DRC and Gaza Strip in Palestine. At the time of this writing, the atrocities faced by both Congolese and Palestinians are increasingly recognised and discussed as illustrations of modern-day genocide.    

This post does not intend to establish whether the atrocities in DRC and Palestine are equivalent to the legal definition of genocide under Article 6 of the Rome Statute. Instead, it examines how CAYP and Al-Haq have used the term successfully to draw global attention to the atrocities taking place in their respective states despite indifference and silence to their plight. The post has three objectives. First, it seeks to demonstrate the parallel narratives of genocide in the Palestinian and Congolese contexts. Second, it explores the power of language in applying the term genocide, drawing on Ngũgĩ’s conceptualisation in “Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language” and Mamdani’s in “The Politics of Naming”. Finally, it will show the solidarity effect as many actors and social media users, against Western racial imperialism, have united CAYP and Al-Haq’s usage of genocide in campaigning and advocacy today. 

The Parallel Narratives of Genocide in the Palestinian and Congolese Contexts

The existing legal frameworks fail to capture the extent of the Palestinian and Congolese suffering fully today, necessitating new terminologies like “Nakba” for Palestinians and “Genocost” for Congolese. For both Congolese and Palestinians, genocide is a continuous process, better captured by these memorable terms. 

In DRC, during the Belgian colonial period, approximately 13 million Congolese, or half of the country’s population at the time were systematically killed due to the exploitation of rubber, a genocidal event according to many historians. As Robert G. Weisbord put it, “it was indeed a holocaust before Hitler’s holocaust.” According to CAYP that was the first occurrence of Genocost driven by economic gain to facilitate the automotive revolution. Natural resources allowed Mobutu to maintain more than three decades of dictatorship before returning to Genocost once again, from 1996 up to now, where millions of Congolese died and continue dying because of minerals. According to CAYP, over the past three decades, mainly Ugandan and Rwandan military presence in DRC has caused over 12 million deaths and more than 500,000 women have been raped as a result of attacks mainly by ADF and M23.   

In Palestine, particularly the Gaza Strip, since the 1948 Nakba, thousands of Palestinians have lost their lives. The Nakba (Arabic: النَّكْبَة an-Nakba) is the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians through their violent displacement and dispossession of their land, property, and belongings, along with the destruction of their society and the suppression of their culture, identity, political rights, and national aspirations. In 1948, Israel killed around 15,000 Palestinians and they forcefully displaced more than 750,000. Additionally, as Rosemary Sayigh put it, Nakba describes the events of the ongoing persecution and displacement of Palestinians by Israel. As a whole, it covers the fracturing of Palestinian society and the long-running rejection of the right of return for Palestinian refugees and their descendants. Today, the Nakba has undergone a metamorphosis; it has evolved from a historical calamity into a brutally sophisticated structure of oppression. Recently according to UN figures, by mid-March 2024, Israeli forces had killed over 31,500 Palestinians – one out of every 75 people in Gaza – averaging 195 killings a day, most of the victims were civilians, including over 25,000 women and children and 95 journalists. 

Both CAYP and Al-Haq highlight the parallels in their narratives of genocide. CAYP was founded in 2010 and began labeling the atrocities in Eastern DRC as genocide around 2013, on the basis of the systematic rape of Congolese women and children, the ongoing mass killing of civilians, and other atrocities committed against the population in eastern Congo – all of which it argues is motivated by the country’s mineral resources. CAYP has attributed each 2^nd August as a memorial to commemorate the victims of Genocost. Al-Haq was founded in 1979 and started labeling the situation in Gaza as genocide in 2023, following Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s statement: “We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel – everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we act accordingly.” Al-Haq asks every Palestinian to hold a memorial day on each 15th May to commemorate the victims of the Nakba. The conflicts in both contexts are exacerbated by neighbouring countries: Uganda and Rwanda’s involvement in DRC and Israel’s actions in Palestine, in many cases with the support of western imperialism. Both Congolese and Palestinians claim that their natural resources are being plundered, with Rwanda backed up by international actors, accused of exploiting minerals in Eastern DRC and Israel of pillaging water resources and land in Palestine. Both CAYP and Al-Haq stress the necessity of incorporating historical context into legal frameworks to address the full scope of human rights violations. 

The Power of Language in Using the Term “Genocide”

Raphael Lemkin coined the term “genocide” in 1944 to describe the coordinated attempts to annihilate a national group and its way of life. After its appearance, it took only 4 years for the term genocide to be incorporated into the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCG), which defines genocide as acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. This includes killing members of the group, causing serious harm, inflicting destructive conditions, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children.

The power of the term “genocide” lies in its ability to evoke strong connotations of murder on an industrial scale. In his seminal work “The Politics of Naming,” Mamdani discusses the unique legal effects of the term “genocide” in campaigning and advocacy. He emphasises that international actors, particularly the United States, have instrumentalised “genocide” for political purposes. He critically analyses the situations in Darfur and Iraq between 2003 and 2005, noting that the estimated number of civilians killed in each was roughly similar, around 70,000 to 200,000. In both cases, the killers were mostly paramilitaries linked to the official militaries, targeting groups rather than individuals. Despite these similarities, the violence in Iraq was labeled as a cycle of insurgency and counterinsurgency, while in Darfur, it was called genocide. This difference in labelling led to greater international attention and prioritisation of Darfur. 

The “Save Darfur” campaign’s use of the term “genocide” had significant legal effects, including the establishment of international legal bodies for Darfur and the prevention of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other human rights violations. It highlights the importance of naming in campaigning and advocacy and the power of language when using the word “genocide.” As “the crime of crimes,” it demands immediate intervention.   

However, despite campaigns by Palestinian Al-Haq and CAYP to recognise the atrocities in Gaza and the Eastern DRC as genocides, both remain contested cases. These campaigns align with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s conceptualisation in “Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language,” which posits that language is not just a communication tool but a repository of culture, history, identity, and self-definition. Labelling atrocities in Eastern DRC and the Gaza Strip as “genocides” extends beyond legal definitions, as these frameworks focus on the present and ignore the historical context of Congolese and Palestinians’ sufferings.    

CAYP and Al-Haq argue that the current situations in their states mirror past genocides, such as the 1885 Genocost in DRC and the 1948 Nakba in Palestine. These earlier atrocities, part of a continuum of oppression, were not recognised as “genocide” at that time as there was nothing like the UNCG. Even if such a convention had existed, it would have applied only to the “civilised” world of post-1948 (preamble of the UNCG), excluding places like the DRC and Palestine. 

The 1948 UNCG defines genocide in a Eurocentric manner, to spare Europe from accountability for deserving cases of genocide it had already imposed on many segments of the world’s population before 1948. It does not take into account the entire understanding of genocide as even Lemkin – the one who coined the term – did. Lemkin understood genocides as processes aimed at the destruction of a certain group’s essential foundation of life and identified specific methods of group annihilation: political (cessation of self-government and destruction of political institutions), social (annihilation of national leadership, attack on legal system), cultural (ban on the use of language), economic (destruction of the foundation of economic existence), biological (decrease in the birth rate), physical (mass murder, endangering of health), religious (disruption of religious influence, destruction of religious leadership), and moral (creation of an atmosphere of moral debasement). His UN colleagues, however, deemed this proposal an unacceptable extension of the term. Therefore, what constitutes ‘‘genocide’’ was thus contested from the beginning, demonstrating that the UNCG or at least the definition is not fit for purpose; the term was defined in Eurocentric ways to insulate Europe and to prevent prosecutions. That is why we must not be surprised to see many cases of “genocide” endlessly contested. 

In addition, as usual, the first step in any colonial process is the erasure of the colonised people’s memory. Once this memory is erased, it is replaced with that of the coloniser, making it easier to control the colonised. The UNCG tends not to acknowledge the past colonial brutality that was undeniably genocidal. It carefully omits all forms of genocide that occurred during colonial times under various colonial powers. This raises questions about whether Al-Haq and CAYP are fighting a losing battle by operating within an international criminal justice system designed to facilitate erasure. While campaigning and advocacy use “genocide” they have to be clear that their understanding is a unique one. Perhaps their efforts should expand to encompass a comprehensive restructuring or dismantling of the Eurocentric international criminal justice system. In addition, while the term “genocide” is a powerful tool in campaigning and advocacy, CAYP and Al-Haq must be cautious as they risk ending up operating within and giving legitimacy to a Eurocentric system designed to serve imperialist and racist colonial interests. 

Even more interestingly, thanks to Congolese and Palestinians’ campaigns against genocides, Social media users around the world have adopted the term “genocide,” the discursive power of which has been so useful in talking about Gaza, to invite the public to share its sense of urgency between Palestine, the DRC, and Sudan — all of which are facing unique, but related crises. Social media users — especially young people — have been quick to recognise the shared struggle between the people of Palestine and African peoples.Labelling the Congolese and Palestinian situations as genocide is beneficial. However, “Genocost” and “Nakba” are preferable, and there is a need to recognise these terms as legal concepts. By promulgating new laws that (re)capture the totality of the Congolese and Palestinian conditions, we may yet escape the confines of the Eurocentric definition of genocide in current legal narratives.