Human Rights Abuses
On 6 September 1994, Abacha declared that his regime had absolute power, placing his government above the jurisdiction of the courts. He did, however, promise to hand the government over to civilians in 1998.
Despite his stated commitment to returning the country to democracy, Abacha's government was accused of human rights abuses, especially after the hanging of Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa by the Oputa Commission (only one of several executions of Ogoni activists opposed to the exploitation of Nigerian resources by the multinational petroleum company, Royal Dutch Shell Group); Abiola and Olusegun Obasanjo were jailed for treason, and Wole Soyinka charged in absentia with treason. His regime suffered stiff opposition internally and externally by pro-democracy activists who made the regime unpopular, and responded by banning political activity in general and by controlling the press in particular; a significant fraction of the military was purged. Abacha surrounded himself with approximately 3,000 armed men loyal to him. His government compared to other Nigerian governments was characterised by an inconsistent foreign policy: He supported the Economic Community of West African States and sent Nigerian troops to Liberia and Sierra Leone to restore democracy to those countries while denying it at home. Abacha scoffed at the threat of economic sanctions on account of the world's dependence on petroleum, of which Nigeria is a major producer.
Despite being repeatedly condemned by the US State Department, Abacha did have a few ties to American politics. In 1997, Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) travelled to Nigeria to meet with Abacha as a representative of "The Family", a group of evangelical Christian politicians and civic leaders. Abacha and The Family had a business and political relationship from that point until his death.
Abacha also developed ties with other American political figures such as Senator Carol Mosley Braun, Rev. Jessie Jackson and Minister Louis Farrakhan. Several African American political leaders visited Nigeria during his reign and Farrakhan supported the regime, while it was seen as an international pariah. Farrakhan also had a street in Nigeria named after him. The street name was changed back to its original name after Abacha's death.
Read more about this topic: Sani Abacha
Famous quotes containing the words human rights, human, rights and/or abuses:
“Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune, or “broken heart,” is excuse for cutting off one’s life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.”
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935)
“We can imagine a society in which no one could survive as a social being because it does not correspond to biologically determined perceptions and human social needs. For historical reasons, existing societies might have such properties, leading to various forms of pathology.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“It seemed like this was one big Prozac nation, one big mess of malaise. Perhaps the next time half a million people gather for a protest march on the White House green it will not be for abortion rights or gay liberation, but because we’re all so bummed out.”
—Elizabeth Wurtzel, U.S. author. Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America, p. 298, Houghton Mifflin (1994)
“Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the Establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality, but to those of another.”
—Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979)