{UAH} THE FRAUDLENT'S LEGACY MAY BE GREENLIGHTING GENOCIDE

Biden’s legacy may be greenlighting genocide

by Michael Rubin

November 18, 2021 07:00 AM

Shortly after taking office, Secretary of State Antony Blinken promised to put human rights at the center of foreign policy. "The United States is committed to a world in which human rights are protected, their defenders are celebrated, and those who commit human rights abuses are held accountable," he said .

Someone should have told climate envoy John Kerry. For Kerry, getting President Xi Jinping’s signature on a piece of paper is mutually exclusive with countering the genocide that Xi wages against China’s Uyghur population. Kerry’s posture is crass and immoral but, unfortunately, also the tip of the iceberg. The scale of repression the Uyghurs endure may pale in comparison to a genocide developing in Nigeria that the State Department appears determined to ignore.

This week, Blinken visits Africa. In the Nigerian capital of Abuja, he will meet Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari to discuss the environment, democracy, and security. That will be a bad day for human rights. Blinken might applaud Buhari’s democracy and climate virtue-signaling, but the reality is that Buhari has more blood on his hands than any African leader besides Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed .

A former military coup leader, Nigerians know Buhari best for the brutal suppression of the southeastern Biafra state during the Nigerian Civil War a half-century ago. Since rebranding himself a democrat and returning to power in 2015, he has made the eradication of the largely Christian but oil-rich Biafra his priority. The potential for mass murder is growing. With a population of 65 million, there are five times more Biafrans than Uyghurs. The State Department’s depiction of conflict in Biafra as rooted in land disputes between herders and farmers is akin to saying that a land dispute between soldiers and farmers motivated the Nazi invasion of Ukraine.

Nor is the fighting in Biafra spontaneous. Rather, Buhari’s government targets Biafra’s Yoruba people. To achieve this ethnic cleansing and genocide, Buhari, a Fulani, relies on both Islamist Fulanis who now dominate Nigeria’s security forces and other Fulani militants and jihadis whom he buses in from Benin, Mali, Chad, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Burkina Faso, and Cameroon. This is state-sanctioned use of mercenaries paid in rape loot. The mercenaries and security forces dispossess Biafrans of their farms and land. There is a religious angle as well as Buhari deploys Islamists, many from far outside Biafra’s borders, to attack and displace the region’s Christians, Shiites, and even its small Jewish community . The Indigenous People of Biafra increasingly seeks a recognition of genocide from the United Nations. The Buhari regime’s response has been to up its arrest and rendition campaign against journalists and indigenous leaders.

Blinken may take a bad situation and make it worse should he offer Buhari greater security cooperation. While Buhari talks up the need to fight Boko Haram , which has terrorized the northeastern region of Nigeria, he diverts weaponry and forces to use against Biafran Christians. To support Nigerian security forces at this point is to facilitate murder and undermine religious freedom.

President Joe Biden’s team may embrace the rhetoric of human rights, but so long as it is willing to sacrifice principle for virtue-signaling, it will fool no one. The simple fact is that less than a year into its tenure, the Biden administration is shaping up to be the most genocide-friendly White House in decades.

Michael Rubin (@mrubin1971 ) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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