Continuing his tour of the African
continent, the US President made a flying visit to the North African
state of South Azanta, a US ally to which Washington has
sent much arms. Unfortunately, the President could not leave the
Azantan
airport, as the capital was gripped by a wave of strikes and
demonstrations by the political opposition. In a brief
press conference at the airport, amid the distant sound of exploding
shells, the President told his hosts that Azanta needed to follow the
US example of democracy, openness and tolerance. He said he had
received disturbing reports of targetted killings by the Azantan
security forces against minority ethnic groups. He said the Azantan
President could not escape responsibility for the actions of forces
under his authority. He said the Azantan government's failure to take
action against a systematic pattern of targetted killings perpetrated
over many years was tantamount to an endorsement of these killings, for
which these officials ultimately would be held responsible.
In a no-nonsense mood, the President urged Africa to follow the example
of the West and not take direction from the likes of China and Russia,
which did not have a culture of respect for human rights including the
right to peaceful protest. He said that peaceful protesters in Azanta
had faced massive intimidation by government security forces carrying
military assault weapons and protest leaders had been arrested and
detained. by the police. He said that such oppressive tactics only
served to increase disaffection. He maintained that Azanta had a
massive number of uncoordinated, heavily-armed security forces, and
that no government could survive by attempting to hold its civilian
population under heel by force of arms. He said African politicians
should understand that ultimately power was held through the will of
the people and not by the maintenance of a massive security force. He
said that in many parts of Africa there was no real independence of the
police or judiciary, and that these two sectors worked closely with the
politicians to protect each others interests. In America, he said,
peaceful protest was a right and the police did not interfere with it.
African leaders, he said, spent too much time protecting
and rewarding their own tribesmen rather than concentrating on
the nation as a whole.
When asked by a journalist how the Azantan President could be held
responsible for the actions of the police force, whilst in America the
President was absolved of blame for police actions, he replied that in
America police officers accused of wrongdoing were taken before a court
of law, tried and if convicted, severely punished. When told that 99.9%
of such trials had ended in acquittal of the officers concerned, the
President expressed doubt that Azantan journalists would have accurate
statistics on the US justice system.
When told by journalists that
according to official figures US police
killed several thousand civilians per year whilst Azantan police only
killed several hundred, the US President appeared to become somewhat
irritated and said that by no stretch of the imagination could the
situation in Azanta be compared to that in America. He said per capita
police killings of the civilian population were two to three times
higher in Azanta than in America, and in any case the American police
had been acting within the ambit of US law.
When asked by journalists whether he in fact was not responsible for
the high level of police killings in the US, having allowed the
situation to fester for so long, he replied that he had come to Africa
to
help Africans, not to be insulted by African journalists
As tension mounted in the conference room, the President declined to
take
further questions and flew out of the airport shortly thereafter. It
was later announced that he would be cutting short his African trip to
attend to pressing issues back in his country. It was understood that
restive tribesmen had created a
potentially embarrassing situation in his country that
required his personal attention.