Deadly Marionettes: State-Sponsored Violence in Africa (review)

Article 19 is a nongovernmental organization dedicated to the systematic and worldwide elimination of censorship. Article 19 takes its name from the same article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which guarantees that “[e]veryone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression . . . includ[ing the] freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers.” ¹

When it was established in 1986, the London based Article 19 became the first organization exclusively devoted to protecting and promoting the right to freedom of expression worldwide. ² In just over a decade, Article 19 has evolved into a well-respected and widely operating organization with additional offices in Washington, D.C., New York City, and a recently opened regional office in South Africa.

Since its inception, Article 19 has maintained its exclusive focus on freedom of expression while generating a diverse and expansive list of publications, clients, and research. One of the most recent publications issued by Article 19 in January 1999, is Kid’s Talk: Freedom of Expression and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. ³ This comprehensive report examines the articles of the Convention that pertain to freedom of expression, explores the ways in which these articles have or have not been enforced, analyzes the application of the Convention in a series of case studies, and provides conclusions and recommendations for how to better protect children’s freedom of expression and access to information under the Convention.

This review focuses on Article 19’s October 1997 report, Deadly Marionettes: State-Sponsored Violence in Africa. ⁴ Like Kid’s Talk, Deadly Marionettes exemplifies Article 19’s thematic focus on detecting and comprehensively analyzing patterns of censorship throughout the world. Deadly Marionettes identifies the problem of covert state-sponsored violence in Africa, examines seven country case studies of this kind of violence, and targets the common themes apparent in each case. Although more recent country-specific reports have since been issued on several of the countries examined, ⁵ a review of Deadly Marionettes is valuable because it provides an overall context in which these discrete examples of censorship can be recognized as part of a general pattern.

The preface to Deadly Marionettes defines the objective of the report: “to help create a common recognition of ‘informal repression’ as a human rights issue.” ⁶ The term “informal repression,” originally coined in this report, refers to the secret government sponsorship of violence against political opposition to, and critics of, the government. Because oral communication is the dominant means of conveying information in Africa, informal repression in the African context is censorship of the spoken word. Informal repression characteristically targets local communities and is usually carried out by ethnic or religious militias. ⁷ The report notes that, by covertly sponsoring such violence, national governments are able to maintain a monopoly on political power while publicly representing themselves as pro-democracy.

The introduction to Deadly Marionettes explains the problem of informal repression and why it needs to be addressed. Then, the report presents case studies of informal repression in seven African countries: Zimbabwe, South Africa, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Nigeria, and Cameroon. Deadly Marionettes concludes with an analysis of the themes common to each case study. In doing so, the report crystallizes the characteristics of informal repression so that the human rights community can begin to develop means to identify and dismantle the violent regimes.

Introduction

Providing some background to why this report is both timely and necessary, the introduction to Deadly Marionettes links the rise in informal repression in Africa to the rise in both national and international scrutiny of human rights abuses. Because the monitoring of governments’ human rights performance has increased, politically powerful people who once manipulated the political climate through openly violent means have been forced to drive their violent measures underground.

Examples of informal repression on the African continent are disturbingly abundant. The introduction provides a brief but...