Press Release
October 12, 2017
American
Lawyers Announce Collection of Evidence to Prosecute Nigeria’s President Buhari
and Lt. General Buratai in the International Criminal Court for Genocide and
Crimes Against Humanity
WASHINGTON, D.C.-- On behalf of
Biafrans who covet justice—the dead, the living, and those yet to be born—the
law firm of Fein & DelValle PLLC is drafting a criminal indictment against
Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari and Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant
General Tukur Yusfu Buratai, for genocide and crimes against humanity under the
Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Buhari and
Buratai are criminally culpable because of their command responsibility over
security forces operating under their direction or control and who are
terrorizing tens of millions of Biafrans specifically because of their
Christianity and ethnicity. The crimes
include extrajudicial killings, torture, and sister unspeakable horrors. They are the grisly signature of Buhari’s and
Buratai’s ongoing military campaign in the South East region with the
euphemistic moniker “Operation Python Dance II.
The
indictment being drafted by Fein & DelValle will be presented to Chief
Prosecutor of the ICC, Fatou Bensouda. It will be modeled after the genocide or
crimes against humanity indictments returned against Serbia’s Slobodan
Milosevic, Sudan’s Omar Bashir, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, Chad’s Hissen Habre,
and Cambodia’s Comrade Duch.
The
overwhelming majority of Biafrans cannot speak for themselves without risking
lethal retaliation by President Buhari or Lt. General Buratai. That fear explains the reason the United
States District Court for the District of Columbia granted the motion of Fein
& DelValle to reference their ten (10) Biafran plaintiffs anonymously in
their Torture Victims Protection Act suit against sixteen (16) individual
Nigerian defendants in Doe, et al. v.
Buratai, et al., Civil Action No. 1:17-cv-0133.
Fein &
Delvalle are gathering photographic, video, and testimonial evidence of the
ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity perpetrated by Buhari and Buratai
against Igbos not only in the South East region, but also in northern Nigeria
and elsewhere. There is no safe haven in
Nigeria for them. Last June, Hausa
Fulani youths in northern Nigeria (AREWA) with impunity threated to evict
eleven million Igbos from their homes and businesses in northern Nigeria by
force and violence if they did not quit the area by October 1, 2017.
Mr. Fein
stated: “We are confident that 50
million Igbos in Nigeria were not born
with saddles on their backs ready to be ridden by booted and spurred
Hausa-Fulani with the grace of God.
Criminal prosecutions of Buhari and Buratai before the International
Criminal Court are the best way of teaching that gospel.”
Mr. Fein
and Mr. DelValle voiced optimism that the prosecutions of Buhari and Buratai
will prompt the United Nations Security Council to task the United Nations
Electoral Unit to conduct a referendum on Biafran independence in the South
East region; and, to operate a transitional government for a six-month period
prior to the balloting to avoid any intimidation of the voters. It is no accident that South Sudan achieved
independence on the heels of President Bashir’s ICC indictment for genocide in
Darfur.
Nigeria’s
current borders were drawn by a racist British colonial master more than a
century ago with no reference to the inhabitants. The boundaries are morally, legally, and
politically indefensible. The Government
of Nigeria does not reflect popular will on that score. It rules under a 1999 Constitution that was
decreed by a military dictator for the purpose, among other things, of holding
Igbos in bondage to Hausa-Fulani terrorists.
Britain
defaulted on its decolonization obligation to permit self-determination
referenda by each of the separate and distinct peoples of Nigeria. United Nations General Assembly Resolution
1514, December 14, 1960, provides: “All peoples have the right to self-determination; by
virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely
pursue their economic, social and cultural development.”.
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