‘Johnny come lately’ on Citizenship

I was born and raised in Uganda. For the first sixteen years of my natural life, I was a Ugandan citizen. I sang the anthem with gusto; I cherished the ‘black –yellow- red’ stripes embroidered with a crested crane. My citizenship was never an issue that kept me awake at night. Well that was the case at least until the outbreak of the liberation struggle in October, 1990.My mother, on the other ,hand seemed to be battling demons that I could barely comprehend. At every opportunity she betrayed her desire to return to a homeland that was departed from unwillingly. Proverbially referred to as the land of milk and honey, my young impressionable mind couldn’t help but draw up images of an African El Dorado.As the battles between the FAR and RPA raged on in rural Rwanda, I began to hear assertions of the then president Habyarimana,“Rwanda is too full No room for returning refugees!” he declared. This only served to enhance my imagination as to how beautiful Rwanda must be; for everyone seemed to want a piece of it and others would rather keep it all to themselves.The gunshots had barely stopped when former refugees started to flock back home. My mother on her part did not disappoint. Kigali fell on 4th July, 1994. By mid August she was in town. What haste! I guess 30 years in exile does that to you. I was at boarding school at the time and only joined her for the Christmas holidays. To put it gently, I was underwhelmed. I know the war had just ended and I expected to find damaged infrastructure and indeed the evidence of war was everywhere. The problem was there wasn’t much of anything; no rubble, no damaged machinery, just nothing.As ghost towns go, Kigali in 1994 took the biscuit. I couldn’t stop wondering what it was that had driven people to fight so hard for all those years only to return to a desolate land such as the Rwanda that was before my eyes. Disclaimer: I was sixteen at the time.I now know that a home be it of mud and wattle is still a home. It’s one thing to be homeless. Being stateless, on the other hand, is something of completely different realm .The recent skirmishes in Eastern DRC with the outbreak of the M23 rebellion is in that realm. The Kinyarwanda speaking peoples of eastern DRC find themselves in a situation of ‘de facto statelessness’. The government of the DRC has turned their collective backs on them and left them to their own devices. Faced with possible annihilation at the hands of extremists, their fate is not unlike that of the Jews under Hitler. It has been often said that’ freedom is not given but is to be taken or won on battlefields’.In the words of Chetaji Subash Chandra Bose, a leader in India’s independence movement, “give me your blood and I will give you independence” Talk remains a cheap currency in battles of self determination. To be taken seriously you need to demonstrate a willingness to die for your cause. That is exactly what M23 are doing. It is a serious doubt whether the violence will produce a solution to the problems in the region but what’s for certain is that for any respite to the situation, something has to be done. The concerns of Kinyarwanda speaking peoples of Eastern DRC will have to be taken seriously and addressed.Under international law, one’s citizenship can be determined by three means; by right of birth, ancestry or naturalisation. Individual states still remain the custodians of the power to bestow or withdraw citizenship. This is all very well when states a run by scrupulous and just men of whom few exist in this world. In reality it has brought untold suffering to multitudes of people across the world.Events leading up to African elections can be very revealing on how far politicians can go to serve their own interests. Kenneth Kaunda who was Zambia’s first president, from 1964 to 1991, was briefly stripped of his citizenship in 1999 in the lead up to an election due to political differences with then incumbent president Fredrick Chiluba. Since the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN General Assembly in 1948, we have come a long way in ensuring that all states treat their citizens as human beings with equal rights as all other human beings across the world. The substantive rights encompass the right to live, freedom from torture, freedom from slavery, right to a fair trial, freedom of speech and freedom of thought, conscience and religion.Recently, access to internet is being considered a fundamental human right and has been ratified as such by the Government of Finland as of October 2009.Given the collective history of the world from the Armenian Genocide to the Jewish Holocaust, to Kurdish oppression to the Tibetan dilemma, is it not time to define a ‘right to citizenship’ as a human right?This human right would recognise that every human being is a citizen of one country or another by default but retains the freedom to choose if several options are available to him by the three means of determining citizenship. States would then be obliged to recognise citizenship of individuals as determined by internationally accepted standards. Any state found guilty of treating any of its population as second class citizens as is the case in the Eastern DRC would be deemed guilty of human rights violations. The government would be held accountable and individuals within the government would face trial.I am no legal expert but it’s my humble opinion that there is enough meat to work with there!