The Abacha clan is not usually credited with promoting either family values or social welfare. Since seizing power m a November 1993 coup Nigeria’s seventh military, ruler, Gen. Sani Abacha, has jailed the country’s elected president, cracked down on the pro-democracy press, imprisoned as many as 7,000 political opponents, allegedly stolen more than $1 billion in oil revenues and presided over the country’s economic collapse. Last November the dictator ordered the hanging of playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa and nine other environmental activists from the Ogoni tribe-executions that provoked international outrage and led to a now faltering campaign to impede economic sanctions against the junta. Yet Abacha has found an ardent apologist in Moseley-Braun, the only African-American in the U.S. Senate and a fierce proponent of “constructive engagement” with the Nigerian dictatorship. “I hope our government is moving towards a policy of fairness,” she told a group of journalists in Abuja before her audience with the notoriously reclusive despot. “I think we have an obligation to see to it that our policy in Nigeria is formulated based on facts and not on fiction or prejudice.”
Moseley-Braun’s four-day “private visit” (as the U.S. State Department characterized it) to Nigeria last week hardly seemed designed to ferret out the facts. Early in her trip the senator traveled with military escorts through Ogoniland, the oil-rich-and environmentally devastated-area where Saro-Wiwa launched his doomed protest campaign against Royal Dutch/Shell in 1993, and where hundreds of civilians have since been killed in a military crackdown. “She didn’t talk to a single Ogoni activist,” says Robert Azibaola. a human-rights-group leader in Ogoniland. In nearby Port Harcomt. Mosely-Braun chatted with military governor Col. Dauda Musa Korao, the official who supervised the hangings of Sano-Wiwa and the oilier activists. Government-owned Radio Rivers State later reported that she praised Komo for bringing peace to the region. (Moseley-Braun declined NEWSWEEK’S requests for an interview, but through a spokesman claimed that she didn’t characterize the regime “either positively or negatively.”) Moseley-Braun didn’t meet with pro-democracy leaders in Lagos–though she asked U.S. Ambassador Walter Carrington to provide her with a list of candidates– and reportedly didn’t raise the issue of mass detentions or other human-rights abuses in her meetings with junta officials. Opponents of the dictatorship were appalled. “We expect that democratic forces should be on our side, to show sympathy and support,” says Abdul Oroh, executive director of the Civil Liberties Organization, a Lagos-based human-rights watchdog group. “When someone such as Moseley-Braun gets comfortable with a tyrannical, illegitimate government, we wonder what’s going on. We wonder who are our friends.”
Moseley-Braun has found plenty of friends within Nigeria’s military cabal. Since her election to the Senate in 1992, the former Cook County recorder of deeds has made several trips to Nigeria. In 1993, opposition sources say, she was feted in Abuja by Abaeha’s predecessor, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, and later, according to the Washington weekly City Paper, tried to persuade President Clinton to meet with the dictator during his visit to Washington. Clinton refused, and three months later Babangida quashed Nigeria’s presidential election, plunging the country into three years of political turmoil. In recent months Moseley-Braun’s pro-junta crusade has grown more strident. She has been one of the few members of the Congressional Black Caucus to oppose the Nigeria Democracy Act, which would place an array of additional sanctions on Nigeria, halting U.S. investment and freezing the junta’s assets. Moseley-Braun argues that imposing sanctions on Nigeria and not China would be a racist “double standard,” and claims the real victims will be Nigeria’s poor. Most Abacha opponents both inside and outside Nigeria reject that argument. “The poor are already hurting because of this illegitimate regime,” says Nwiza Muntahalf, a spokesman for TransAfrica, a Washington-based pro-democracy lobbying group. “There’s no medicine, no books. Universities are shutting down. People can’t be hurt more than they already are.” That’s a message Moseley-Braun might have taken home-had she talked to someone besides Abacha and his cronies.
