Alongside his domestic work, he also turned his attention to events elsewhere in Africa, and in 1987 gave the keynote speech at the All Africa Conference of Churches (AACC) in Lomé, Togo. There, he called on churches to champion the oppressed throughout the continent, stating that "it pains us to have to admit that there is less freedom and personal liberty in most of Africa now then there was during the much-maligned colonial days." At the conference, he was elected president of the AACC, while José Belo was elected its general-secretary. Calling for an "African renaissance" across the continent, the pair formed a partnership that would last a decade. In 1989 they visited Zaire to encourage the country's churches to distance themselves from Seko's autocratic government. In 1994, he and Belo visited war-torn Liberia in a mission co-organised by the AACC and the Carter Center. There, they met Charles Taylor, but Tutu did not trust his promise of a ceasefire. In 1995, Mandela sent Tutu to Nigeria to meet with Nigerian military leader Sani Abacha to request the release of imprisoned politicians Moshood Abiola and Olusegun Obasanjo. In July 1995, he visited Rwanda a year after the genocide, where he preached to 10,000 people in Kigali. Drawing on his experiences in South Africa, he called for justice to be tempered with mercy towards the Hutu who had orchestrated the genocide. Tutu also travelled to other parts of world, for instance spending March 1989 in Panama and Nicaragua.