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Africa: International Criminal Court Indictments for Genocide - Who'll Bell the Cats?
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The Monitor (Kampala)
OPINION
23 July 2008
Posted to the web 23 July 2008
The establishment a few years ago of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to try exceptionally grievous crimes against humanity as perpetrated by rulers or groups of rulers in various corners of the world was tragically late.
Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Polpot of Cambodia's Khmer Rouge who put away anything between two and four million people in Cambodia's killing fields, all went to their deaths unpunished. Human history as a whole is sadly full of these monstrous excrescences; but post-independence Africa in particular has made spectacular contribution to a growing club of genocidal monsters. It is little wonder that all the persons indicted or served with arrest warrants to date hail from Africa.
Aside from the Dirty Five from Uganda, there have been two Congolese, one Liberian and, lately, a Sudanese superstar who joins two others from his country, one being a member of his cabinet. The rest of the world has provided only Slobodan Milesovitch (RIP). As Africans we have reason to be proud.
Not only have we invented child-soldiers dubbed Kadogos, but we have also perfected the use of rape as a weapon of war, sometimes raping even men-against the order of nature-specifically in order to try to spread HIV and Aids. Where that is deemed too slow and time consuming we have fried men alive in railway wagons.... Pure genius.
So why is General Hassan Omar El Bashir of Sudan pissing in his pants and ranting incoherently as though there is hot porridge in his mouth which he can neither swallow nor spit out? If lesser fry like Joseph Kony and what is left of Uganda's Dirty Five have successfully evaded capture, what does the president of Africa's largest country have to worry about?
The world is still busy trying to decide what constitutes "genocide" why is Gen. Bashir who by his own admission has killed only 10,000 persons in Darfur province running scared? As far as I am concerned even one person killed extrajudicially is already one too many. According to other counts, at least 300,000 Darfurians have been " put out of action", countless women and girls raped and desecrated , and more than 2 million citizens sent scurrying into both internal and external exile, their ancestral homes having been pillaged and torched by a pitiless militia that has magically procured air support from some "unknown" source. And the executive president of the country does not know? Even though he is a General? If he has admitted that "only 10,000" people have been killed, as if arithmetic matters in murder, how many killers has the good president prosecuted and jailed?
The ICC will have to change its tack if these blustering mass murders are to stand any chance of getting brought to justice. These sneaky tactics of waiting for Jean - Pierre Bemba , for example, to put a foot wrong and blender into Belgium does not wash.
Can't this UN-supported court send in commandos to spirit out an indicted criminal on the pain of dire sanctions or even outright should there be resistance? What is the point of issuing an arrest warrant when you don't have the ability to effect the arrest? As it is, all a criminal has to do is lie low in the capital of his jungle country, avoid all international engagements that might entail leaving his country, and do his shopping by proxy, for ever and ever until he dies of old age.
There is a more serious shortcoming. How does the ICC identify its targets? In certain continents known to me almost all revolutionary rulers have used child- soldiers to shoot their way to power, presided over rapid armies that have raped on an industrial scale, often raping babies to death, and they have all but wiped out sections of the population deemed to be dissidents.
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Charles Taylor? But there are dozens of Charles Taylor's on this good planet! Why Jean - Pierre Bemba and not George W. Bush? Why Thomas Lubanga but not Laurent Nkunda? Or Robert Mugabe for the massacre of the Ndebele in Matebele land? What is the point of resolving to bell the cat if you don't have the balls to bell the cat?
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