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07/07/2004:

"Sierra Leone: the Mysteries of a Special War Crimes Trial"

by Lansana Gberie zmag.org
So much for international humanitarian law and justice…

On 3 June  2004, the UN-created Special Court for Sierra Leone began prosecution of those it alleged bear "the greatest responsibility" for war crimes, violations of humanitarian law and related offenses during Sierra Leone's decade-long dirty war. It was a "solemn occasion," said the court's American prosecutor, David Crane, whose many shortcomings surely does not include modesty or under-statement. Crane summoned all of mankind to "once again [assemble] before an international tribunal to begin the sober and steady climb upwards toward the towering summit of justice." Waxing poetic---rather in the manner of high-pitched tele-evangelists of the American south---Crane declared: "The path will be strewn with the bones of the dead, the moans of the mutilated, the cries of agony of the tortured, echoing down into the valley of death below. Horrors beyond the imagination will slide into this hallowed hall as this trek upward comes to a most certain and just conclusion."

The prosecutor must surely be thinking of the depredations of Foday Sankoh, the nihilistic and self-adoring ex-corporal whose petty army, known as the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), terrorized Sierra Leone from 1991 to 2000 by crudely mutilating civilians and burning down towns? No. Sankoh died peacefully last year. Charles Taylor, the buccaneering Liberian thug-president who helped set up the RUF after unleashing a catastrophic war on his own country? Not a chance. Taylor is hundreds of miles away from the court, in comfortable exile in the Nigerian port city of Calabar. In fact, what inspired Crane's pithy eloquence was Sam Hinga Norman, a former Sierra Leone government minister and the putative leader of the Civil Defence Force (CDF), a group of civilians who organized to liberate villages overran by the RUF, keep the bloodthirsty rebel force in check, and restore a democratically-elected government which had been overthrown by the rebels and rogue government soldiers.  Bathos is too limited a word to describe this grandly demented exercise in how not to pursue international justice: even Joseph Conrad, with that cold eye for heroic absurdity and hypocrisy, would not have invented this. full article