African leaders try to obstruct international justice

Laurent Gbagbo, former president the Ivory Coast, has become the first former head of state to go on trial before the International Criminal Court at The Hague. He refused to step down after losing an election in 2010, and is accused of encouraging his militias and security forces to commit murder, rape and other crimes to keep him in power.

A very good thing that he should face trial, you might think, but that does not seem to be how other African rulers see it, and they appear to be using the African Union to try to hamstring the court.

When the ICC was set up in 2002, African leaders seemed pretty keen, but now the African Union has resolved to go on shielding President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan from facing charges of genocide in Darfur, and criticised prosecutions being brought against other African leaders such as Kenya’s deputy president, William Ruto, who is accused of orchestrating violence after an election 8 years ago.

Of course, the ICC is not perfect, and many leaders in Africa and other places who should face trial are powerful enough to escape, but surely it is surely in the interests of Africa’s people that some should face justice rather than none. If the continent’s rulers care about that.

Darfur - lest we forget

So far this year, an estimated 300,000 people have fled their homes in Sudan’s Darfur region according to the United Nations.    After a peace deal was signed in 2011, violence had died down, but not out.

Altogether, about 1.4 million people are now homeless, and 300,000 are believed to have died since the conflict began in 2003.  While on a visit to a refugee camp, the UN’s top humanitarian official, Valerie Amos, said the situation was ‘extremely worrying’.

She said displaced people faced chronic food shortages, and had to walk in fierce heat to get water.  They also lacked access to health care and education, while rebels were obstructing the distribution of aid.

The conflict began with rebels complaining that the Sudanese government favoured Arabs and oppressed black Africans.  Since it started, the mainly Arab Janjaweed militia has been accused of carrying out ethnic cleansing and genocide, and President al-Bashir has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for alleged war crimes.

(See also my blogs of March 4, 5 March, 6 Aug, 21 Sept, 2009 and 27 May 2010.)

* The fifth in my series of videos on Britain’s 20 Worst Military Disasters features the Battle of Hastings.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtIhODt-Wrc&feature=youtu.be

 

Genocide begets genocide?

The Rwandan government’s threat to withdraw its 3,400 personnel serving with the UN-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur (see my blog of Sept 3) seems to have had the desired effect. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon quickly jetted into the Rwandan capital, Kigali, to tell President Paul Kagame that he was “disappointed” about the leaking of a UN report accusing Rwandan forces of murdering tens of thousands of Hutus in the Congo.

A team from the UN’s office for the High Commissioner on Human Rights has catalogued more than 600 incidents, and it claims that President Kagame’s Hutu forces were involved in more than 100 of them.

In 1996, for example, Rwandan troops are said to have gone to the Chimanga refugee camp. They told the refugees they would be going back home. Then, on an apparently pre-arranged signal, they opened fire, killing up to 800.

Back in 1994, it was President Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front that put an end to the mass murder of Tutsis by extremist Hutus in Rwanda. Many of the perpetrators fled to the Congo, where they hid among a million other Hutus who had fled fearing for their lives under the new regime. It was when the genocide organisers started re-grouping that President Kagame ordered the invasion.

Another African genocide?

The mainly-Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front is justly praised for ending the genocide in that country in 1994, after 800,000 people had been slaughtered by Hutu extremists in just 100 days – the fastest mass murder in history. The story is chronicled in the film Hotel Rwanda.

Now though, the Tutsis find themselves accused in a leaked United Nations report of genocide in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo. When the genocidal Rwandan government was overthrown, more than two million Hutus are thought to have fled into the Congo, where some resumed attacks on Tutsis.

The Rwandan government then began backing Tutsi militias, who eventually overthrew the regime in Kinshasa. Other countries got involved – Uganda, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Angola – with the suspicion that they were trying to get their hands on a share of the Congo’s immense mineral wealth, and at least 5 million people died.

The leaked report accuses the Rwandans of killing tens of thousands of Hutu men, women and children. Rwanda has dismissed the findings as “insane”, and threatened to pull out of UN peace-keeping missions, which could be quite a blow for the organisation. The current commander of the joint UN-African Union mission in Darfur is a Rwandan.

(See also A Disastrous History of the World and my blogs of Jan 23, March 23, Sept 23, Oct 30, Dec 15, 2009 and Feb 25, 2010)

Darfur war crimes + warship explosion

Further evidence of a growing determination to hold suspected war criminals to account. For the first time ever the International Criminal Court has called on the UN Security Council to take action against a country for failing to arrest suspects.

The country in question is Sudan, and the suspects former Humanitarian Affairs (!) Minister Ahmed Haroun - who allegedly recruited and armed the Janjaweed militia - and Ali Muhammad Abd-Al-Rahman, one of the militia leaders – both accused of war crimes in Darfur. Today Omar al-Bashir, himself an alleged war criminal, begins a new term as Sudan’s president. More than 300,000 people are believed to have been killed in Darfur. (See my blogs of March 4 and Aug 6, 2009).

On this day…..95 years ago, a huge explosion ripped through HMS Princess Irene, a British navy minelayer berthed at Sheerness in Kent. Aboard were 300 Royal Navy personnel plus 76 dockyard workers. Just one of them survived.

As the First World War was raging at the time, there were all sort of rumours that the blast had been caused by dastardly and ingenious enemy action, but an official inquiry came to the conclusion that it was actually a faulty mine primer. For more details, see A Disastrous History of Britain.

Global warming and wars + deadly cyclone anniversary

Researchers at the University of California believe they have shown that global warming directly increases the chance of wars in Africa. Looking back over the period 1981-2002, they have calculated that conflicts are 50% more likely in hotter years. The war in Darfur is often cited as the first major conflict directly caused by climate change. (see my blog of Sept 21)

Meanwhile in the UK, the Royal Society, the Met Office, and the Natural Environment Research Council have issued an alarming warning about the environmental effects of global warming. And all this as expectations for next month’s climate summit in Copenhagen grow more and more depressed.

On this day…170 years ago, a cyclone is said to have killed 300,000 people as it whipped up 40 foot waves that devastated the area around Coringa at the mouth of the Ganges on India’s east coast. The storm also destroyed 20,000 boats.

Fifty years earlier in December 1789, a cyclone produced three tidal waves in the area that are supposed to have drowned 20,000.

Darfur - the first war over global warming?

Reports of the death of Darfur’s civil war appear premature. That hopeful diagnosis had been made last month by the outgoing head of the joint African Union-United Nations peacekeeping force, General Martin Agwai.

The lastest clashes came in the north of the region and are said to have cost the lives of about 20 civilians. The UN says that altogether 300,000 have died in the conflict since 2003 with 2.7 million driven from their homes. Peace talks are due to resume next month in Qatar.

The war is seen by some as the world’s first global warming conflict, as drought stirred up tensions between African farmers and Arab animal herders who used to happily coexist on the same land. (See also my blog of March 5th)

It's not just Darfur + Hiroshima

Another conflict in southern Sudan has now claimed more lives this year than the violence in Darfur over which President Omar Hassan al-Bashir faces charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. (See my blog of March 5th)

At least 185 Lou Nuer people were killed on Sunday when they were attacked by men from the Murle ethnic group. According to the United Nations, most of the dead were women and children. The conflict, which is being exacerbated by food shortages, has claimed more than 700 lives this year.

On this day…..64 years ago, an American B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Those close to ground zero were vaporised immediately, and over the days that followed, many more died from injuries, burns and the effects of radiation – taking the death toll to 92,000 in the first two weeks. Illnesses caused by radiation would continue to claim lives for years after, taking the total number of victims to at least 140,000.

The area around the epicentre is now the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, and one of its main features is the so-called A-bomb dome – the remains of the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, the closest building to the epicentre to survive in any recognisable form. I remember visiting the area in 1993, and the thing that sticks in my mind is how the traffic lights by the dome cheerily pealed out Coming through the Rye when it was time to cross.

Darfur + Stalin

The International Criminal Court has indeed issued a warrant for the arrest of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan (see yesterday’s blog). He is accused of two counts of war crimes and five of crimes against humanity.

The people of Darfur - a region in the west of Sudan that is about the size of France – have suffered six years of murder, rape and destruction, and up to 300,000 have died, while more than two and a half million have fled. The ICC already has a warrant out for Sudan's humanitarian affairs minister (!). President al-Bashir has responded predictably – expelling foreign aid organisations who do what little they can to keep the remaining Darfuris alive, while China and Ethiopia have protested against the arrest warrant.

On this day....56 years ago, Josef Stalin died. The Soviet dictator was one of history’s worst mass murderers – responsible for the deaths of up to 30 million people. The ways in which they died were many and varied. The forced collectivisation of agriculture in the 1930’s killed millions, though as Stalin’s then henchman Khrushchev said later, we do not know how many, because “no one was counting.”

As Stalin grew more and more paranoid, he began an orgy of show trials, with loyal Soviet citizens executed wholesale after admitting imaginary crimes. Then there were the gulags – the labour camps in the bleakest parts of the country – where people were sent to die for the most trivial offences, or for none at all. Many believe that Stalin was on the point of launching another purge when death claimed him.

War crimes

Following the conviction of a former priest (see my blog of March 1), now a woman MP has been gaoled for life for her part in the Rwanda genocide of 1994. Beatrice Nirere was found guilty of setting up road blocks where victims were detained.

Last week, three rebel commanders in Sierra Leone were convicted of crimes against humanity for systematically mutilating civilians and forcing children to become soldiers, while former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor is also on trial, and the International Criminal Court may soon issue a warrant for the arrest of President Omar Bashir of Sudan for alleged war crimes in Darfur. If this happens, it will be the first time a serving head of state has been indicted.

Meanwhile in Cambodia, the trial has begun of Kaing Guek Eav, also known as Duch, who ran the notorious S-21 prison in Phnom Penh – now a genocide museum – where at least 14,000 “enemies of the revolution” were tortured and killed in the 1970’s, and former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic is facing a UN tribunal at The Hague.

Many, many war criminals, of course, still escape justice, but these developments surely represent some cause for optimism that at least some of the guilty will be called to account.