David Crane : He has the blessings of the Sierra Leonean people
CAN SPECIAL COURT REALLY DELIVER JUSTICE ? PART 1
BY KABS KANU :
Day and night, the blood of the 250,000 innocent children , women and men slaughtered by the warring factions in Sierra Leone cry out for justice from the grave. Their blood cry out day and night for justice because they had no reason to be set upon by the fighters and wickedly bludgeoned , hacked or shot to death during the senseless Civil War in the country.Most of them were innocent citizens or foreigners who had no hands in the political dynamics in the country.
The warring factions in Sierra Leone , in an inexplicable shift from the principles of warfare , hunted out only the poor, the hapless, the innocent and ordinary people instead of targetting enemy fighters. When they did not burn, bludgeon or shoot innocent people to death, they hacked off their limbs , thereby rendering them hopeless for the rest of their lives.
Those unlucky thousands underwent that gruesome agony only because they were unfortunate to live in a country where some of their citizens had developed contempt and spite for human dignity and human life. How men and women who grew up in a country established on Godly principles could sink to such depths of moral depravity, callousness and contempt even for the God who created them could be easily attributed to the demonic assurance that our people have developed that they can rape, loot, kill, amputate and steal and nothing will come out of it. It is now customary in Sierra Leone to hear men and women brag with devillish alacrity : “I will blow yor head off and nothing will come out of it. I will kill you and pay for you at the Police Station.”
One can therefore empathise with men like Dr. David Crane , Geoffrey Robertsen and other members of the Special Court in their unbriddled zeal to make sure that those bearing the greatest responsibility for such diabolical mentality in Sierra Leone are given their just recompence. Only people with a warped sense of justice and patriotism will stand in the way of these men as they try to bring justice to Sierra Leone.
Thankfully, most Sierra Loneans adore the Special Court .Despite the agitation over the indictment of the Kamajor Commander, Chief Hinga Norman, whom many Sierra Leoneans believe should have been indemnified because he was fighting on the side of the effort to defeat the rapists, arsonists, anarchists and human butchers who had turned Sierra Leone into a living Hell, the generality of Sierra Leoneans still support the Special Court.
Despite their support for the court, however, some Sierra Leoneans have lately become sceptical about the ability of the court to succeed in its mission. The court has committed administrative and legal blunders that should not have been seen happening in the first place. For this, the UN and the daft government that negotiated the formation of the court should bear some of the blame.
The Special Court erred in trying to arrest the Kingpin of the suffering of the Sierra Leonean people, Charles Taylor, while he was attending a conference in Ghana without first putting the mechanism in action to ensure that once it issued the international warrant of arrest for Taylor, it will be implicitly executed by the host country. The court is assuming too much .It should have known that Africa , by no stretch of the imagination , is the First World. It is unconscionable in some developed countries for an international arrest warrant on an internationally known war criminal to be snobbed as was done in Ghana. But this is Africa, a still dark continent , where the rule of law is not regarded and where leaders thumb their noses at international law because they too are criminals worthy of indictment like the selfsame Charles Taylor.
READ PART 2
Leave a Reply