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My
point of view on this may sound provocative but I hold to it passionately. It
is that an agreement such as Lomé, which was meant to bring the civil war to
an end, should not have been treated as if it was an agreement recklessly to
grant immunity for wrongdoing. This was, unfortunately, the blandly inept and
misleading notion – mischievous in any respect – that notably Amnesty
International and the US Human Rights Watch propounded to their audiences. To
this day both continue to hold fastidiously to their positions. The result
was that confidence in the effectiveness of Lomé was seriously undermined
from day one of its coming into force, and even before the ink of the
signatories had dried up. We
also had the unseemly spectacle of one of the putative moral guarantors and
key role players of the agreement – the United Nations – publicly,
paradoxically, entering a reservation on the clauses dealing with the
amnesty, while Mary Robinson, the UN's High Commissioner for Human Rights,
was doing global rounds whipping up a maelstrom of ambivalence over peace or
continuing warfare. It is this institutional ambivalence of the human rights
lobby that needs to be corrected urgently to avoid confusion in future. At
the same time, I do have to make a candid assertion. It is that the grant of
a pardon– in Sierra Leone's case blanket amnesty under the Lomé Agreement - to rebel aggressors, some of whom
admittedly are of the worst kind ever, is clearly at odds with the norms of
the rule of law in any democratic society. My point however is that by any
standards, Sierra Leone is not a democratic society, no matter what anyone
might say. The government is not democratic nor are the prevailing conditions
of life by any stretch of the imagination, what with a permanent state of
emergency in force! Not even the vapid and sometimes patronising tantrums of
external ethical purveyors of this illusory notion can alter that fact. This
hollow pretence that somehow Sierra Leone is a normal society borders on
intellectual dishonesty and must stop. Instead the reality and experience on
the ground must be considered. The
indisputable fact is that, whether we like it or not, a horrible civil war is
being fought in Sierra Leone and it has gone on for close to 10 ugly years.
Thus the consequence of such a fact alone, in the words of the UK Guardian newspaper of July 29, in its
editorial approving the decision to let loose known mass IRA and Loyalist
killers on to the streets of "civilised" Belfast, is that "...when it comes to making peace,
the normal rules cannot always apply either …The painful fact is that when
wars are ending justice sometimes has to take second place to ensuring
peace". It
only needs to be said that that whatever happens, the worst brutes on all
sides must be made to give account but I do not think that an international
tribunal is the best forum for that. The cart is being placed ahead of the
horse. What needs to be put into place first is a credible Truth and
Reconciliation Commission to investigate these matters, and elicit the facts
upon which a decision to prosecute the very worst offenders can be safely and fairly made. Then a court, and it not need to be international,
can be empowered to undertake a criminal trail. Most international criminal
courts/tribunals tend to be set up during or after a war and operate unfairly
because they already presume the guilt of the accused however much they wrap
their terminology in legalistic verbiage; and the accused are always the
'losers' of the war. How many brutish killers have not fought their way to
power in many countries and stayed there with the tacit acquiescence of the
so-called 'conscientious' moral world order? In
the main, international criminal courts and tribunals: (a) always run the
risk of only serving to play to the public gallery and inadvertently satisfy,
thus pamper and succumb to, the excesses of those who are out to seek revenge
for whatever reasons; and, consequently, (b) do not solve or even address the
political problems inherent in the conflict but gloss over the crucial facts
that need to be brought to light, to
explain and make everyone understand the root causes of these horrendous
events and the motives and the identity of some of the largely anonymous
persons behind them. It seems to me that this development in Sierra Leone is a knee-jerk reaction that is aimed at extending the Arusha Tribunal’s remit to crimes against humanity. But lest it should be forgotten, one must point out (in the words of a BBC teletext commentary) that "in those countries, as in Yugoslavia (until recently), Burundi, Mozambique and Angola, the people accused of atrocities were/are in power, too powerful to be tried, or have been brought into the state structure as part of a negotiated peace process. What made Rwanda different was the fact that the war in that country was won outright". So maybe the objective of the present manoeuvres in Sierra Leone by the UN and the British Government should be seen as a move for decisive victory. In the absence of that, it is a waste of time and money trying Sankoh and any others, not to talk of putting on trial child soldiers who are just as much the victims of this war. |
