Has the International Criminal Court, as Paul Kagame charged, ‘been put in
place only for African countries’? Having spent hundreds of millions of
dollars, only securing its first conviction on 14 March, it might also
be thought a shameful waste of resources. All that effort, just to
convict Thomas Lubanga Dyilo
for recruiting children as soldiers nearly ten years ago.
Prosecuting
criminals w...
Has the International Criminal Court, as Paul Kagame charged, ‘been put in
place only for African countries’? Having spent hundreds of millions of
dollars, only securing its first conviction on 14 March, it might also
be thought a shameful waste of resources. All that effort, just to
convict Thomas Lubanga Dyilo
for recruiting children as soldiers nearly ten years ago.
Prosecuting
criminals with vast resources at their disposal, however, is neither
cheap nor easy – some of them are heads of state, after all, and have
vast funds with which to fend off justice. This was also the court’s
first case. It needed to be a success.
So much for the resources. And
the fairness? ‘Why not Argentina,
why not Myanmar, why not Iraq?’ Jean
Ping complained. The court’s answer was, because most of the
cases were
themselves referred by Africans. They knew their own countries were too
fragile to bring to justice villains of such magnitude.
Which, lest we
forget, the ICC did. Lubanga was a frequent visitor to these pages in
2002 and 2003 during the worst of the Congo-Kinshasa
bloodbath, a
cruel, greedy warlord with the blood of tens of thousands of Congolese
civilians on his hands. There were many like him. Indeed, in the lonely
years to come, he may echo Ping’s words and ask, ‘Why me?’ Why not
those who gave him orders, sponsored, condoned and collaborated with
him, such as first the Ugandan,
and then the Rwandan,
governments?
