One by one they go

ON April 26, 2012, the International Criminal Court (ICC) sitting in The Hague in The Netherlands announced its verdict in the case in which former Liberian President Mr Charles Taylor was being tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Mr Taylor was found guilty on 11 charges, including terrorism, rape, murder, sexual slavery, pillage and conscripting and enlisting children under 15 into the armed forces. There were those who applauded the verdict, which they said was to serve as a lesson to other dictators who might want to go the Mr Taylor. There were many others, especially in Africa, who saw the whole trial and verdict as an affront to the independence of the continent and a betrayal of a compatriot. Nobody could hold brief for Mr Taylor for what he was accused of doing. The issue is about the morality of those who accused him and sponsored his trial in The Hague. In August 2003, under a peace deal brokered under the auspices of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the then President Taylor offered to step down and seek asylum in Nigeria if that would bring peace to a country that had suffered more than 14 years of violent conflict. Based on this agreement, Mr Taylor exited the Executive Mansion in Monrovia and went into exile in Nigeria. His exit also fulfilled the expectations of Liberians in particular and ECOWAS as a whole when peaceful elections were held in 2006 and a new government under Mrs Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was formed. What amounted to a betrayal and playing subservience to foreign powers occurred in the same year when Mr Taylor was arrested by the Nigerian authorities on orders from President Olusegun Obasanjo and handed over to the UN War Crimes Prosecutor in Sierra Leone. The trial took more than five years and the verdict was given on April 26, 2012. Judgement will be given on May 30, 2012, but already prosecutors are asking for a sentence of 80 years for Mr Taylor. Without trying to exonerate Mr Taylor from any of the charges, there are many who believe that he is a victim of circumstances or going the way other leaders who lost favour with the United States after their services had become redundant. Remember that in 1985 Taylor managed to escape from a US prison and there were doubts as to how he could have succeeded in that and leave American soil without official assistance. There were strong suspicions that agents within the US Administration might have played a critical role in that escape to prepare Taylor for the rebellion against President Samuel Doe who had become an object to be dispensed with. Those who know the story of Manuel Antonio Noriega of Panama will tell you that he was, for many years, a collaborator of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the US. The US used him extensively to channel funds and weapons to the US-Contra rebels who were fighting the Sandinista Movement in Nicaragua. Relations between Noriega and his American allies turned sour when he threatened to abrogate the Panama Canal Treaty which allowed American soldiers to be stationed in Panama and defend the waterway. Incidentally, Noriega himself claimed that his refusal to provide military assistance for the Nicaraguans as demanded by Lt Col Oliver North of the US Marine Corps provided the ground for his ouster. In 1989, US troops invaded Panama and captured Noriega, flew him to the US and charged him with drug trafficking, racketeering and money laundering. In January 1991, the US and its allies launched ‘Operation Desert Storm’ to smoke out Iraqi soldiers who had invaded Kuwait. Iraq had invaded Kuwait which Saddam had claimed was part of Iraqi territory and that invasion had not come as a surprise to the US and its allies. There were reports that the US gave its tacit agreement to that invasion so long as the operation was carried out swiftly without any serious damage to Kuwaiti oil installations and so long as the oil supply lines were kept intact. Later event proved that it was apparently a trap and Saddam fell for it. While the restoration of the sovereignty of Kuwait might have been the proclaimed motive for the US-led invasion of Iraq, the US and its allies had other reasons. Between 1980 and 1988, the US and its European allies had equipped the Iraqi armed forces with modern and sophisticated weaponry to confront Iran, which itself was a US ally until the collapse of Shah Pahlavi. The Iran-Iraq War came to an inconclusive end in 1988, with the Iraqi military still bristling with modern and sophisticated weapons provided by the US, France and Britain and which had to be dismantled, lest they were turned on US allies, including Israel. The faulty move by Saddam to invade Kuwait offered that opportunity. President George Bush was in haste and could not cause enough damage to the Iraqi armed forces before withdrawing American troops from ‘Operation Desert Storm’. In March 2003, the US and its allies found another excuse to visit Iraq again. That time without a UN mandate, the US launched another attack on Iraq with support from its traditional, with the claim that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction which must be destroyed to save humanity from a megalomaniac. On December 30, 2006, Saddam was executed by hanging after being convicted of charges relating to the 1982 killing of 148 Iraqi Shites. The US was silent on the much-touted weapons of mass destruction because there were none. More than five years after the death of Saddam, Iraq cannot be described as a peaceful place. Meanwhile, the US campaign in Iraq had claimed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, maiming millions and displacing others from their homes. I started by questioning the morality of those sitting in judgement over Mr Taylor. In 1945, the US dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese are still living with the scars of those atrocities. All the military campaigns launched by the US and its allies since the Second World War (WWII) have caused the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians, mostly women and children. From the jungles of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Grenada to the deserts of Iraq and Iran and the rugged mountains of Afghanistan, US troops have left in their trail death, destruction, desolation and despair, all in the name of fighting communism, defending democracy or removing dictators. If Mr Taylor and very soon Laurent Gbagbo of Cote d’Ivoire are to pay for crimes against humanity, what about those who have presided over the death of a countless number of people across the globe in their ambition to conquer and annex the resources of other countries? What about the perpetrators of the war in Iraq, which Pope John Paul II, before his death, had described as senseless and unjustified? What about those who triggered the war in Afghanistan, whose objectives could not be clearly defined, apart from bringing death and destruction on a daily basis to the people? Who answers for the cowardly act of dropping atomic bombs on civilians in Japan when the war itself was grinding to its logical conclusion? If the ICC is there to serve as a bulwark against high-handedness, excessive use of force and arbitrariness, then it must open its doors to receive all and discriminate against none. Whatever its intentions on paper, the ICC in its present philosophy could be described as nothing but another surrogate tool by the US and its allies to extend their authority over others and be answerable to none. We saw it lately in the invasion and destruction of Libya which has been dismembered, disorganised and sent many years backwards at the expense of the national interest of a few countries. Such arbitrariness is what the ICC must stand up against. fokofi@yahoo.co.uk kofiakordor.blogspot.com