MG Zimeta
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The dust appears to be settling on Guantánamo Bay; by presidential decree, it will be closed within a year. The last British detainee, Binyam Mohamed, was released on 23rd February. The Guantánamo experiment was, say its critics, a comprehensive failure. But this depends on what it was trying to achieve. The strategic victories it won for the Bush administration during the eight years of its existence will last much longer than the camp itself.
“Guantánamo” has become a byword for all that is wrong with America’s war on terror. At first glance, it appears to have been a legal failure too. Its architects’ cynical reinvention of (and disregard for) the law has been widely documented. David Bowker, a lawyer in the department of state’s office of the legal adviser, reported how he and colleagues were asked to “find the legal equivalent of outer space” where detainees would have no legal rights. But in June 2006, the US supreme court ruled that its inmates were entitled to protection under the Geneva convention—despite the administration’s attempts to establish the contrary.
Guantánamo’s guiding philosophy—that being of the wrong religion in the wrong place at the wrong time can make you eligible for inhumane treatment—has also been widely denounced as a moral failure. Binyam Mohamed is a case in point: a 30-year-old cleaner accused of making a nuclear bomb, he was held at Guantánamo for 54 months and tortured. Towards the end of his incarceration there was speculation he was being held purely to conceal the torture he had suffered. “You will be punished,” Samuel Beckett wrote in his novel The Unnameable, “for having been punished.”
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Ben Simon
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For decades, it has seemed the fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and in neighbouring Uganda and Rwanda, would never end. The governments of these countries seemed unable—indeed unwilling—to work together reign in the various rebel groups rampaging across their borders. Deeply suspicious of each other’s motives, they have preferred to fund, back, or turn a blind eye to the insurgencies. But this could be about to change.
Last November I was in Kiwanja, a small trading town near Goma in eastern Congo, standing among a group of rebel fighters. One of them passed by me and whispered in a hushed voice, “I’ve got to get out of this shit.” The 25-year-old Tutsi, who called himself Pascal, said he was desperate to run away, fed up with life as a fighter. This life had begun for him at 13, when Tutsi fighters swept through his hometown of Goma and forced him to join them.
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Ben Simon
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In his article “The curse of Leopold” ( Prospect, December), Tim Butcher argues that those who try to attribute the fighting in eastern Congo to tribal rivalries miss the point. The thirst for Chinese dollars, he said, is the real destabilising force. But Butcher has seriously underestimated the role tribe plays in this conflict.
Late in October, fighters from Laurent Nkunda’s rebel army were scattered in the tall, thick elephant grass in a valley about 10 kilometres south of Rutshuru, a strategic town in eastern Congo’s North Kivu province. They were staring at the government soldiers positioned on a nearby ridge, watching for any movement or sign of an imminent attack. I had joined them, along with a photographer named Roberto, after meeting with their district commanders at a rally the week before. As far as I know, we were the only journalists on the frontline at that time.
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Tom Chatfield
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Five years after the invasion of Iraq, what do we know about those weapons of mass destruction whose shadowy existence played such a large role in the justification for war and such a controversial role in its aftermath? It is a story that remains significant largely because the reconstruction of Iraq has been so much bloodier, more chaotic and politically damaging—both in the middle east and the west—than was dreamt of in 2003. “There were no WMDs” seems likely to be the enduring epitaph of both a two-term president and a three-term prime minister. Their absence is, for many, emblematic of the gulf between the realities of the middle east and the ill-planned optimism with which western powers entered Iraq in March 2003. Yet the story of the search for WMD is more than simply a catalogue of intelligence errors and political manipulation; it has also become a story of competing narratives about middle eastern power politics, and the deepest global security concerns we face today.
On 20th March 2003, Iraq was invaded by a US-led coalition of forces, which included British, Australian, Polish and Danish troops. “Operation Iraqi Freedom” intended, in the words of President George W Bush, “to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.” In Britain, particular emphasis was put on the first of these aims. The British government’s infamous Iraq dossier was published on 24th September 2002, and opened with a personal statement by Tony Blair which claimed that “Saddam Hussein attaches great importance to possessing weapons of mass destruction, which he regards as the basis for Iraq’s regional power… He is ready to use them, including against his own population, and is determined to retain them, in breach of UN security council resolutions… As a result of the intelligence, we judge that Iraq has: continued to produce chemical and biological agents; military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, including against its own Shia population. Some of these weapons are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them.” These claims lie at the heart of one of the greatest continuing intelligence controversies in modern history.
Official investigations
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Linda Melvern
Few events in recent times have been the subject of such speculation as the assassination, on 6th April 1994, of Rwanda’s president Juvénal Habyarimana. For 13 years, the identity of those who shot down the president’s Mystère Falcon jet—triggering the genocide of up to 1m Rwandans, mainly Tutsi—has remained a mystery. All that is known with certainty is that surface-to-air missiles were fired at the jet as it came in to land at Kigali airport, causing it to crash into the garden of the presidential villa—killing all on board.
By this time Rwanda had suffered over three years of civil war, with President Habyarimana’s Hutu government fighting a rebel army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), created in neighbouring Uganda by Rwandan Tutsi refugees. In previous decades, thousands of Rwandan Tutsi had been forced into exile refugee camps, denied the right of return. The RPF emerged to enforce their rights, and invaded Rwanda in October 1990, eventually seizing territory in the north. In 1993 an international peace agreement—known as the Arusha accords, after the Tanzanian city in which it was signed—was brokered between the Rwandan government and the RPF, providing for a power-sharing democracy in Rwanda. UN peacekeepers were sent to monitor compliance with the agreement.
After the downing of the jet, each side in the civil war blamed the other for the death of the president, and a vicious battle for the historical truth has been waged ever since. It is widely believed that whoever is eventually found guilty will carry the moral responsibility for starting the genocide—which is why we may never know for certain who the assassins were.
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Alex De Waal
The “responsibility to protect” is the doctrine that the victims of civil war or humanitarian disaster have a right to foreign succour and, in extremis, the protection of international troops, should their own government, either from incapacity or malice, fail to do the job. The principle of the responsibility to protect—”R2P” in diplomatic shorthand—was adopted unanimously by the UN general assembly in September 2005. It was a mantra for Blair’s personal foreign policy. The R2P is a noble concept, an example of progress in global moral standards. But it is impractical except in the tiniest of dysfunctional nations, such as Sierra Leone, Kosovo and East Timor, and even then at great difficulty. In a middle-sized country, the burdens and risks would tax the capability of a superpower.
Since early 2004, columnists and advocates have called for armed intervention to “save” Darfur from “genocide.” Gareth Evans, former Australian foreign minister and president of the International Crisis Group (ICG), heralded Darfur as the test case for R2P. While flirting with outright military intervention, Evans’s focus has been on what is known in the trade as “coercive protection”—a UN peacekeeping force that can enforce its will by UN mandate and sufficient firepower. This tries to split the difference between traditional peacekeeping and outright intervention, but as Evans and his comrades-in-rhetoric have rattled their sabres over Darfur, it has become clear that the sober advice of professional peacekeepers was right all along: there is no middle way.
International policies towards Darfur have failed. The world didn’t stop the immense army-Janjaweed offensives of 2003 and 2004, which killed tens of thousands, plus perhaps a further 150,000 through starvation and disease, and displaced 2m. There’s no working peace agreement, and a few hundred people are killed each month in local conflicts. A UN force of 26,000 with a limited protection mandate (it is allowed to use force to protect civilians) is only now on its way and will be operational early next year. The accepted script is: blame world leaders’ lack of political will for their failure to stand up to Khartoum’s evil designs.
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Richard Dowden
The international criminal court (ICC) was set up in 2002 to prosecute individuals for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Some feared that its western-inspired, universalist idea of justice might come into conflict with local forms of law, jeopardising the process of reconciliation. Now that the court has started to flex its muscles—issuing its first warrants, in October 2005, against five leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, and more recently making an arrest in the Democratic Republic of Congo and identifying suspects in Sudan—there are signs that these fears may turn out to have been justified.
In recent times, almost all of Africa’s nastiest wars have ended in local deals. Victors have showed a reluctance to punish. Losers have not been excluded, but given places in government, binding them into the system to prevent future rebellion. Only in a few cases has a rebel or deposed head of state been punished.
Take Mozambique. In the late 1970s, Renamo, a bunch of murderers set up by the Rhodesians, was let loose on Mozambique to punish the government for supporting Rhodesia’s guerrillas. Renamo’s gangs killed, raped, maimed and looted, leaving fear and horror in their wake. Peace only became possible when the South Africans decided to stop supporting Renamo. After months of negotiation with the Mozambique government, these war criminals were given mansions, salaries and cars, and became the official opposition. In elections today, they win some 30 per cent of the vote and you can have lunch with them any day in Maputo.
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Phil Clark
In the May issue of Prospect, Richard Dowden argued that the international criminal court’s (ICC) approach to justice in northern Uganda was hindering the chances of a sustainable peace deal between the government and the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The dilemma is a genuine one, but it is worth adding that coverage of the Uganda situation has often been framed in simple “peace vs justice” terms. This “boxing match” terminology is more hindrance than help. Rather than polarise the debate further, it is more useful to consider how different approaches at different levels, at different times and by different institutions can address the challenges of mass crimes in complementary ways.
In Uganda, the ICC is now directly confronting a question many believed was inevitable: will it continue prosecuting serious crimes if it becomes an obstacle to peace? Having issued indictments against the LRA commanders in October 2005, the court still has none of them in custody. Although he initially referred the LRA cases to the ICC, Uganda’s President Museveni then proposed amnesties for the commanders instead, to encourage the LRA to talk peace. The ICC warrants can’t simply be withdrawn, however, and options are now being explored for a compromise whereby the Ugandan courts rather than the ICC would take up the baton and proceed with what may be watered-down charges.
The ICC has further headaches in the two other situations it is investigating. In Sudan, peace and justice tensions also loom and the court confronts the challenge of how, without independent muscle, it is going to apprehend Darfur war crimes suspects (one of whom is in the government) when the Sudanese administration rejects the court entirely. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the ICC’s first suspect has been transferred to The Hague, but the court has been criticised for pursuing a fairly lowly warlord while worse offenders now enjoy government positions.
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Tim Allen
On some issues I would go further in criticising the international criminal court (ICC) than does Richard Dowden. For instance, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the court is biased in favour of the Ugandan government. The ICC prosecutor unwisely chose to announce its intervention in northern Uganda at a joint press conference with President Museveni, and eyebrows have been raised at its decision to issue warrants only for members of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and not the Ugandan forces.
The ICC prosecutor argues that he has applied “gravity criteria” to alleged crimes. Yet over 1m people have been forced to live in dreadful displacement camps, many of them by the Ugandan army. Forced displacement is a crime within the remit of the court, and many more have died in the camps than at the hands of the LRA, so why has no one been held to account? The answer, according to the prosecutor, is that gravity criteria are linked to cases of instrumental killing. Indirect killing in displacement camps does not count. But if that is so, why was a warrant subsequently issued for Thomas Lubanga in the Democratic Republic of Congo, who stands accused of enlisting children? Is that worse than murder? If so, why was it not considered so grave in Uganda, where the practice has been widespread on both sides of the conflict?
Such apparent biases and inconsistency do nothing for the ICC’s image. Combined with the kind of argument put forward by Dowden, they seem to make a compelling case against the usefulness of the court. But I am not convinced, and remain broadly positive about the ICC. Why?
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Richard Dowden
When the reparations for slavery movement was launched a few years ago, I wrote a light-hearted article dismissing it as yet another Nigerian scam. Since one of the movers behind it was Nigeria’s richest crook, Chief Moshood Abiola, that seemed a reasonable argument. And legally speaking, since almost all African slaves were captured by fellow Africans before being sold to European traders, it would be the successors of the old west African kingdoms—modern west African states—which would be responsible for reparations. That would mean the people of Sierra Leone—average per capita income $900—would be paying reparations to the people of Barbados—per capita income $18,200.
Most of my work focuses on Africa, where the Atlantic slave trade is almost completely forgotten—except by those who live near the west African slave forts. And as cynically and brutally as their ancestors sold the forebears of today’s African-Americans, they rip off their descendants returning to find their roots. They boast about it and joke that African-Americans are the stupid ones; they got caught. It seems the equivalent of Brits jabbing at Australians with jokes about their criminal past.
But I have learned from many painful discussions that Americans, Caribbeans and Britons who have African ancestors do not see slavery as something to joke about. They do not see themselves as descendants of Africans who happen to have been enslaved in Africa and taken to America. They see themselves as the latest link in a chain. They often feel their slave history is part of the way they live now—particularly in America.
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