Despite many setbacks, judges in this city have made history this week, writes CHRIS STEPHENin The Hague
WITH THE war crimes conviction of Liberia’s Charles Taylor yesterday, international justice has finally come of age. It has been 18 years since the first international war crimes court opened, also in The Hague, where Taylor was convicted for crimes against humanity.
Back then, things were more rocky. The first UN court, dealing with the former Yugoslavia, took rented rooms and had a staff of just four, including, famously, a secretary who did not have shorthand. But it is only now the process has finally arrived, because Taylor is the first head of state convicted by an international court of war crimes since the second World War.
The judgment, read out by three judges, was cautious. They dismissed prosecution claims that the former Liberian president had personally ordered the decade of murder, rape, mutilation and enslavement that scarred Sierra Leone for the best part of a decade. Instead, they referred to a mountain of evidence showing that he was the puppet-master, sending rebels in neighbouring Sierra Leone weapons in return for plundered diamonds.
Prosecutors were able to tease a pattern from a mountain of individual horrors, mutilations and outrages. When the militias, who hacked off arms, raped and disembowelled, needed guns, Taylor provided. When they needed radios, satellite phones, even fuel for their bulldozers, they turned to him. Often it was the smallest piece of evidence, such as an intercepted radio call or a stray document, that pinned down his responsibility.
The conviction has been a long time coming. Taylor was arrested in 2006 and the case against him, including moving the entire Sierra Leone Special Court from Freetown to The Hague, has cost $9 million. A high price, perhaps, to convict one man, until you remember the alternative, which would be more years of murder, mayhem and chaos in West Africa. As one of the dozens of activists swarming around the Hague press centre said yesterday, war crimes justice is cheap at the price.
More important than the satisfaction Taylor’s victims may feel with this judgment is the deterrent for other would-be warlords and murderers in seeing what happened to one of Africa’s biggest Big Men.
It has been a rocky road. When war crimes justice began in the 1990s lawyers struggled to fashion Geneva and genocide conventions into workable laws.
Prosecutors returned from battlefields with mud on their boots, befuddled by the problem of collecting evidence from what are, by definition, the most dangerous crime scenes in the world.
And the failures at times seemed to eclipse the successes. The last time the UN put a former head of state on trial – Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic – the trial took four years, so long he died of a heart attack before it could finish.
Iraq did without the UN to try dictator Saddam Hussein and the result was a travesty, with due process thrown out the window and the suspect hanged before he could have a proper hearing.
Meanwhile, the International Criminal Court, sitting a few miles away across the Hague, is struggling for support.
It has indicted Uganda’s Joseph Kony for horrific atrocities, and Sudan’s president Omar al-Bashir for genocide in Darfur, but there is no pressure from the international community for either man to be arrested. Libya is now refusing to hand over Saif al-Islam Gadafy to the ICC, and once again, the international community seems unconcerned.
In addition, opposition from America, China, Israel and Russia means ICC prosecutors are powerless to investigate Guantánamo Bay, Tibet, Gaza or Chechnya.
Yet despite the setbacks and draining international support, judges in one corner of this gale-blown city have made history this week.
Taylor, a man who brought terror to Sierra Leone, has been convicted and will probably spend the rest of his life behind bars. And if that makes other warlords, dictators and even a few presidents sleep less well in their beds, that can only be a good thing.
Chris Stephen is the author of Judgement Day: The Trial of Slobodan Miloševic (Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 2005)