"No one would also forget that the current government in power, for which Norman has paid the ultimate price trying to defend and protect, foolishly handed him over to the Court and abandoned him to his fate - underlining the all-too familiar pathos: of the petty native colluding in the destruction or ridicule of his own society."
By Lansana Gberie,Toronto, Canada.
The first indication that everything relating to the UN-created Special Court for Sierra Leone should no longer be taken at face-value came from the unintentional lucidity of the 22 February press statement by Court Registrar Lovemore Munlo. Announcing the death, after a botched hip operation, of Chief Sam Hinga Norman, one of the Court’s most important accused, Munlo stated that the operation on Norman - carried out in a decrepit hospital in Senegal - had been “successful”. He then regretted that Norman’s death had “robbed the people of Sierra Leone” of “justice.”
Not many people who noted the cognitive dissonance that this stupid and callous statement represent readily connected it to one made four years ago, by the former American prosecutor of the Court, David Crane. Shortly after indicting Norman and seven others of crimes against humanity, Crane stated that the accused will “never see the light of day.” The accused, Crane stated, bore “the greatest responsibility” for atrocities committed in Sierra Leone during its decade-long war, 1991-2002.
The notion of “greatest responsibility” was always an intellectually slovenly contrivance, but no one who has followed the Court’s very ponderous and expensive progress (over $100 million spent to date) since it was set up in 2002 would fail to notice its hanging judge’s methodology: success for it means conviction, never acquittal, of the accused, and where this is not likely, well...
Norman, and the two other members of the pro-government Civil Defence Force (CDF) which he led, Alieu Kondewa and Moinina Fofana, were accused by the Court of using “cultish rituals” to conscript civilians into the CDF, and of scheming to “take a traditional belief system and [manipulating] it [sic] to their own ends.” The charges, also including cannibalism, states that Norman hatched “a common plan” to use “illegal and forbidden means” to “defeat the RUF and AFRC forces.” Norman, the prosecution claim, was central in the “joint criminal enterprise” - the war.
The Court was meant to be in operation for three years, but five years after it was set up, it is yet to conclude a single case. Its new multi-million dollar budget suggests that it will be in operation at least until 2009. The Court has indicted fourteen persons, but three - the RUF leader Foday Sankoh and his sociopathic former commander Sam Bockarie, and now Hinga Norman - are dead; another, a military leader named Johnny Paul Koroma, has simply disappeared. A fourth (and most significant), former Liberian President Charles Taylor, was handed over to the Court in 2006, and is now detained in The Hague, where he will be tried under a special arrangement. With the death of Norman, eight persons, two of them CDF leaders, three RUF officials, and three members of Koroma’s military junta, are in the detention of Court in Sierra Leone. All are virtually unknown, and their fate of very little concern to the wider public in Sierra Leone. The idea that their trial would have any valence with respect to impunity, in other words, is totally moot, indeed highly unlikely.
In still other words, the key reason for which the Court was set up in Sierra Leone - in addition to the immediacy of physical presence and its purported short, inexpensive life span - is now gone with the wind. This is a flat observation. After years of inept trudging, the death in detention of key suspects, tens of millions of dollars virtually wasted on expatriate officials in the form of salaries and other benefits, with zero earmarked for the war’s thousands of victims (including hundreds of amputees), it has led to this: another tongue-in-the-cheek announcement by a nondescript Court official about how Sierra Leoneans have been, once again, robbed of “justice”!
It bears restating, in view of such brazen assault against decent sensibilities, what Norman and the CDF represented during Sierra Leone’s bloody decade. The CDF was set up in Guinea in 1997 by the exiled President Tejan Kabbah (after his overthrow by Koroma). It was formed as a coalition of various civil militia groups, among which was, notably, the Mende-dominated Kamajor hunter militia, which had emerged during the war as a result of the corruption and ineffectiveness of the national army. These groups emerged among largely displaced Sierra Leoneans - displaced by the ravages of the rebels and rogue soldiers - and they fought back to reclaim or protect their villages and homes from the depredations of the rebel forces. I have looked into this very carefully, and can say that these groups represent a very rare phenomenon in Africa: the reality of ordinary, derelict, poor people organising themselves to resist predatory forces. What is known about Africa - and you can see this in various Hollywood representations of the continent - is of its huddled, helpless citizens, stalked by rampaging thugs, finally getting saved by some gallant white people. This is the standard narrative, and any deviation spoils the script: it destroys a certain myth; and it has to be resisted and sullied. Little wonder that among the many charges against the CDF, whose primary crime seems to have been to undermine this complacent myth, was cannibalism, another ancient, corrosive insult that has been levelled against a people who must remain benighted and patently hopeless.
Norman, in my view the true hero to emerge out of the war of so many villains, acted as the spiritual leader of the CDF. As a result of his background as a British-trained soldier (he served in the Congo as a UN peacekeeper in the early 1960s), he was chosen to coordinate the operations of the CDF with the West African intervention force Ecomog during their assault against Johnny Paul Koroma’s junta, in 1997-1998. The role exposed him to great danger, but he was ultimately successful: the Armed Forces Ruling Council (AFRC) junta, which had overthrown Kabbah in 1997, was unseated in February 1998, and Kabbah was reinstated. Later, following the resurgence of rebel activities, Norman once again coordinated CDF activities with those of Ecomog and the British forces to beat back the rebels, and played a crucial role in the subsequent disarmament process. Without his courageous role, Sierra Leone may not have survived; it was only after his (and Ecomog’s) success in putting down the coup and driving the nihilistic rebels out of Freetown, that the so-called international community sent in a UN force to oversee the final stages of the war’s end.
Now imagine what the nibbling, extravagantly paid, incompetent bunch at the Special Court has wrought. The Court has profaned the very exalted achievement that the CDF represented, at the same time as profaning, at least in the minds of many people, the very idea of the sanctity and ultimate fairness of international humanitarian justice. By mercilessly prosecuting (actually persecuting) and ultimately causing the death of Norman, a national hero with huge following in large parts of the country, the Court has further deepened the fissures in Sierra Leonean society, and deformed the already problematic socio-politics of the country just a few months before nation-wide elections. No one would forget that Norman incurred the health problem (whose attempted cure in an ill-equipped hospital led to his death) as a result of his brutal treatment, on the day of his arrest and after, by Special Court officials. No one would also forget that the current government in power, for which Norman has paid the ultimate price trying to defend and protect, foolishly handed him over to the Court and abandoned him to his fate - underlining the all-too familiar pathos: of the petty native colluding in the destruction or ridicule of his own society.
That is a legacy of another sort...playing exactly to type.
Photo: The late Chief Samuel Hinga Norman, about to be flown to Senegal last month.
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