[Peace-discuss] AOTA yesterday

[Karen Aram]

David,


While I do agree that trials of criminals in relation to human rights abuses should include western criminals as well as African leaders, I applaud Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, for her coverage of the verdict against the former Chad dictator Hababre on June 2nd., as she made it clear that this brutal dictator was supported during his reign by the US government, and he was not tried in the ICC, but in a African court in Senegal, by the victims of his crimes. It sends a message to all "dictators" protected by the US that once we don't need you, or if as in the case of so many others you don't do our bidding, you are disposable. Granted, it's not perfect and I have no doubt there are flaws in this system, and he maybe a scapegoat. The fact that Kerry and the Washington Post commented on it, is suspicious.  However, I don't think Amy deserves criticism for this, I reserve my criticism of her for not focusing on the greatest danger facing the world today. Nato on the border of Russia and US provocations in the S.China Sea. Too much focus on identity politics and the interests of the audience, which is never true journalism. See below:

Chad is a mostly desert country in northern Africa that was under French colonial rule from 1900 to 1960. Sectarian warfare followed. U.S. President Ronald Reagan supported a coup in Chad, led by Hissene Habre, despite knowing his record of brutality. Habre had a mass grave behind his residence. He ruled Chad from 1982 to 1990, and he terrorized his critics, both real and imagined. More than 40,000 people were killed, many tortured in the notorious "Piscine," or "the Pool," a prison and torture center located in a converted swimming pool.

In 2001, 11 years after Habre fled to Senegal (taking most of Chad's national treasury with him), an intrepid attorney with Human Rights Watch, Reed Brody, entered the abandoned headquarters of Habre's notorious secret police force, the DDS. What he found there was astounding: thousands upon thousands of documents, dust-covered and forgotten, that detailed arrests, torture and killing of more than 13,000 of Habre's victims. This documentary evidence, along with unrelenting organizing among the victims themselves, by people like prison survivor Souleymane Guengueng, led to the first trial in an African nation of a former head of state from another African nation. In the past, such trials have taken place in international tribunals, outside of the continent. Senegal formed a special court specifically to try his case.

"It hurts me that many of my colleagues died along the way. They could not be here to see the result, which is why I was moved and brought to tears," Souleymane Guengueng said after the verdict was read. "Hissene Habre was sentenced to life imprisonment. He will finish off his life in prison, and that's all we wanted. I hope this serves as a lesson to all the other dictators out there."

Bignone and the Argentine junta, and Hissene Habre, could not have committed their atrocities were it not for the support of the U.S. government. Secretary of State John Kerry called Habre's verdict "an opportunity for the United States to reflect on, and learn from, our own connection with past events in Chad." The U.S. should definitely reflect on, and learn from, these guilty verdicts. But we also should investigate, charge and put on trial U.S. government officials who aided and abetted these dictators. We need a uniform standard of justice, applied equally, across the globe.



not the ICC, but it sends a message to all leaders of crimes
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