Mugabe is sensing the worst case scenario

| Friday July 25, 2008 00:00

A vice president of Congo is in custody. Former leaders of Cambodia are in the dock. And the once all-powerful president of Yugoslavia died in a jail cell. The current president of Sudan Hassan Omar el-Bashir is under indictment, accused of ethnic slaughter in Sudan's Darfur non Muslims and crimes against humanity. Bashir could become the first sitting head of state to be charged by the International Criminal Court (ICC). All these seemed so impossible just 15 years ago.

The arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the accused architect of Bosnia's bloody four-year war and of Europe's first genocide since the Holocaust, highlights the long and winding path of international justice. It's a tale of successes along with many teething pains. Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs during the 1992-95 war, evaded arrest for 13 years after he was indicted for the massacre of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the U.N declared safe zone of Srebrenica in 1995. Since the creation in 1993 of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, a confusing array of war crimes courts have cluttered the legal landscape, all with the declared purpose of punishing the leaders, instigators and planners of mass crime in times of conflict.

Scores of people, mainly Serbs from the former Yugoslavia and Hutus from Rwanda, have been convicted. In the process, the courts have refined international law. Heads of state are no longer immune. General amnesties are no longer accepted unquestioned. Using children in war is outlawed. Rape has been defined as a weapon of war, and abusing women or forcing them into marriage are punishable crimes. Looting and plunder the age-old prize for warriors adds prison time. The cornerstone has been laid for another 100 years worth of jurisprudence, which has faced down this beast of impunity that has nibbled on the edges of civilization for a century. Beyond crimes that have occurred, the threat of prosecution also is meant to deter others. That goal has been met with measured success. People are really beginning to think of these tribunals as an effective deterrent.

There is a critical mass of high level cases. Some people believe that the risk of prosecution was a factor that prompted the political settlement in Kenya earlier this year and in the promise by Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe to end a campaign of violence against his political opponents. Mugabe is hearing the footsteps behind him.

Thank you
Banks Ndebele
MOGODITSHANE