Not When But Because

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Al-Nahda

By Saleh AA Younis
May 12, 2006, 05:34 PST

Generally, when people go on vacation, they ask for favors like, “Could you water my plants while I am gone?” Or, “Could you take care of my pet?” Or, “Here’s the combination to my alarm system…” But not with Eritreans. So this friend, who is going on vacation, gives me this assignment: Did you know that all the cases before the ICC [International Criminal Court] are African? Check it out! Bye!

You know how inward-looking we Eritreans are. We are interested in Africa only to the extent that it impacts Eritrea. And I promise, this article will eventullay morph from Africa to Eritrea. Trying to talk to Eritreans about Africa is like talking to Americans about Latin America. (George Bush Sr’s vice president, Dan Quayle, thought that Latin Americans speak Latin.) When the rest of Africa does something bone-headed, it makes us feel superior by comparison. In South Africa, the VP on trial for rape (now euphemistically called sexual crime) said, in his defense, that as a Zulu, he had an obligation to satisfy the sexual appetite of a woman who obviously had the hots for him because she crossed her legs in front of him.

I especially like it when we smugly say “izom Afrikawian” (these Africans). I don’t know if conceit is one of the seven deadly sins, but it has got to be in the Top Ten. The reward for our conceit has been lessons in humility—take the worst governed country in, Africa, Zimbabwe, now make it worse by taking out its constitution, private press and legal opposition. There, Eritrea. Still conceited? Give the two countries Presidents for life, except Mugabe is 82, and cannot possibly have many more miles on his odometer, and Isaias is only 61. Conceit: we have a country without a constitution, private press, legal opposition, a functioning court and a 61 year old president who has publicly said that the thought of retirement will never cross his mind as long as he lives, but our favorite sport is to look down at Africa.

But back to my vacationing friend: the ICC has only three open cases and they all deal with Africa: Congo, Uganda and Sudan.

In the Congo (which I am refusing to call by its full name because it is neither democratic nor a republic), the case is against Thomas Lubanga Dyilo. The documents that the ICC has disclosed are all procedural, disclosing very little, but a little research shows that Thomas Lubanga was with the Uganda-affiliated front when the Congo became the playground of every African dictator in the neighborhood. Thomas Lubango Dyilo is accused of torturing, killing, raping civilians and conscripting thousands of children soldiers. But it was his killing of nine UN peacekeepers that got him in the crosshairs of the ICC.

In Uganda, the ICC case deals with several individuals who belong to the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA.) Unlike Lubango, who is in custody, the LRA guys—a handful, including their leader, Joseph Kony--are still on the run, and the ICC has issued an arrest warrant. The LRA used to benefit from Sudan and Uganda’s I-will-support-your-enemies-as-long-as-you-support-mine, but since Sudan’s reconciliation, the LRA seems to be out in the cold, but still committing its random targeting of civilians using children soldiers just to make a point that the government does not totally control the country.

The third case, that of Darfur, Sudan combines the magnitude of the Congo with the brutality of Uganda many times over. It is the only one that has been described as genocide—based on the systematic assault, killing, rape of innocent people for the purpose of exterminating and displacement of an ethnic group. According to the statement delivered by the ICC Prosecutor to the UNSC, there are 51 people (presumably all Janjaweed) targeted for prosecution for crimes committed since July 1, 2002.

One should note that the ICC cases are only those where the prosecutors have concluded that there are sufficient witnesses and sufficient evidence to pursue the cases. The real tragedy in Africa is that for every Uganda, Congo and Sudan, there are probably ten other nations where the ICC is not pursuing a case because the witnesses are too scared to speak or the ICC has concluded that it is not politically prudent to pursue the cases.

In fact, the ICC’s arrest warrant of Lord’s Resistance Army leaders is already being blamed for complicating a peace process and similar complaints are likely to be raised following the “comprehensive” peace agreement recently signed regarding Darfur.

Relevance To Eritrea

Our superpower government (and I am not talking of the US) has given the Congo crisis a try. Our tyrant dispatched General Wichu to assist his protégé and drinking buddy, Laurent Kabila, in the use of heavy artillery. When the Congo became a free for all, Eritrea’s share of the spoils was going to be service industry perfected by PFDJ’s Red Sea Corporation in Sudan and Ethiopia—insurance, banking, transportation, etc. But God had different plans for the dearly departed Kabila and the mission was aborted. What is interesting about the Congo is that it marked the transformation of Clinton’s Renaissance Men: Museveni, Isaias, Kagame found the lure of diamonds so irresistible they had to find ways to cling to power by any means necessary and, in the process, transform themselves to a common African species: the Big Man. For Meles, it wasn’t Congo, it was something he invented: making a war of a skirmish, and to deal with post-war dissent, something called Bonapartism which nobody has heard of before or after.

In Darfur, our superpower has been involved since 2003, with Abdella Jaber, head of PFDJ’s organizational affaris, so versed in its affairs he knows the ethnic politics there and can name the Fur, the Masalit, the Baggara and how they have been oppressed by Khartoum. Sudan would regularly accuse Eritrea of delivering plane loads of weapons to Darfur rebels and Eritrea would regularly and categorically deny it—but a “panel of UN experts” have recently confirmed what everybody knows (why else would the Darfur rebels insist that Eritrea attend any peace meeting?): weapons are flowing from Eritrea.

After they solve the crisis in Darfur, our superpower government will solve the crisis in East Sudan, then solve the problem in Somalia (which it is also arming, despite the UN embargo), then Ethiopia (whose rebels it is arming, despite its denials), then the Ethiopian-Egyptian Nile water politics and, finally, the Kashmir and the Palestinian issue.

It is obvious now that the Eritrean opposition groups are going about solving their problem the wrong way: they should all include Sudan, Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia in their names as this will guarantee attention from and reconciliation with the Eritrean government. The ELF could call itself the Cairo Conference (because the ELF was founded there); the EDP could call itself the Somali Gratitude Party (because many EPLF leaders use to travel on Somali passports) and the ELF-RC could call itself the Sudan Rebirth Party (because it was reborn there.)

KNEW OR SHOULD HAVE KNOWN

The pattern that emerges from ICC is that for it to pursue a case, the crime must be horrific enough, it must be targeted against innocent civilians, and a political calculation must be made that issuing an arrest warrant would not endanger a fragile peace process or reconciliation.

The biggest challenge, in these cases, is finding the witnesses and, after you find them, to give them enough sense of security for them to want to talk. The ignorance is such that many of the PFDJ big shots think that just because there is no paper trail with their name or they have “plausible denial” they will never be indicted. This is why Isaias always says, "I know nothing about it" whenever he is asked criminal behavior he has clearly sanctioned, like arresting parents for the alleged crimes of their grown children. They do not seem to know or care that "I didn't know" doesn’t amount to much if there is a prosecutor with sufficient zeal or enough credible witnesses willing to talk. Because the test is not just "did you know" but, given your title, "should you have known?"

The PFDJ could probably explain away all its excesses using war and national security as a cover. But. I can count at least five major events that a lot of people within the PFDJ hierarchy have to answer for:

· The mass arrest of the University of Asmara students and shipping them to one of the hottest places on earth, WiA;

· The detention and slave labor of young boys and girls at Nakura island;

· The imprisonment of people in underground prisons like Track B for years;

· The deliberate use of torture (helicopter, containers) to break people’s will;

· The gross negligence that created an environment where young girls, however few or many, were raped in government-operated facilites by military officials.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of credible witnesses dispersed all over the world. The stories are there, but they have not been weaved into a narrative.

No denying it, it is a slow process, compounded by a number of factors. (1) It is a unipolar world where dictators count their rule in decades not years. (2) Our neighborhood is hardly a model of democracy or prosperity. (3) Our opposition groups have not yet inspired the people in critical numbers. (4) Our opposition elite are embarked on futile campaigns of purification to shrink the already small opposition tent further and kick out whomever they define as a heretic. (5) Our people are war weary and have not given a clear mandate for the type of struggle that should be waged and (6) There is no limit to what the PFDJ will do to retain power. All of the above tend to argue that, unless the PFDJ collapses of its own weight, “our struggle is long.”

But for anybody who values justice, the when is less important than the why. Not when but because. Because there is no statue of limitations for committing torture against innocent people. There is no amount of progress, construction, infrastructure-building, or ten state-owned media outlets running 24.7 that will whitewash the crimes the PFDJ has committed against the people. However long it takes, justice must be delivered by the uprising of the people, by international law, or the hand of God. All have arms longer than the venerated whip of the EPLF.

sal_younis@hotmail.com