Brother Saiks, I bring this to your attention. Haruna. Notice it was written since March 2011. So it predates the "slaughters and rapes" of Black Africans in Libya (many of whose victims are Sierra Leoneans). This is the first time I am reading anywhere about Gadhafi's role in the Sierra Leone and Liberia massacres. Whatever I said about that prior to this editorial from The Punch newspaper, I recall from independent research and experience with Gadhafi.
Indict Muammar Gaddafi now for war crimes in Sierra Leone
By Aroun Deen
|
|
Monday, 21 Mar 2011 |
With international pressure already mounting on
the Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, and with the International Criminal
Court now in the process of gathering information on civilian deaths in
Libya, the Special Court for Sierra Leone and the International Criminal
Court have a profound opportunity to indict Gaddafi for war crimes and
crimes against humanity he had committed in Sierra Leone. The United
Nations has already sanctioned Gaddafi’s government, and now it’s time
he was brought to justice, too, for his prior crimes in West Africa.
Muammar
Gaddafi was the mastermind and key financier of the brutal war that
left thousands dead in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. The war would not have
happened in the first place had it not been for the desire of the
Libyan leader to punish the government of Sierra Leone for what he
regarded as its siding with the West in the 1980’s when he was at
loggerheads with particularly the United States and Britain. It was also
part of Gaddafi’s broader agenda to destabilise much of West Africa and
establish satellite states in the region to be headed by puppet regimes
that would be doing his biddings. The decade-long war ripped Sierra
Leone apart. Thousands of its victims, whose arms and limbs were chopped
off by rebels, were reduced to paupers, roaming the streets as beggars
in Freetown and other cities. Children as young as a day old were also
among those whose arms and limbs were hacked off by Gaddafi’s rebels.
Pregnant women, too, were disemboweled with delight in their display of
ghastly brutality.
As part of his criminal plans to set
West Africa on the war path, Gaddafi instituted a program of guerilla
warfare in Libya for a group of disgruntled West Africans, including a
group of Sierra Leoneans he had invited to Tripoli to undergo training.
The men who led the war on Sierra Leone – former Liberian leader and
warlord, Charles Taylor and Sierra Leone’s rebel leader, Foday Sankoh,
and The Gambian Fugitive, Kukoi Samba Sanyang – were among those who
trained in Libya.
The ring leaders of the Revolutionary
United Front rebel group, which was fighting to overthrow the government
of Sierra Leone, also received massive financial support from Libya
through Gaddafi’s People’s Revolutionary Council.
Long
before the government of Sierra Leone and the United Nations jointly set
up the Special Court for Sierra Leone to prosecute the key suspects of
the war for war crimes and crimes against humanity, calls had been made
for Gaddafi to face international justice for his role in Sierra Leone –
like Charles Taylor now in The Hague. An opposition leader in Sierra
Leone, Charles Margai, who was one of the strong advocates for Gaddafi’s
indictment, was incensed when Gaddafi visited the country in 2007. In a
BBC interview, he called on Sierra Leoneans to boycott the reception
that was hosted for him at the national stadium.
David
Crane, the first chief prosecutor at the special court, considered
indicting the Libyan dictator. The former prosecutor, who now teaches
law at Syracuse University, said that the direct participation of the
Libyan leader in the wars in both Sierra Leone and Liberia caused the
“murder, rape, maiming, and mutilation of over a million human beings…”
But calls for justice were not heeded because it appeared principled
Western nations developed a fondness for Gaddafi following his so-called
positive gestures, such as his abandoning of his weapons of mass
destruction programmes.
In January 2004, a former French
Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin, was quick to express hope that
French firms would participate fully in business activities in Libya.
This followed Libya’s signing of a deal to pay $170 million to relatives
of French victims of a UTA French airliner bombing in 1989, which was
blamed on Libya. Current French President Nicolas Sarkozy also went to
Tripoli in July 2007.
The greatest irony of it all was
that Sierra Leone and Liberia never got compensations from Libya for the
untold suffering, infrastructural damage and needless loss of lives
even though evidence suggested that he was the mastermind of the
carnage.
The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, met
Gaddafi in Tripoli in 2004. The meeting was blessed with the signing of a
deal by oil giant, Shell, estimated at hundreds of millions of British
pound sterling for gas exploration rights off the Libyan coast.
In
August 2008, Italy’s Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi visited Libya
and signed a $5bn dollars investment deal with Gaddafi. Condoleezza
Rice, the former US secretary of state had also been to Libya where she
met with the controversial Gaddafi.
The Libyan leader’s
promise to, at the least, pay compensations to relatives of his brutal
crimes as well as his giving up of his WMDs were welcome news in a world
– particularly in Europe – that confronts many terrorists activities.
Oil supplies from Libya mean much to the West. But appeasing the West
should not stand in the way of justice for Sierra Leone, just because it
is not an affluent country endowed with oil deposits.
Up
till now, Gaddafi’s relations with the West are getting cozier by the
day. His brutal treatment of peaceful protesters – who seek nothing more
than just a political change that guarantees freedom and better living
standards – shows clearly that Gaddafi is too grown to learn new tricks.
He is fundamental in his choice to resorting to brutality as a means of
addressing challenges.
Muammar Gaddafi bears the greatest
responsibility for the brutality in Sierra Leone. The Sierra Leone
Truth and Reconciliation Commission set up at the end of the war found
out that Libya contributed in a significant way to the chaos and mayhem
that engulfed the country. Gaddafi’s role in the training in Libya and
financing of the rebels justify his direct involvement in the mayhem.
Such key roles deserve more than mere naming and shaming.
The
desire for a share of Libyan oil or business prospect should not rub
leading international policy makers of their moral responsibility to let
Gaddafi account for his brutal misdeeds.
Gaddafi’s hatred
for Sierra Leone dated back to the early 1980’s when the then President
of Sierra Leone, Siaka Stevens, in November 1982, boycotted an
Organization of African Unity conference Libya was scheduled to host.
The 1982 conference lacked a quorum due to the absence of many heads of
state as a result of controversies surrounding Gaddafi’s role in the
rebellions that were going on in Africa at the time. Gaddafi must not go
unpunished. What was good for the British and French must be good for
Sierra Leoneans too.