Journal articles on the topic 'Crimes against humanity - Sierra Leone'

On April 26, 2012, Trial Chamber II (Chamber) of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (Special Court or Court) in The Hague convicted former Liberian president Charles Ghankay Taylor of crimes against humanity and war crimes committed from November 30, 1996, to January 18, 2002, in the territory of Sierra Leone during its civil war. Specifically, Taylor was found guilty of the crimes against humanity of murder, rape, sexual slavery, enslavement and other inhumane acts, and the war crimes of committing acts of terror, murder, outrages upon personal dignity, cruel treatment, pillage, and conscripting or enlisting children under the age of fifteen years into armed forces or groups or using them to participate actively in hostilities. In a separate judgment rendered on May 30, 2012, the Chamber sentenced Taylor to a single term of fifty years for all the counts on which the accused had been convicted.

AbstractSierra Leone experienced particularly heinous and widespread crimes against humanity and war crimes during its eleven years of civil war from 1991 to 2002. During the war, the civilian population was targeted by all the fighting factions. Civilians were captured, abducted, and held as slaves used for forced labour. The Special Court for Sierra Leone was established by the government of Sierra Leone and the United Nations in 2002, through Security Council Resolution 1315. It is mandated to try those who bear the greatest responsibility for serious violations of international humanitarian law and Sierra Leonean law committed in Sierra Leone since 30 November 1996. The aim of this paper is to sketch out the extent to which the jurisprudence of the Special Court can serve as a model for efficient and effective administration of criminal justice nationally through the preservation of its legacy.

AbstractThis article considers the finding by the Appeals Chamber of the Special Court for Sierra Leone that forced marriage is a crime against humanity. While hailed as an evolution in the prosecution of gender-based crimes, the finding is legally and factually unsound. The Chamber's decision offends the principle of legality, specifically, non-retroactivity, the prohibition on analogy, and the requirement of specificity. In addition, the Chamber misconstrued the facts and law with regards to sexual slavery in distinguishing it from forced marriage. This article critically examines each element of the Chamber's decision that forced marriage satisfies the threshold requirements to qualify as a crime against humanity.

AbstractIn international criminal law, to sustain a charge of crimes against humanity, the Prosecution must prove, among other elements, that the perpetrator was involved in an attack directed against a civilian population. In Prosecutor v Fofana and Kondewa, the Special Court for Sierra Leone found that the Prosecution failed to prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the civilian population was the 'primary object' of the attack and acquitted the accused on the counts of murder and other inhumane acts as crimes against humanity. The Appeals Chamber accepted this view. However, it reversed Trial Chamber I on the ground that the Prosecution evidence did establish that the civilian population had been the primary, as opposed to incidental, target of the attack. The author suggests that this is an error resulting from the undue jurisprudential pre-occupation with the meaning of 'primary' in relation to the notion of attack against a civilian population. Instead, the inquiry should focus on whether the civilian population was 'intentionally' targeted in the attack, notwithstanding that it may not have been the primary object of the attack. He submits that this approach would be consistent with the classic theory of mens rea in criminal law.

The proposed establishment of the Special Court for Sierra Leone is a valiant effort to end impunity for the egregious crimes that were committed during the Sierra Leonean civil war. Nonetheless, the Special Court – which will have jurisdiction over crimes against humanity, war crimes, and various offences under Sierra Leonean national law – will have a number of major hurdles to cross in order to fulfill its mandate. Most notably the Court as currently empowered lacks the ability to induce the authorities of third states to comply with its orders and has limited temporal jurisdiction: thereby allowing a number of accused to escape justice. More alarmingly the on-going discussions within United Nations Headquarters concerning the financing of the organisation has substantially eroded the credibility of the institution, especially as large numbers of potential accused have been languishing in jail for significant periods without being formally charged.

Societies emerging from political turmoil and civil unrest associated with gross violations of human rights and humanitarian law face the crucial question of how to deal with these atrocities and put the past in its place. Since the 1980s, this problem has been a major preoccupation of international law and scholarship. The traditional responses include outside intervention in such states pursuant to Chapter VII powers under the United Nations Charter, grants of conditional amnesty to perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity, grants of some form of unconditional amnesty, and prosecution of perpetrators.Nowhere is this question more pressing than in Sierra Leone, which recently emerged from a ten-year civil war characterized by systematic, serious and widespread violations of human rights and international humanitarian law. The Government of Sierra Leone had to make a choice between these four traditional strategies for dealing with these pervasive human rights violations.

The global effort to establish an effective system of international justice is at an important phase in its history. After close to 50 years of relative stagnation following the Nuremberg trials at the end of World War II, the field of international criminal law has been revitalised. The establishment of the International Criminal Court, the ad hoc tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda, “hybrid” or “internationalised” processes such as the Special Court in Sierra Leone, and national criminal justice systems exercising universal jurisdiction, have all lent substance and credibility to the assertion that the most grievous human rights crimes are subject to international scrutiny and legal action.

Since the close of the Cold War, the international community has created a variety of legal institutions designed to step in when state justice systems fail to prosecute genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The ad hoc criminal tribunals, the hybrid tribunals (such as the Special Court for Sierra Leone), the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the use of universal jurisdiction by national courts are among a new generation of courtly mechanisms designed to hold wrongdoers criminally accountable, state justice systems notwithstanding. These mechanisms represent an era of international judicial involvement in what used to be a more exclusively sovereign matter—the response to mass crimes against civilian populations. Accordingly, they have engendered a slew of scholarship devoted to analyzing their strengths and weaknesses, individually and as a group.

SummaryThis article considers the first two trial, and corresponding first two appeal, judgments issued by the Special Court for Sierra Leone in what are commonly referred to as the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) and Civil Defence Forces (CDF) cases. These judgments are noteworthy for having been the first to adjudicate at the international level the war crime of conscription or enlistment of children under the age of fifteen or using them to participate actively in hostilities and the gender-based crime against humanity of forced marriage. Beginning with the issue of child soldiers, this article explores how the Special Court addressed the applicable elements of crime, the abduction of children, the role of initiation within the act of conscription or enlistment of child soldiers, and the definition of use of children to participate actively in hostilities. The second part of this article discusses how the AFRC judgments addressed the crime against humanity of forced marriage. In comparison, the CDF Trial Chamber avoided consideration of this crime, and the Appeals Chamber’s partial criticism of this approach could not correct the negative silence created within the Special Court’s record of gender-based atrocities by the CDF. The article concludes that the AFRC and CDF judgments raise issues that require further consideration. For example, what is the legal linkage between abductions and child soldier recruitment, and how does one distinguish between active and non-active participation of children under fifteen in hostilities? These judgments also point to the dangers involved in misunderstanding a gender-based crime such as forced marriage solely as a crime of a sexual nature, and the way in which a trial record can be irrevocably altered by the unbalanced exclusion of gender-based crimes.

The concern for the safety and security of personnel involved in peacekeeping missions has grown in the last two decades, mainly because of the increased risks deriving from deployment in volatile environments and mandates comprising multiple tasks. This article provides an overview of the developments of international law regarding the protection of peacekeepers, with a special focus on international criminal law and its role in enhancing the safety of the personnel and objects involved in peacekeeping missions. Indeed, starting in 2008, international and hybrid tribunals have issued their first decisions and judgments against individuals indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity in connection with attacks against peacekeepers.After an analysis of the legal regimes established by the 1994 Convention on the Safety of United Nations and Associated Personnel and by international humanitarian law, the article examines the relevant international criminal law provisions and their application and interpretation by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the International Criminal Court. It is argued that the application of the specific war crime of attacking peacekeepers, introduced for the first time in the Rome Statute in 1998, presents particular challenges, but it has also led to the punishment of a broader range of offences against peacekeepers. Furthermore, the application of this crime may contribute to the broadening of the range of punishable offences under the more general war crime of attacking civilians, thus leading to the enhancement of the protection of civilians.

AbstractAt the beginning of the renaissance of international criminal law in the 1990s, the law on crimes against humanity was in a fragile state. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) decisively contributed to the consolidation of customary international law on crimes against humanity and paved the way for its first comprehensive codification in Article 7 of the Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). At the same time, the ICTY in its early decisions already showed a certain inclination to broaden the scope of the application of the crime by downgrading its contextual requirement. More recently, this tendency culminated in the complete abandonment of the policy requirement. While this ‘progressive’ facet of the ICTY's jurisprudence largely took the form of obiter dicta, the Situation in the Republic of Kenya has confronted the ICC with the need to ‘get serious’ about the present state of the law. This has led to a controversy in Pre-Trial Chamber II about the concept of organization in Article 7(2)(a) of the Statute. While the majority essentially follows the path of the more recent case law of the ICTY, the ICTR, and the Special Tribunal for Sierra Leone and supports a liberal interpretation, Judge Kaul prefers to confine the term to state-like organizations and generally calls for caution against too hasty an expansion of the realm of international criminal law stricto sensu. This comment agrees with the main thrust of the Dissenting Opinion and hopes that it will provoke a thorough debate.

Sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) is often intertwined with and nested within other violations of international criminal law (ICL) as part of a broader attack against a group. However, ICL is not giving enough visibility to this nexus of crimes rooted in the intersection of identities and discrimination that underpins SGBV during conflict. Intersectionality is a concept originated in feminism and progressively recognized by international human rights law (IHRL). It posits that SGBV is caused by gender 'inextricably linked' with other identities and factors that result in compounded discrimination and unique aggravated harms. Based on case studies, this paper argues that ICL should integrate an intersectional approach based on identity and discrimination to address the nexus between SGBV and broader international crimes. Intersectionality enables a better understanding of the causes, harms, and gravity of SGBV, and it provides consistency with an IHRL interpretation. The article begins setting out the foundations of intersectionality in feminism and IHRL, and its applicability to ICL. It then applies intersectionality to two case studies that demonstrate the interlink of SGBV with broader violations of ICL: The Revolutionary United Front Case (RUF) trial judgment of the Special Court for Sierra Leone (SCSL) concerning SGBV and the war crime committing acts of terrorism, and Al Hassan, prosecuted at the International Criminal Court (ICC), concerning SGBV and the crime against humanity of persecution. It concludes with final remarks on why and how ICL would benefit from integrating an intersectional approach to SGBV.

AbstractOn 29 March 2006 former Liberian President Charles Taylor was surrendered to the Special Court for Sierra Leone, where he was charged of war crimes, crimes against humanity and other serious violations of international humanitarian law committed during the Sierra Leonean conflict since 1996. The same day, invoking concerns about stability and security in the West African sub-region if the trial were to be held in Freetown, the President of the Special Court submitted a request to the Government of the Netherlands and to the International Criminal Court to facilitate that the trial be conducted in e Hague. Accordingly, on 20 June 2006, Mr. Taylor was transferred to the premises of the International Criminal Court where the trial commenced almost one year later.The change of venue of the Taylor trial from Freetown to Europe has several implications, which the present contribution aims to discuss, given that the Special Court is the first international(ized) criminal tribunal faced with such a relocation. This paper firstly reviews the necessary procedural steps taken for the transfer; then, it focuses on the compatibility of this change in location with the spirit and purposes of the Statute of the Special Court; finally, it considers the matter in relation to the fundamental aspects of transparency and of the due process guarantees of the accused.

AbstractForced marriage was endemic during the Sierra Leonean conflict. Girls and women forced to serve as 'wives' to rebel soldiers were usually expected to submit to ongoing rape and to provide domestic labour to their 'husbands'. Many of these 'wives' suffer from continuing stigmatization. The Prosecutor of the Special Court for Sierra Leone brought forced marriage charges as a crime against humanity through the category of inhumane acts against Brima, Kamara and Kanu, affiliated with the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), and Sesay, Kallon and Gbao, affiliated with the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). This article considers two benefits stemming from the resulting jurisprudence: the naming of forced marriage as an inhumane act and the acknowledgement of forced marriage as a violation not captured by other legal terms. However, conceptual difficulties remain: how should forced marriage be defined so as to fulfil the principle of nullum crimen sine lege? Is forced marriage more accurately labelled as enslavement? And, is conjugality accurately captured as a defining feature of forced marriage? If forced marriage is to be successfully prosecuted in other contexts – for example, in the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia – then more attention must be paid to resolving these questions.

AbstractUNESCO's Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity sees cultural diversity as a source of creativity and progress. International criminal law can protect cultural diversity. However, the relationship between cultural diversity and international criminal law seems based on a paradox: everyone must respect cultural diversity, but no one may invoke it to violate international criminal law. On occasions, this paradox has been exposed to daylight in the practice of international criminal courts. For example, the Special Court for Sierra Leone held with regard to the practice of enlistment of child soldiers that it could not accept any cultural considerations as excuses for criminal conduct. Here we should note (i) that the prohibition of crimes under international law (genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, aggression) is generally accepted as belonging to the realm of jus cogens norms, i.e. norms from which no derogation is permitted, and (ii) UNESCO's Declaration aims at universality and not at uniformity.As international criminal law is intended to apply universally, it is vital that it takes cultural considerations on board. In this article the author reviews the literature available in the field, identifies some of the areas of international criminal law and procedure where problems with cultural diversity have been most conspicuous, and concludes that further research on the relationship between cultural diversity and international criminal law is needed.

AbstractThis essay investigates the connection between humanitarian intervention and R2P within an historical, legal, and conceptual context. It challenges the widely held view that Africa lacks the capacity to intervene in areas of conflict and human rights violations, arguing instead that the continent possesses the will and instruments to protect human rights. The author notes that, while the UN Security Council retains the primary responsibility for promoting global peace and security, the R2P norm remains contested even within the UN. The ECOWAS interventions in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the 1990s were initially undertaken without UN approval, but were later sanctioned by the world body. These interventions undermined the idea of state sovereignty as independence from external interventions, which had previously constrained humanitarian missions in Africa. However, the essay argues that the R2P principle was boosted by the establishment of the International Criminal Court in 2002 to prosecute persons suspected of committing war crimes, crimes against humanity, and/or genocide. In addition, the intervention clause in the AU's Constitutive Act of 2000 supports the R2P principle while prohibiting unilateral interventions. Notwithstanding these developments, the author notes that the AU and Africa's regional bodies still have a long way to go in translating the R2P doctrine into practice.

Almost 60 years after the surviving Nazi-leaders were tried in the first ever international criminal tribunal for mass atrocities during World War II in Nuremberg, criminal responsibility for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes is perceived of as somewhat normal. Even if it is not yet an everyday event that human rights abusers are tried on an international level, the reality of the possibility of such a trial is present in the minds of the attentive public. This change was achieved over the last ten years. The establishing of the Yugoslavia-tribunal in 1993 was the turning point. Since then a number of both national and international trials held against human rights criminals has given the topic high priority. Finally the International Criminal Court (ICC) was founded and after a comparatively short time actually established and put in a position to operate. Sierra Leone relies on criminal prosecution in order to rebuild its society after a distracted and bloody civil war and a trial against Saddam Hussein seems a necessity. Many expectations are connected to criminal law and the working of the ICC. The dream of a world-wide justice, i.e. to attribute “just desert” to the offenders and to do justice to the victims, seems to have become reality. At the same time the establishing of an international criminal court is understood as a signal that will deter future offenders from committing human rights atrocities. The paper of Alexandra Kemmerer gives proof of how optimistically the EU promotes the idea of international criminal justice.

AbstractThis article considers the application of international human rights treaties or conventions to domestic law in common law countries and the historical differences in approach between some jurisdictions. It promotes the view that the judiciary of a country which has signed an international human rights treaty or convention may refer to such a treaty when interpreting domestic law, notwithstanding the fact that the treaty or convention has not been incorporated into domestic legislation. The article also suggests that international human rights treaties and conventions have a role in developing international criminal law and international humanitarian law. It cites the example of the decision that forced marriage is an inhumane act, a crime against humanity, by the Special Court of Sierra Leone, and gives the factual and jurisprudential background to that decision.

<em>The objective of this paper is to explore the initiatives and practices of different countries in truth seeking. Many countries during the post-conflict, colonial, slavery, anarchical and cultural genocide periods establish the Truth Commissions to respond to the past human wrongdoings: crimes and crimes against humanity. Enforced Disappearances (ED), killings, rapes and inhumane tortures are wrongdoings. Truth Commission applies the method of recovering silences from the victims for structured testimonies. The paper is prepared based on the victim-centric approach. The purpose reveals the piecemeal fact-findings to heal the past, reconcile the present and protect the future. The study covers more than 50 Commissions in a chronological order: beginning from Uganda in 1974 and concluding to Nepal in February 2015. Two Commissions in Uruguay were formed to find-out enforced disappearances. Colombian and Rwandan Commissions have established permanent bodies. The Liberian TRC threatened the government to submit its findings to the ICC if the government failed to establish an international tribunal. The Commissions of Bolivia, Ecuador, Haiti, former Yugoslavia and Zimbabwe were disbanded, and consequently, their reports could not be produced. No public hearings were conducted in Argentina and former Yugoslavia. It is noted that only 8 public hearings in Ghana, 8 national hearings in East-Timor and 15 in Brazil were conducted. Moroccan Commission held public hearings after signing the bond paper for not to disclose the names of the perpetrators whereas Guatemala did not include the perpetrators’ names in the report. The Shining Path’s activists are serving sentences based on civil-anti-terrorist court, but Alberto Fujimori is convicted for 25 years. Chadian Commission worked even against illicit narcotics trafficking. The UN established its Commissions in Sierra Leon, El Salvador and East-Timor, but failed to restore normalcy in Kosovo. Haiti prosecuted 50 perpetrators whereas Guatemala prosecuted its former military dictator. The Philippines’ Commission had limited investigation jurisdiction over army, but treated the insurgents differently. In El Salvador, the State security forces were responsible for 85 percent and the non-state actors for 15 percent similar to CIEDP, Nepal. The TRCs of Argentina, East-Timor, Guatemala, Morocco, Peru and South Africa partially succeeded. Large numbers of victims have failed to register the complaints fearing of possible actions. All perpetrators were controversially granted amnesty despite the TRC recommendation in South Africa. The victims and people still blamed Mandela that he sold out black people’s struggle. Ironically, the perpetrators have received justice, but the victims are further victimized. As perpetrator-centric Government prioritizes cronyism, most of the Commissioners defend their respective institution and individuals. Besides, perpetrators influence Governments on the formation of Truth Commission for ‘forgetting the victims to forgive the perpetrators’. A commission is a Court-liked judicial and non-judicial processes body, but without binding authority except Sierra Leone. Transitional Justice body exists with a five-pillar policy: truth, justice, healing, prosecution and reparation. It has a long neglected history owing to anarchical roles of the perpetrators and weak-poor nature of the victims. Almost all TRCs worked in low budget, lack of officials, inadequate laws and regulations, insufficient infrastructures and constraints of moral supports including Liberia, Paraguay, Philippines, South Africa, Uganda and Nepal. The perpetrators controlled Governments ordered to destroy documents, evidences and testimonies in their chain of command that could have proven guilty to them.</em>

AbstractIn the “RUF case”, the Special Court for Sierra Leone considered charges brought against senior officials of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in relation, inter alia, to a series of notorious attacks against the UN Assistance Mission in Sierra Leone (UNAMSIL) in May 2000. In finding the accused guilty of certain of the crimes charged, the Trial Chamber relied heavily on single-source evidence, hearsay evidence and circumstantial evidence. The Trial Chamber addressed a number of difficult factual and legal issues relating to the definition of peacekeeping and the status of robust peacekeepers for the first time; however, not all such findings appear to have been accurately grounded in fact and law.

AbstractThe Special Court for Sierra Leone has been noted for becoming the first international court to convict accused of the crimes of sexual slavery, the use of child soldiers, 'forced marriage', and intentionally directing attacks against peacekeepers. This article analyzes how prosecutions of some of these supposedly 'new' crimes were found not to be in violation of the principle of legality, nullum crimen sine lege. In particular, this article will focus on the crimes of 'forced marriage', intentionally directing attacks against peacekeepers, and sexual slavery: the judgments in the RUF case (Prosecutor v. Sesay, Kallon and Gbao) and the AFRC case (Prosecutor v. Brima, Kamara and Kanu) together reveal two different processes through which the law has proven able to evolve and adapt to accommodate so-called 'new' crimes without violating the principle of legality.

This article will provide a synoptic historical outline of international criminal law (ICL) from a gender perspective. An effort is made to highlight the landmark stages in the evolution of the ICL, particularly in its treatment of rape and other sexual crimes perpetrated against women during armed conflict. For this purpose, a critical examination of Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, criminal tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda as well as Special Court for Sierra Leone, and the International Criminal Court is attempted. Endeavour is to outline the gender and sexual crimes jurisprudence developed by the above mentioned international criminal tribunals as well as courts, and then to examine its effectiveness in prosecuting crimes of rape and sexual violence carried out against women. An analysis of what might have gone wrong within the ICL in dealing with rape and crimes of sexual nature is also attempted.

AbstractIn the wake of the mandate of the Special Representative of the United Nations Secretary-General for Business and Human Rights (SRSG), international criminal law looks set to play a role in measures towards the legal accountability of business actors involved in gross human rights and humanitarian law violations. Against the backdrop of the SRSG's now completed mandate, this article looks at three recent developments in international criminal law to consider the field's potential relevance to business actors involved in conflict. The first is the newest mode of liability recently adopted by the International Criminal Court, indirect perpetration through an organisation. The second is the aiding and abetting doctrine as applied by the Special Court for Sierra Leone in the Charles Taylor case. The third is the potential uptake of a practice of thematic prosecutions focusing on particular under-regulated issues of concern for the international community.

The arrest and prosecution in March 2006 of the former Liberian warlord-President Charles Taylor by the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone, for war crimes including the recruitment and use of child soldiers, and the arrest and prosecution of the Congolese warlord, Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, by the International Criminal Court, accused of enlisting child soldiers in the DRC war, have raised expectations that finally international conventions and customary international laws protecting children in conflict zones will now have enforcement powers. But why has it taken so long to protect children in conflict situations despite the volume of international treaties and conventions? What do we know about the phenomenon of child soldiering, and why are children still routinely recruited and used in Africa's bloody wars? This article argues that against the background of unfolding events relating to prosecution for enlistment of child soldiers, the international community is beginning to wake up to the challenge of enforcing its numerous ‘paper protection’ instruments for the protection of children. However, a range of challenges still pose serious threats to the implementation and enforcement of the international conventions protecting children. Extensive research fieldwork in Liberia and Sierra Leone over three years reveals that the application of the restrictive and Western-centric definition and construction of a ‘child’ and ‘childhood’ raises inherent difficulties in the African context. In addition, most war-torn and post-conflict African societies are faced with the challenge of incorporating international customary laws into their domestic laws. The failure of the international community to enforce its standards on child soldiers also has to do with the politics of ratification of international treaties, in particular the fear by African governments of setting dangerous precedents, since they are also culpable of recruitment and use of child soldiers.

The forty-third session of the United Nations International Law Commission (ILC) was held in Geneva from April 29 to July 19, 1991, and was chaired by Ambassador Abdul Koroma of Sierra Leone. During the session, the last of the ILC’s current five-year term of office, the Commission adopted full sets of draft articles on three of the subjects on its agenda. It completed the second reading, or final adoption, of the draft on jurisdictional immunities of states and their property, and approved on first reading its articles on the law of the non-navigational uses of international watercourses, and the Draft Code of Crimes against the Peace and Security of Mankind. In its report to the General Assembly, the Commission recommended that the Assembly convene a diplomatic conference charged with concluding a convention on the basis of the draft articles on jurisdictional immunities. The drafts on watercourses and crimes were sent to governments for their comments, which the Commission requested they submit by January 1, 1993. The ILC will then give each of those drafts a second reading, taking into account the observations received from states. In addition to the progress made on these topics, the Commission considered reports on the three remaining subjects on its agenda: international liability for injurious consequences arising out of acts not prohibited by international law, relations between states and international organizations (second part of the topic) and state responsibility.

In the face of the fast depletion of natural resources worldwide resulting from industrial and economic cannibalism, selfishness and marginalization are becoming more and more pronounced in a globalizing world. The phenomena of selfishness and marginalization are manifest in the introduction of stringent immigration laws by most industrialized countries in the North to ward off migrants from the less developed economies in the South; and also the reinforcement of existing laws by the latter to protect their citizens and natural resources in recent years. Issues of national identity, territorial integrity as against the centrality of humanity remain an Achilles heel toward the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As far as 1968, Ahmadou Kourouma, an Ivorian novelist, in his very first narrative text, “Les Soleils des Indépendances” later translated into English as The Suns of Independence, raised the tragic dilemma of national identity at the expense of ‘human identity’. In the absence of concrete steps to address the issues over the years, Liberia, Sierra Leone and La Côte d’Ivoire were engulfed in intestine civil strife over two decades later. The main causes of this strife are found in the irrational quest for self-identity in the name of nationality and ethnic superiority for greater access and control of “national” resources. This paper examines the upsurge of socioeconomic and political exclusion, and the potential threats they pose to the realization of the recently launched Sustainable Development Goals. It is done through a critical reading of Kourouma’s The Suns of Independence, Allah is not obliged and ‘Quand on refuse, on dit non’. The study is posited within the analytical framework of literary studies and sociocriticism

While addressing the Royal African Society, founded in honor of Mary Henrietta Kingsley, Edward Wilmot Blyden reflected on one of his more memorable experiences in Victorian England: During a visit to Blackpool many years ago, I went with some hospitable friends to the Winter Garden where there were several wild animals on exhibition. I noticed that a nurse having two children with her, could not keep her eyes from the spot where I stood, looking at first with a sort of suspicious, if not terrified curiosity. After a while she heard me speak to one of the gentlemen who were with me. Apparently surprised and reassured by this evidence of a genuine humanity, she called to the children who were interested in examining a leopard, “Look, look, there is a black man and he speaks English.” (Blyden, “West” 363) Blyden, a West Indian-born citizen of Liberia and resident of Sierra Leone, assures his audience that such scenes were not unique for the African abroad, even at the turn of the twentieth century; seen as “an unapproachable mystery,” an African traveler like himself was “at once ‘spotted’ as a peculiar being – sui generis” who, as if by nature, “produce[d] the peculiar feelings of the foreigner at the first sight of him” (Blyden, “West” 362, 363). Keenly aware of how non-Europeans were displayed at metropolitan zoos, fairs, and exhibitions throughout the nineteenth century, Blyden puns on the leopard's spots in order to highlight his experience of being marked as an object of curiosity. Indeed, the nurse's anxious wavering between curiosity and terror dissipates not because Blyden ceases to appear marked, or “spotted,” but because the taxonomic crisis he arouses by not standing on the other side of the fence has been temporarily contained: she distances the threat of Blyden's difference as “a black man” while evading the equally threatening possibility of recognizing his sameness as one who “speaks English.” The nurse, to borrow the words of Homi Bhabha in describing the fetishism of such colonial “scenes of subjectification” (Bhabha 81), constructs the man before her as “at once an ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible” in a way that attempts to “fix” Blyden's identity and the Victorian categories his appearance unsettles (Bhabha 70–71), while making the relation between differences and their appended significance appear natural (Bhabha 67). If, by expressing himself in his characteristically impeccable English in order to vindicate his “genuine humanity” (Blyden, “West” 363), Blyden appears to be “putting on the white world” at the expense of his autonomy (Fanon 36), he simultaneously wages battle in this world at the level of signification in ways that anticipate the work of the later African nationalist and West Indian emigrant, Frantz Fanon. An extensive reader and ordained minister who recognized the politics of exegesis as well as semiosis, Blyden implicitly asks his audience, “Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?” (Jeremiah 13, 23). Posing a rhetorical question that argues rather than asks, that brandishes the very texts often used against him, Blyden subtly deploys this passage typically associated with the intransience of human character in order to defy attempts at determining him entirely from without. Serving as a kind of object lesson demonstrating the need for less objectifying knowledge about Africans and their cultures, Blyden's anecdote challenged his contemporaries to further the lessons he and Mary Kingsley offered through their writing.

The origin of the concept “Crimes against Humanity” (СaH) — one of most serious crimes of international concern — can be found in 1915 Allied Joint Declaration and Martens Clause. CaH were first defined in Art. 6(c) of the Nuremberg IMT Statute. CaH are included in the jurisdiction of International criminal tribunal for former Yugoslavia, Rwanda Tribunal, Special Court for Sierra Leone, Extraordinary Chambers in the courts of Cambodia, Special Panels for serious crimes in East Timor. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Art. 7) contains a broad definition of this crime that reflects the international customary law. Evolution of the CaH concept includes both the expansion of specific acts, forming this category, and its essential elements: attacks against civilian population; link with armed conflicts; large scale and regularity of attacks; and, probably, inclusion into the illegitimate policy conducted by states and other actors. In the absence of a uniform definition of CaH in the statutes of courts and the convention, the work of International Law Commission makes a considerable contribution to the modern development and understanding of the concept. The adoption by ILC of the CaH definition, based on the ICC Statute will confirm the generally recognized definition of the CaH concept; and a wide range of states’ obligations on suppression, prevention and cooperation proves, inter alia, the erga omnes nature of the CaH prohibition.

In July 2005, while European heads of state attended memorials to mark the ten year anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide and court trials continued in The Hague at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Bosnian-American artist Aida Sehovic presented the aftermath of this genocide on a day-to-day level through her art installation in memory of the victims of Srebrenica. Drawing on the Bosnian tradition of coming together for coffee, this installation, ‘Što te Nema?’ (Why are you not here?), comprised a collection of tiny white porcelain cups (‘fildzans’ in Bosnian) arranged in the geographic shape of Srebrenica in the lobby of the United Nations building in New York. It was to represent Europe’s worst mass killing since the Second World War, which took place in July 1995 in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica. Up to 8,000 Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak) men and boys were killed when Bosnian Serb troops overran the internationally protected enclave (The Guardian). The cups were gathered from Bosnian families in the United States of America and Bosnia & Herzegovina, and in particular from members of ‘Zene Srebrenice’ (‘the women of Srebrenica’). Each of the 1,705 cups represented one exhumed, identified and re-buried victim of the Srebrenica genocide (1,705 at July 2005). The cups were filled either with coffee or, in the case of victims not yet 18 and therefore not old enough at the time of their death to have participated in the coffee tradition, with sugar cubes. The names and birth dates of the victims were recited on an audio loop. Genocide is the methodical destruction of the existence of a people. It is noted through the ‘UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide’ that genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity throughout history (UNHCHR). Tribunals, such as the ICTY, with their focus on justice, are formal and responsibility-based modes of responding to genocide. Society seeks justice, but raising awareness around genocide through the telling and hearing of the individual story is also required. Responding to genocide and communicating its existence through artistic expression has been a valuable way of bearing witness to such a horrendous and immense crime against humanity. Art can address the gaps in healing and understanding that cannot be addressed through tribunals. From Picasso’s ‘Guernica’, to the children’s pictures triggered by the Rwandan genocide, to the ‘War Rugs’ of Afghanistan and to vast installations such as Peter Eisenman’s recently opened Holocaust memorial in Berlin; art has proved a powerful medium for representing such atrocities and attempting to find healing after genocide. Artworks such as Sehovic’s ‘Što te Nema?’ give insight into the personal experience of genocide while challenging indifference and maintaining memory. For the affected communities, this addresses the impact on individuals; the human cost and the loss of everyday experiences. As Srebrenica survivor Emir Suljagic comments, “when you tell someone that 10,000 people died, they cannot understand or imagine that. What I want to say is that these people were peasants, car mechanics or masons. That they had daughters, mothers, that they leave someone behind; that a lot of people are hurt by this person’s death” (qtd. in Vulliamy). ‘Što te Nema?’ transmits this personal dimension of genocide by using an everyday situation of showing hospitality with family and friends, which is familiar and practised in most cultural experiences, juxtaposed with the loss of a family member who is missing as a result of genocide. This transmits the notion of genocide into the sphere of common experience, attachment and emotion. It acts as an invitation to explore the impact of genocide beyond the impersonal statistics and the aloof legalese of the courtroom drama. Beyond providing a representation of the facts or emotions around genocide, art provides a way of responding to a crime, which, by its nature, is generally difficult to comprehend. Art can offer a mode of giving testimony and providing catharsis about events which are not easily approached or discussed. As Sehovic says of ‘Što te Nema?’ (it) is a way of healing for Bosnians, coming to terms with this terrible thing that happened to us … it is building a bridge of understanding where Bosnian people are coming from, because it is very hard to talk about these things (qtd. in Vermont Quarterly Magazine). For its receiver, genocide art, with all its capacity to arouse our emotions and empathy, transmits something that we cannot see or engage with in the factual reporting of genocide or in a political analysis of the topic. Through art, it is possible to encounter genocide at an individual, personal level. As Mödersheim points out, we seem to need symbolic expressions to help us understand, and deal with the complex nature of events so horrific that reason and emotion fail to grasp their magnitude. To the intellect, many aspects of these experiences are unfathomable, and yet to keep our humanity we need to understand them … where words and explanations fail, we look for images (Mödersheim 18). An artist’s responses to genocide can vary from the need of survivors to create actual depictions of the atrocities, to more abstract portrayals of the emotional response to acts of genocide. Art that is created by survivors or witnesses to the genocide demonstrates a documentation and testament to what has occurred – a symbolic act of transmitting the personal experience of genocide. Artistic responses to genocide by those, such as Sehovic, who did not witness the event first hand, express how genocide “remains deeply felt to the point where we could not say it has ended” (Morris 329). Such art represents the continuation and global repercussions of genocide. The question of what ‘genocide art’ means to the neutral or removed viewer or society is also significant. Art is often associated with pleasure. Issues of mass killing and war are often not the types of topics one wishes to view on a trip to an art gallery. However, art has a more crucial function as a social reflector. It is often the reaction of non-acceptance of such artworks which indicates how society wishes to consider questions of genocide or of war in general. For example, Rayner Hoff’s 1932 war memorial ‘The Crucifixion of Civilisation 1914’ was rejected for display because it was considered too confronting and controversial in its depiction of a naked, tortured female victim of war in a Christ-like pose. As Picasso commented, “painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy” (qtd. in Mödersheim 15). In discussing the art that emerged from the Sierra Leone Civil War, Ross notes, “as our stomachs and hearts turn over at such sights, we get a small taste of what the artists felt. Even as we look at the images and experience the horror, disgust and anger that comes with knowing that they really happened, we realise that if these images are to be understood as reports from the field, serving the same function as photojournalism, it means that we have been sheltered from this type of reporting from our own news sources” (Ross 39). Here, art can address the often cursory acknowledgment given to ‘events which happen in faraway places’ and lend an insight into the personal. As Adorno notes, “history in artworks is not something made, and history alone frees the work from being merely something posited or manufactured” (133). Here we see the indivisibility of the genocide (the ‘history’) from the artwork – that what is seen is not mere ‘depiction’ but art’s ability to turn the anonymous statistics or the unknown genocide into the realisation of a brutal annihilation of individual human beings – to bring history to life as it were. What the viewer does after viewing such art is perhaps immaterial; the important thing is that they now know. But why is it important to know and important to remember? It has been argued that genocides which occurred in places like Srebrenica and Rwanda happened because the international community did not know or refused to recognise the events to the point of initially declining to apply the term ‘genocide’ to Srebrenica and settling for the more sanitised term ‘ethnic cleansing’ (Bringa 196). It would be nave and even condescending to argue that ‘Što te Nema?’ or any of the myriad other artistic responses to genocide have the possibility of undoing a genocide such as that which took place in Srebrenica, or even the hope of preventing another genocide. However, it is in transporting genocide into the personal realm that the message is transmitted and ignorance to the event can no longer be claimed. The concept of genocide can be too horrendous and vast to take in; art, whilst making it no less horrific, transmits the message to and confronts the viewer at a more direct and personal level. Such art provokes and provides a starting point for comment and debate. Art also stands as a lasting memorial to those who have lost their lives as a result of genocide and as a reminder to humanity that to ignore, underestimate or forget genocide makes possible its recurrence. References Adorno, Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Bringa, Tone. “Averted Gaze: Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina 1992-1995.” Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide. Ed: Alexander Hinton Laban. London: University of California Press, 2002. 194-225. Kohn, Rachael. “War Memorials, Sublime & Scandalous.” Radio National 14 August 2005. 12 December 2005 http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/ark/stories/s1433477.htm>. Mödersheim, Sabine. “Art and War.” Representations of Violence: Art about the Sierra Leone Civil War. Ed. Chris Corcoran, Abu-Hassan Koroma, P.K. Muana. Chicago, 2004. 15-20. Morris, Daniel. “Jewish Artists in New York: The Holocaust Years.” American Jewish History 90.3 (September 2002): 329-331. Ross, Mariama. “Bearing Witness.” Representations of Violence: Art about the Sierra Leone Civil War. Ed. Chris Corcoran, Abu-Hassan Koroma, P.K. Muana. Chicago, 2004. 37-40. The Guardian. “Massacre at Srebrenica: Interactive Guide.” May 2005. 5 November 2005 http://www.guardian.co.uk/flash/0,5860,474564,00.html>. United Nations. “International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.” 10 January 2006 http://www.un.org/icty/>. UNHCHR. “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” 1951. 3 January 2006 http://www.unhchr.ch/html/menu3/b/p_genoci.htm>. Vermont Quarterly Magazine. “Cups of Memory.” Winter 2005. 1 December 2005 http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmpr/vq/vqwinter05/aidasehovic.html>. Vulliamy, Ed. “Srebrenica Ten Years On.” June 2005. 10 February 2006 http://www.opendemocracy.net/conflict-yugoslavia/srebrenica_2651.jsp>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hawkes, Martine. "Transmitting Genocide: Genocide and Art." M/C Journal 9.1 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/09-hawkes.php>. APA Style Hawkes, M. (Mar. 2006) "Transmitting Genocide: Genocide and Art," M/C Journal, 9(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/09-hawkes.php>.