Somalilandsun: During the mid of June 2020, The International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague in Neatherlands acquitted Laurent Gbagbo from the charges of crimes against humanity.
The crimes against humanity were committed in Gabon when Laurent Gbagbo was at the center of power and politics. Rationale for this heart-wrenching acquittal was failure by the prosecution to meet procedural expectations. Thus, it is a milestone of current political history in Africa that even though Gbagbo has been set free by the ICC, there is clear evidence in the public domain that there was political decision that came from the office of Gbagbo to perfect massive commission of rape, murder, forceful eviction of communities and as well as destruction of property in the West African State of Gabon.
Facts from recent history of Gabon clearly attest to the position that acquittal of Gbagbo does not mean that he is not guilty; he has some knowledge about political decisions that fuelled anti-human criminal brutalities perfected to the powerless people of Gabon. He is culpable squarely, his acquittal is only hinged on the technical but insignificant and corrigible or curable failure by the Prosecution at the ICC to meet procedural standards required to collect and administer water-tight evidence in support of over sixty charges instituted against Gbagbo. But the world is not poor of good conscience to charge that the decision by the ICC in relation to Gbagbo must be treated as some kind of global-class moral loophole in the judicial civilization of our time which must inform we the living to agree that technical failure in procedure of criminal trial must not be a justifiable social process that qualify to pardon those that thrive impunity from their membership to the economically privileged political class to perpetrate recurrent mass brutality on the powerless populations .
The fact we cannot afford to avoid is that, there was an obvious political ploy which led to mass killing of people, raping of women and forceful evictions of the communities in Gabon. The logic behind this observation is borrowed from the study of sociology and psychology as applied to politics; which has always premised that there is no any eventuality of crime against humanity that can occur spontaneously during times of political elections without organic input from the threatened establishment or vice versa. Hence, moral obligation the system of prosecution at the ICC to come down from its horse of snobbish Judicial culture and work on how better to develop and support an operationally effective system of collecting evidence on political crimes often perfected on the poor people of Africa.
It is also obliging to the people of Africa not to be tempted to behave like the selfish opportunists and pretenders among the political class in Africa that have always blindly called for African Countries to pull out of the ICC on slight matter of technical and procedural inefficiency at the ICC , but instead all the civil societies in Africa , individual actor and the intellectual organic mass Media outlets must help the citizens of Africa to wage and maintain struggle against the prevailing selfish culture of petty bourgeoisie political dilettante by ensuring consistent full-scale membership of African countries to the Rome Statute. This will in one way or another help Africa in attenuating the social pain that Africa’s poor have always earned from the mult-pronged and the fiercely fangled monster of African politics.
There is currently a beautiful example of how Africa must relate with the intergovernmental judicial organizations in Kenya’s experience of defeating Djibouti in the recent contest for temporary membership at the Security Council of the United Nations. Why Kenya defeated Djibouti is a question of diplomatic strategy and geographical advantages, only not to mention cultural, linguistic and infrastructural advantages. However, the main idea here should not be about Kenya’s axiomatic using its membership at United Nations Security Council as capital for diplomatic ornamentation and self-glorification on diverse platforms of international politics, but instead, Kenya is morally obliged to take a step further and revamp its previously fallen cases at the ICC by supplying the evidence that was initially frustrated by the government. This must be done as a sign of Kenya’s morally worth-while politics in service to the spirit of rule of law and support of democratic ideal of justice for the poor people of Kenya that were raped, burned in the church at Kiamba, brutalized by the Mungiki at Naivasha and forcefully evicted from their lawful homes Eldoret, and yet there is reparation or compensation that had been done to them. Vivam.
By-Alexander Opicho
From-Lodwar, Kenya.
Mail-opichoalexander@gmail.com
