Courting Qaddafi

Britain’s business interests in Libya are indeed substantial. British imports alone topped £1 billion ($1.9 billion) in 2008, and both imports and exports rose steeply in the first five months of 2009. It is not just the profits from helping to expand Libyan daily oil production from 1.7m barrels to 3m barrels by 2013 that British firms hope to reap, though Libyan oil is easily accessible and underexplored.

City financial firms, happy to channel Libya’s foreign investments now, want to develop financial services in the North African country too. Retailers such as Marks & Spencer, one of the 150 British firms present in Libya, hope to expand there, and defence and construction contracts beckon. But Britain and its companies are not alone in spotting opportunity in Libya: French, Italian and indeed American firms are all courting Mr Qaddafi. Gene Cretz, America’s first ambassador to Libya in 36 years, waxed enthusiastic earlier this year about expanding tourism and military ventures. (Scottish companies—especially oil and gas firms in and around Aberdeen, the political heartland of Alex Salmond, Scotland’s first minister—have commercial ties to Libya too.)

At an emergency session of the Scottish Parliament on August 24th, Mr MacAskill explained that under Scottish law compassion should be applied “no matter the severity of the provocation or the atrocity perpetrated”. He has supporters, including the Catholic and Protestant churches of Scotland and two-thirds of Scottish lawyers, according to one poll. Many Scots resent American criticism of his decision.

But his opponents (who also have his boss, the cunning and popular Mr Salmond, in their sights), are not letting up. Scotland’s Parliament will return to the matter on September 2nd. Annabel Goldie, the Scottish Tory leader, expects it to pass a motion declaring “for the world to hear” that Mr MacAskill’s decision “was not taken in the name of the Scottish people”. A YouGov poll published on August 27th found that over half of the Scots surveyed did not approve of Mr Megrahi’s release, and almost a third think that Mr MacAskill should resign.

Text 3

War crimes and international justice

Always get your man

Oct 22nd 2009 From The Economist print edition

Bringing war criminals to justice is a slow business. But the net is widening

WHO, outside the Balkans, now remembers Radovan Karadzic? A hunted man for 13 years, the leader of Bosnia’s Serbs in the war that ended in 1995 was captured last year. He was working as a psychologist in a private Belgrade clinic. Barring any last-minute hitch, on October 26th he will finally appear in the dock at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.

Along with General Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military commander who is still at large, and Slobodan Milosevic, the leader of Serbia proper who died before his lengthy trial ended, Mr Karadzic stands accused of Europe’s worst atrocities, against Croats and Bosnian Muslims, since the second world war. His alleged crimes include ordering the massacre at Srebrenica of some 8,000 Muslim men and boys.

The Yugoslav tribunal got going 16 years ago. It has indicted 161 people, including Serbs, Croats and Muslims, for the most serious of crimes and has brought to trial all of them but two: the elusive General Mladic and another Serb, Goran Hadzic, formerly leader of a Serb-populated breakaway part of Croatia. Mr Karadzic’s trial, the tribunal’s last, should end in 2012. Like the Tanzania-based tribunal set up to try the perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Yugoslav court must close.

Meanwhile, however, other bits of The Hague are getting busier. In a room borrowed from the more recently established International Criminal Court (ICC), the Sierra Leone tribunal is trying Liberia’s ex-president, Charles Taylor. He will shortly resume his defence against charges that he directed rebel groups involved in mass rape, mutilation and murder of civilians during Sierra Leone’s civil war of 1991-2002. A dapper-looking Mr Taylor denies all; he has also dismissed allegations of cannibalism as “racist”. Once that trial finishes, it will be time for the Sierra Leone court to wind up.

The ICC itself, however, is only just getting going. Set up in 2002 to avoid the need for ad hoc tribunals, it has still to complete its first trial. It has taken four referrals: Congo, the Central Africa Republic, Uganda and, at the behest of the United Nations Security Council, Sudan. The ICC prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has taken up cases involving both Sudanese government officials and rebel commanders. One of the rebels showed up voluntarily in The Hague this week—itself a first—for a confirmation of charges that relate to an attack on African Union peacekeepers in Sudan’s western region of Darfur.

That showed up Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, who has railed against the court for indicting him earlier this year on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur. The attempt to haul Mr Bashir before the ICC has split the African Union. Some accuse the court of an anti-African bias. Mr Ocampo notes that, Sudan aside, it was African governments that referred all the cases.

The ICC’s first trial, of Thomas Lubanga, a Congolese warlord accused of conscripting child soldiers, started earlier this year; the defence is about to present its case. Another trial, of two Congolese warlords, Germain Katanga and Mathieu Ngudjolo, starts next month. A third case, against Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo, Congolese commander of a rebel group in the Central Africa Republic, is close to trial.

Mr Ocampo also has his eye on, among others, Afghanistan, Colombia, Côte d’Ivoire, Georgia, Guinea, Kenya and, most controversially, Palestine (not a state but the authorities there have asked for ICC jurisdiction). A recent resolution from the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva has since asked for Israel’s actions in the Gaza war to be referred to the UN for possible ICC action. The resolution mentioned only Israel, though a recent report by Richard Goldstone, a South African judge, also criticised Hamas for its rocket attacks.

The tribunals can proceed only when governments co-operate. Cambodia’s tribunal had to wait until this year to start trials of those responsible for the “killing fields” in the 1970s. Whoever conducts a trial, those charged have first to be caught. States that sign the ICC’s Rome Statute commit themselves to help with that, so Mr Bashir has been careful to avoid going to places in Africa where such promises are taken seriously. Some other ICC warrants are still outstanding, including for members of the Lord’s Resistance Army, which terrorised parts of Uganda, and then moved on to Chad and Congo.

Some argue that trying to arrest such war criminals gets in the way of peace talks. The Security Council has the right to suspend ICC action for a year at a time on a rolling basis to give peace a chance. Had Mr Bashir pursued peace with the verve he had his troops and militias pursue Darfur’s civilians, he might have enjoyed the benefit of the council’s doubt.

Many governments have helped bring those accused by the tribunals for Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone and Rwanda to book. Until recently, Serbia’s was not much among them. Now it says General Mladic’s free days are numbered. Mr Karadzic tried to escape trial by claiming, to America’s denials, that he had been given immunity at the peace talks that ended Bosnia’s wars. But the Yugoslav tribunal has seen too much. It does not do immunity.

Text 4

Sudan and Darfur

The generals have got it right

Sep 3rd 2009 From The Economist print edition

Fewer people are dying in Darfur. But the need for a regional settlement is as urgent as ever

FESTERING conflicts in faraway places tend to follow a familiar trajectory. At first there is worldwide moral outrage; next, earnest promises that “something must be done”; then, when rapid solutions fail to work, bafflement and finally a sense of hapless resignation. That sequence is common in Africa: think of Somalia and Congo. Now there is a danger that the benighted region of Darfur, in western Sudan, may join the list of seemingly insoluble problems.

Few of the continent’s conflicts have provoked as much moral expostulation as when, in 2004 and 2005, the truth emerged about the Sudanese government’s brutal suppression of an uprising there. The fighting has lasted longer than the second world war. Some 300,000 people have been killed and nearly 3m displaced. A durable settlement looks unlikely any time soon. In international forums a sense of Darfur-fatigue has spread. The world’s desire to be shot of the problem may help explain the widespread reporting of a story that Martin Agwai, a Nigerian general who is stepping down as commander of the UN’s peacekeeping force in Darfur, said that the war was “over”.

General Agwai said no such thing. He rightly pointed to the end of the full-blown confrontation between well-marshalled rebel forces and a Sudanese army that had mastery of the skies and could bomb the recalcitrant rebel villages at will. But he also explained that, in the past three years, the nature of the fighting has dramatically changed.

Gone is the neat division between attacker and defender. Instead there is a messy and poisonous plurality of rival groups, tribes and bandits; some co-operate with the government, others with the assorted rebels. Allegiances are fickle, loyalties easily bought. The two original rebel groups have fragmented into at least 20 factions. The International Criminal Court at The Hague has indicted Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, for war crimes in Darfur. But it has also accused three rebel leaders of similar crimes. Even the notorious janjaweed, an Arab militia that served as proxies for the Sudanese army, are now as likely to fight each other or even to turn on the government if they have not been paid on time. It is wrongheaded nowadays simply to tag the rebels as “good” and the Sudanese government forces as “evil”.