• To Help Refugees, Fight the Racism Behind Them
    Aug 31, 2001
    There is an intrinsic connection between refugees and racism. Racism is a direct cause of refugee movements. Every year hundreds of thousands of people are forced to flee their homes because of racial discrimination and ethnic violence, such as the Roma in the Czech Republic, Kurds in Turkey, ethnic minority groups in Burma, Tamils in Sri Lanka, and Hutu in Burundi. It is therefore essential that the World Conference Against Racism, which opens in Durban this Friday, put the spotlight on discrimination against refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. This is the new racism of Europe and elsewhere.
  • The Prosecution of Hissène Habré - An "African Pinochet"
    Apr 30, 2001
    In February 2000, a Senegalese court indicted Chad’s exiled former dictator, Hissène Habré, on torture charges and placed him under virtual house arrest. It was the first time that an African had been charged with atrocities by the court of another African country.
  • Justice: The First Casualty of Truth?
    Apr 12, 2001
    "International justice" is already beginning to be a plausible backstop when national justice fails or a perpetrator flees.
  • The Refugee Crisis in Guinea: Another Macedonia?
    Oct 3, 2000
    The parallels between the current crisis in Guinea and the situation in Macedonia at the onset of the Kosovo refugee crisis in 1999 are striking. The international response to both situations could not be more different.
  • Clinton's Nigeria Agenda
    Aug 22, 2000
    The last time President Clinton visited Africa, he avoided Nigeria like the plague. The year was 1998, and Nigeria was in its fifteenth year of military rule. Photo ops with the Nigerian dictator, Gen. Sani Abacha, were definitely not on the White House itinerary.
  • International Injustice: The Tragedy of Sierra Leone
    Aug 2, 2000
    Can Sierra Leone escape its hellish cycle of mutilation, rape and murder? The answer lies with the United Nations Security Council, which is meeting this week to consider how to set up a war crimes tribunal for this ravaged African country.
  • Precious Stones Don't Kill, Guns Do: Enforce Arms Embargoes
    Jul 21, 2000
    A diamond may be forever, but perhaps the diamond trade is not. The industry has been embarrassed by revelations about how some brutal rebel forces in Africa use gems to sustain their fighting. The United Nations has slapped diamond embargoes on rebel-held areas of Angola and Sierra Leone in the hopes of taming those civil wars.
  • World-Class Crimes
    Jun 7, 2000
    Last fall, in a town about 60 miles northeast of the capital of Sierra Leone, I stood in a crowd of cheering members of the Revolutionary United Front and watched as their leader, Foday Sankoh, took the podium. Under Sankoh's leadership, the RUF had conducted an exceptionally brutal offensive against government troops and civilians. But a peace accord signed by the government and rebels in July 1999 gave Sankoh and his forces a full amnesty for the crimes they'd committed in the eight-year war.
  • Murders, Tortures and Crimes Against Citizens Go Unfettered in Sierra Leone
    Aug 11, 1999
    The victims of crimes against humanity in Sierra Leone have no international tribunal to look to for justice for the murder, torture and mutilation there. The plight of the juvenile amputees underscores the humanitarian imperative in the early establishment of the permanent International Criminal Court agreed to in Rome last summer. One year after the completion of the treaty creating the ICC, eighty-three states, including all of the United States's closest allies, have committed themselves to supporting the Court.