Maravi

(ZIMPAPERS) Deafening silence of The Hague

Deafening silence of The Hague
Sunday, 23 October 2011 01:49 Opinion
By Christopher Mutsvangwa

The gory details of the murder of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi by the National Transitional Council (NTC) rebels who are accountable to their Nato handlers have ignited a media frenzy epitomising the celebration of the macabre.

Even in the 21st century, the post-imperial Nato invaders still hark to the savagery that was the hallmark of their treatment of conquered “lesser races”. Such barbarity being flighted as prime-time news is offensive to all civilised humanity. Indeed it is revolting to us in Southern Africa.

It is not long ago that the brutality of the savage wars of colonial and racist minority domination masterminded and executed countless massacres in a broad swathe of the sub-region stretching from the Indian Ocean in Mozambique all the way to the Atlantic Ocean in Angola.

Practitioners of racist genocide rampaged, smiting to death thousands of the defenceless populace.

Etched deep in our memories are a string of massacres by Portuguese colonial fascist soldiers, Rhodesian colonial racist supremacists and their South African colonial and apartheid kindred.

Our hearts still grieve for those killed at the Wiriyamu Village massacre in Tete (1972); the massacre of Zimbabwean refugees at Nyadzonia (1976); Chimoio (1977) in Mozambique; and Freedom Camp (1977) in Zambia; the Cassinga massacre of Namibian refugees in Angola in 1978 among other hundreds of thousands of cruel killings that included victims of wars by their surrogates.

What is remarkable is that not even one of the various African nations that emerged victorious ever carried out any mass trials and revanchist executions of the perpetrators of these heinous crimes.
Great care was taken to restrain the spirit of mob revenge or summary killings of these racist and fascist killers who qualified as vermin of the earth.
It is this humanity that pervades the sub-region and is thus a harbinger of great promise.

Thus evil practitioners of genocide like General Magnus Malan (who died earlier this year), General Peter Walls and Prime Minister Ian Smith (who died in 2007) and Hans Dreyer of Koevoet in Namibia all went on to live as unmolested free men after their various wars of massacres wrought by their sordid hands.

The Nato handlers of NTC rebels clearly seem never to have learnt anything of such magnanimity.

While they were keen to hand out weapons of war and to impart war skills to their Libyan surrogates, they conveniently overlooked teaching them the cherished principles of the Geneva Conventions on the treatment of captured prisoners of war.

They are thus complicit as scriptwriters of the gory debauchery of evident summary killing of a captured and wounded Gaddafi.

As I write, the world is listening to the loud silence of Luis Moreno Ocampo, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.

His legal vision is jaundiced by an ideological tint with his favoured quarry being humans of very dark colour originating from a targeted African continent.

The Africa Union is indeed fully justified in refusing to deal with a jurist of such bias and prejudice.

It is also appalling to read and hear comments from local notables and journalists associated with the pro-West agenda who are exhibiting evident glee at the television and Press circus of the cruel and the macabre.

- The Sunday Mail

Labels: HILLARY CLINTON, ICC, MUAMMAR AL-GADDAFI, WAR CRIMES

posted by MrK @ 5:20 PM