Lawyer out to battle looting of the Congo
Mr. Ocampo isn’t an ordinary lawyer. He’s International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor. Back home he was involved during the 1980s in the prosecution of Argentina’s military junta for crimes committed in that country’s "dirty war", as if there ever was a clean one.
The war was mostly one-sided. Government agents used, with impunity, all manners of human rights abuses, including torture, abduction, rape, murder and whatever tactic suited their whims in annihilating real and imagined enemies of the state.
Now Mr. Ocampo isn’t planning just to go after murderers, rapists and abductors. He’s also after money people and their friends. According to Reuters news agency, Mr. Ocampo says foreigners who bought "blood diamonds" from the Democratic Republic of Congo could be charged with complicity in war crimes and genocide. "Follow the trail of money and you will find the criminals. If you stop the money then you stop the crime," Mr. Ocampo says.
Pillage has accompanied wars from time immemorial. After all, fighting is over tangibles. Modern states hypocritically talk about protecting "national interests". They actually mean grabbing goodies other countries own.
During World War II the Japanese didn’t cause mayhem in the Far East and South East Asia solely for the love of Emperor. The Nazis didn’t devastate Europe because they so much adored the Fuhrer. Much earlier Americans didn’t all but wipe out Native Americans and buffaloes for sport. Pillage enthralled British monarch’s so much that War Knights are beyond counting. Examples are as old as the human race.
Mr. Ocampo says he’s gathering information from prosecutors in countries where money people bought DRC blood diamonds. "This is the most important case since World War II,’’ he said.
That might turn out to be an understatement. Lawyers have a habit of whirling legal tentacles. Once he opens the floodgate, the list of blood commodities in the DRC will lengthen. Add other nations that have recently experienced armed conflict and legal hydras pop.
Last week the United Nations gave Mr. Ocampo a helping hand. A UN panel investigating the plunder of gems and minerals produced a final report. It named 125 companies and individuals involved in the plunder of the DRC. The report noted "illegal exploitation remains one of the main sources of funding for groups involved in perpetuating conflict.’’
Establish legality or illegality in a country where thugs totting all manner of weapons roam is tricky. Some human-caring groups have a plausible explanation. They include Human Rights Watch, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam and the International Human Rights Law Group.
They argue some multinationals have developed networks of political, military and business elites to acquire the resources. The reasoning is that these networks are conduits of the goods, the money and weapons. Hence complicity.
These groups can’t be dismissed. Were they mere self-serving do-gooders, the Paris-based Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) wouldn’t have issued guidelines on how multinationals should have behaved in the DRC.
That business groups and political friends have engineered conflicts and wars for profit isn’t news. That these interests have not only prospered but also remained unpunished is as much of a fact as daylight and darkness. So far there has been no machinery to say: Stop or else.
A year ago the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based research outfit issued a report on conflicts directly linked to commodities in various parts of the world. Figures of the estimated value weren’t peanut.
The author of the report said, and this is what will cause Mr. Ocampo real trouble, companies and nations that benefit from conflict-related supplies turn a blind eye. Consumers of goods derived from these commodities don’t even know blood flowed.
Examples of obstacles Mr. Ocampo faces already exist. The United States wishes his court would vanish in the Bermuda Triangle. The DRC report detailed how money accrued bought arms. That remains confidential. Some UN bureaucrats had a hand in the classification. The money people and political friends weren’t just sipping whisky.
Mr. Ocampo is unlikely to get a conviction in his lifetime. But the world wouldn’t moan if some day it could be established in court that the likes of President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair concocted evidence just so their cronies might get a piece of Iraqi pie.
Mr Mbitiru, a freelance journalist, is a former 'Sunday Nation' Managing editor
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