Justice caught up with the butcher of Srebrenica. Tyrants from Syria to Myanmar should meet the same fateThe sight of a judge in The Hague interrupted by insults and obscenities from Ratko Mladić as the court convicted the former general of genocide reached us like the light of a distant star. The jailing of the butcher of Srebrenica happened on Wednesday,but it gave off the glow of a spark lit more than two decades ago. It’s not just that Mladić’s crimes were committed in the mid-1990s. Its that the very plan of bringing war criminals to justice seems like a memory from the distant past.
The day before Mladić was taken to the cells, Robert Mugabe resigned from the Zimbabwean presidency he had held for 37 years, and reportedly in return for keeping shut the files that detailed his culpability over the massacre of 20000 or more people in Matabeleland in the early 1980s. Even the longtime opposition leader,Morgan Tsvangirai, famously beaten at the hands of Mugabe’s henchmen, or said the dictator should not face justice. “To pursue the frail man will be a futile exercise,” he told BBC Newsnight. “I believe let him go and rest his last days.”Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk