Bodies of more than a dozen Sub-Saharan Africans summarily executed
Tripoli, August 25, 2011
François Mori/AFP/Scanpix
In the general thrill, confusion, and celebration of the fall of the Libyan dictator, scant attention is paid to the atrocities being meted out by the Libyan revolutionary forces against Sub-Saharan Africans. Accused of being Gaddafi's mercenaries, they've been hounded and killed just because they happen to be black. If some of Sub-Saharan Africans were mercenaries, most of them, however, were just plain migrant workers trapped in Libya. In fact, very few Sub-Saharan African countries could send planes to evacuate their nationals from Libya at the start of the conflict. There were, for example, more than 400 Congolese stranded at Tripoli airport in early March. And, standing out as an exception in the region, the DRC government chartered two airplanes to evacuate them. And these 400 were only those who were in the Libyan capital.
And even if these Sub-Saharans were actually Gaddafi's mercenaries, nothing justifies these kinds of summary executions...
Let me repeat this for good measure: Blacks are being killed like feral dogs in the streets of Tripoli!
Amnesty International claims it has "powerful testimonies" of atrocities committed by both sides and the UN has pleaded that "no acts of revenge" be carried out by the victors. But I'd bet that scores of more Sub-Saharan Africans will be massacred before everything shakes out. And in the total indifference of the international community.
Photo: Zohra Bensemra/Reuters/Scanpix
2) Shawshank Redemption botched remake in the DRC: Norwegian convicted murderers Tjostolv Molan and Joshua French attempt prison break in Kisangani
Sullen Tjostolv Molan and crestfallen Joshua French
In their 12-square-meter death-row cell of the Kisangani Prison Centrale
August 2009
Photo: Tore Bergsaker/Dagbladet
Do you remember these two guys? If you don't, then get up to speed by reading my post of February 12, 2010, titled "Two Norwegians shoot a Congolese to watch him die, laugh about it, insult Africa, and Norway's media blame Congo." Johnny Cash could have written his hit for these two criminals!
The picture above of the Prison Centrale shabby cell is a chilling commentary on the carceral conditions of the Gulag of the Congo, or of Africa in general, for that matter. I remember that a few years ago, officials of the ex-MONUC were flabbergasted to discover that the only prison that had any fund earmarked in the annual budget of the government was Makala Prison in Kinshasa! The rest of the country's prisons had to fend for themselves. And prisoners who couldn't be fed by their families either had to become the slaves of other well-off prisoners or die of starvation and pestilence.
Paradoxically, as I used to tell my friends when Mandela came out of Robben Island after more than two decades of hard labor, there was no way the Madiba could have survived 5 years in a "normal" African prison. We all saw in what conditions M.K.O. Abiola, the 1993 Nigerian president elect who was denied his rightful office and jailed by the military, died promptly upon his release after spending 4 short years in the Nigerian Gulag system! It is rumored that Abiola was kept in such total isolation those 4 years that when Koffi Annan went to see him in prison with Red Cross and other officials, he kept talking to the white people in the room and only at the last minute asked the UN Secretary General: "And who are you, gentleman?"
But more importantly, maybe this photograph should serve as deterrent to all Europeans who, once in Africa, try to rehearse in their heads the swashbuckling feats of a Henry Morton Stanley and, worse, would come up, God forbid!, with the not so brilliant idea of killing an African just for the pleasure of watching him/her die...
Anyway, on Wednesday, August 24, prison guards patrolling the outside perimeter of the Kisangani Prison Centrale noticed a huge crack high up on the wall of the prison. Alarmed, they immediately went to report the breach to the prison warden, Kudura Ramazani. When he went to inspect the crack, Ramazani realized it was right outside the prison cell of Moland and French. Putting two and two together, Ramazani then went in to inspect the cell of the two convicts and--lo and behold!--found two iron bars the pair used to attempt to drill their way out of prison. One of the iron bars was 1 meter-long, the other 45 inches. In other words: Shawshank Redemption--the remake; a botched remake, as it were...
The fact that the two convicts came in possession of these dangerous weapons inside the prison is in itself another commentary on the rampant corruption in the Congolese civil service...
Ramazani then proceeded strictly by the book. He called in other authorities to witness the signing of the affidavit of the confession of the attempted prison break by the two convicted murderers: a MONUSCO officer; Col. Gaston Shomari, the JAG who'd presided over their trial at the end of which they were sentenced to death for murder and espionage (weapons charges are tried in military court in the DRC; and though there's the death penalty in the books, there's a moratorium on executions since Kabila took office); and their local lawyer.
Col. Shomari told the Norwegian daily Dagbladet that the two convicted murderers were very close to breaking out of prison, as there remained only a thin layer of bricks standing between them and freedom. Col. Shomari also added that the two felons were repeat escape offenders who wouldn't give up attempting prison breaks. A few months ago they were caught with the whopping sum of $2,000 (more than a sixteen-month salary of the average Congolese of the interior)--no doubt to bribe their way out and make to the Ugandan border where they came from.
Warden Ramazani said that the pair kept perstering carceral authorities with petitions to be moved to Makala Prison in Kinshasa where they expect their lot to improve. But the point of keeping them in Kisangani Prison Centrale is, in my view, in order to give the people of the provincial capital of Orientale and particularly the widow and orphans of Abedi Kasongo, the murder victim, the assurance that the perpetrators are paying for, and in the very juridiction where they'd committed their heinous crime.
The warden also said that the conditions of the two Norwegian criminals will no doubt worsen as the stricter conditions that will be imposed in the prison could cause much resentment in the other inmates who might then try to harm them...
Well, a year or so ago, Moland was laughing his head off at the tribunal, thinking they'd be let go just because they're special people by the mere fact that they are Westerners! He's today a sullen, diminished man--a living illustration of the proverbial "Rira bien qui rira le dernier" (he laughs best who laughs last)...
I strongly believe that his buddy French is the other victim in this affair. A follower, he let himself be enlisted in the criminal spree of his comrade...
0 comments:
Post a Comment