The Logic of Nuremberg

Mahmood Mamdani, London Review of Books

In March, General Bosco Ntaganda, the ‘Terminator’, former chief of military operations for the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity, voluntarily surrendered himself at the US embassy in Kigali and was flown to the headquarters of the International Criminal Court at The Hague. The chargesheet included accusations of murder, rape, sexual slavery, persecution and pillage, offences documented in detail by Human Rights Watch over the last ten years. Ntaganda’s trial, scheduled for next year, will follow that of Thomas Lubanga, the UPC’s president, who was convicted in 2012. There seems to be no question about the justice of the proceedings. At the same time, however, the UN Security Council has been pursuing a strategy of armed intervention in eastern Congo, using troops from South Africa and Tanzania, against the rebel groups Ntaganda and others commanded. Both initiatives – the prosecution of rebel leaders for war crimes and military operations against their personnel – are taking place when peace talks between government and rebels are well underway. This, then, is a co-ordinated military and judicial solution for what is also, and fundamentally, a political problem. Inevitably with such solutions, the winners take all.

Tshepo Madlingozi -Truth and Reconciliation - South Africa's unfinished transformation from apartheid

Transition, Human Rights and Violence: rethinking a liberal political relationship in the African neo-colony

by Michael Neocosmos, Critical Studies Seminar, Rhodes University, 31 August 2011

The courage, inventiveness and organisation of the people of North Africa in Tunisia and Egypt, as the new year of 2011 was turning, have evidently disproved (if refutation were needed) the thesis of „the end of history‟. In doing so they have provided renewed enthusiasm for 'people power' and a popularly driven process of mass mobilisation in which people can not only force the resignation of dictators and seemingly the (partial or full) collapse of authoritarian states, but crucially also demand a greater say in the running of their own lives. In standing up against oppression in this manner, people have asserted that they are no longer victims but full blown political subjects. Yet the appearance of the masses on such a broad scale on the political scene for the first time since independence cannot be assumed to mean that they will remain there, and not only because coercive military power has yet to be transformed.