Taylor’s trial,new form of colonialism — counsel

THE lead counsel for the former Liberian President, Charles Taylor, Mr Courtenay Griffiths, has described the International Criminal Court (ICC) as a new form of neo-colonial structure being used by the West to control their former colonies.
He said in reality, “what we are witnessing in the 21st century is the creation of a new form of neo-colonialism — a colonialism by a different means” through the misuse of the International Criminal Law.
Mr Griffiths, who was speaking at a press conference on the status of Taylor’s trial by the ICC at The Hague, Holland, in Accra at the weekend, said it was time for Africans to take charge of their own destiny and not allow the Western powers to dictate to them.
While accepting that Mr Taylor was guilty of some offences against humanity before the period of his indictment, he argued that Mr Taylor’s trial had received very little publicity here in Africa, yet it was the continent which was most affected by the outcome of those proceedings, and asked why Mr Taylor’s trial had not taken place in Africa.
“Why has the African Union (AU) not established its own court to deal with issues which affect Africans in Africa? If a corporal in the American Army cannot be tried in the ICC for war crimes and crimes against humanity, how come an African president can?” he asked.
In his opinion, one reason Mr Taylor’s trial and the trial of other Africans were taken to The Hague was that it was easier to destroy the rights of a people when they were kept in the dark and added that the majority of Africans had no clue as to what was going on in The Hague.
According to him, the world had moved on since Britain’s gunboat policy in the 19th century and because that was not feasible now, the West needed a different means to control their former colonies, saying that one way of doing that was through the ICC.
That, he said, was because it was curious that no one was calling, with equal ferocity, for either former President George Bush or former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to stand trial for the atrocities instigated by them in Iraq.
Likewise, he said, there was a studied silence from the “international community” when it came to the crimes committed so recently by the state of Israel in Gaza, pointing out that impunity only became an issue if the perpetrator was a black African who did not enjoy the backing of the West.
Mr Griffiths recalled that when Mr Taylor was arrested and dragged to The Hague to stand trial, he had warned “that if they came for him in the morning they would come for others at night”, noting that that vision had now come true in the case of the President of Sudan and that the next could be President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.
When asked why the press conference in Ghana, he said he had come to the birthplace of Pan-Africanism, in the hope that “we can together rekindle that non-negotiable demand that Africans be treated equally on the global stage”.
“This is a good place to start with politically astute individuals. Accra is a good place because from here the fight could go across. This goes beyond Charles Taylor; let’s not personalise this because he is just being used as a catalyst for the process and if we do not halt this it will engulf us all,” he stated.
He said that was a serious issue that needed to be addressed because almost half a century after supposed independence, “we still allow this to go on”.