Jolie to seek end to sexual violence as war weapon at London summit

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Bosnia, conflict, DRC, rape, Rwanda, Sexual Violence, shame, silence, soldiers, systematic rape, the UN, War Crimes, weapon of war

Jolie to seek end to sexual violence as war weapon at London summit

Angelina Jolie has said she hopes a global summit on sexual violence she will co-host in London with the UK government will bring lasting change to global peacekeeping and war crimes prosecutions, deterring the use of mass rape as a weapon in future conflicts.

The four-day summit, beginning on 10 June, will bring together governments from 141 countries to discuss how to improve and standardise the investigation of large scale sexual violence in wartime, to bring an end a culture of impunity that has severely limited prosecutions up to now.

Speaking to The Guardian during a visit to Bosnia, Jolie said: “I would hope that years down the line when war breaks out, people who are considering raping a man, woman or child would be very aware of the consequences of their actions, and that a woman crossing a checkpoint would be aware there was someone collecting evidence and that evidence would have a … result for her.”

“When that begins to happen on masse, then things will change. That’s why its important that this effort isn’t just one single [approach]. We are working with everyone who has worked on this issue for years, with every NGO and every government, to assist these people on all fronts.”

Jolie visited Bosnia at the end of last week with Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, as part of a two-year partnership aimed at preventing sexual violence in conflict. In the course of the trip they spoke in private to several women survivors of the 1995 massacre in Srebrenica, where the slaughter of 8,000 Muslim men and boys has overshadowed another crime against humanity committed at the same time, the systematic rape of women and girls.

The meeting with the Srebrenica women took place in a disused battery factory where in July 1995, thousands of Bosnian Muslims sought the shelter of Dutch UN peacekeepers. The UN promise of protection proved hollow and the factory is now echoing and empty apart from a sombre memorial – two black boxes each as big as a house. In a cemetery outside a stone monument records the names of the 8,000 men and boys slaughtered by General Ratko Mladic’s Serb army.

One of the women, Edina Karic, was taken from her family by Serb soldiers and held at a nearby lead and zinc mine, where she was repeatedly raped.

“I was taken to the mine, where I was raped many times along with two other girls. Then we were eight days in an abandoned house where we were raped again,” Karic said. “When these things were happening to me, it was as if I wasn’t there in my body. I was looking at it from outside.”

None of Karic’s rapists has been prosecuted, even though she could definitively identify at least three of them, and has followed their lives, in a town a few miles away, through Facebook.

More than 20,000 Bosnian women and girls were raped. Over a decade in the Democratic Republic of Congo there are thought to have been 200,000 victims. There were up to half a million rapes in Rwanda in 1994, and there are widespread reports of systematic sexual violence in Syria.

The silence surrounding rape as a war crime is deepened because the victims are often shunned by their own communities. Edina Karic is a rarity in that she is prepared to speak openly about what happened to her.

“I realised I’m not the one who should feel shame. It’s for the perpetrators to feel ashamed,” she said.

In Sarajevo, Hague and Jolie spoke to a hall full of Bosnian army officers who have, with British assistance, developed a training course meant to equip peacekeeping contingents from around the world to detect and prevent the commission of mass rape. As part of the Hague-Jolie campaign, every UN peacekeeping mission is now supposed to provide for the protection of civilians against sexual violence in conflict.

“At times, you may be all that stands between a child and violence that will scar him or her forever,” Jolie told the soldiers in Sarajevo. You may sometimes be the first person outside their family that a survivor of rape encounters. Your actions may make the difference between a successful prosecution, or aggressors going unpunished.”

So far, for the 20,000-50,000 wartime rapes in Bosnia, there have been 30 convictions at the Hague war crimes tribunal and another 33 at the Bosnia state court. Thousands more perpetrators, like Edina Karic’s rapists, remain at liberty.

“There is no forensic evidence, often no medical reports. All you have usually are witness statements, and in a very conservative society, most victims don’t want people to know what happened to them, so most rapes are not reported,” said Dubravko Campara, a Bosnian war crimes prosecutor.

The Bosnian state court has hundreds of open investigations on its docket and just 17 prosecutors. But with the help of UK funding, another 15 are going to be added to the staff to ease the backlog. The court now has a witness support unit to ease the pressure on women witnesses.

The global Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative was launched two years ago after Hague saw Jolie’s 2012 film about the Bosnian rape camps, Land of Blood and Honey. The hardest part of the effort is likely to be translating goodwill at the summit into real change in future conflicts. When Hague and Jolie visited Goma in DRC last March, they heard that women fleeing the fighting with their families were being frequently raped when they ventured out of refugee camps to look for firewood, despite the proximity of thousands of UN peacekeepers nearby. Keeping the women safe was not part of the soldiers’ mandate.

Hague conceded that progress in changing UN peacekeeping practices had been slow, but added: “The UN will be heavily involved in the summit. A big ally of ours is Zainab Bangura, the UN special representative on sexual violence. I think we are getting somewhere with that, but it means systematically building our objectives into all peacekeeping training.”

“There is a lot of goodwill,” Jolie said. There is a lot of understanding of what’s right and wrong, but there is a disconnect. So if we can try to put the pieces together and fill the holes, then maybe there can be a real change.”

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War is over – now Serbs and Bosniaks fight to win control of a brutal history

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Bosnia

War is over – now Serbs and Bosniaks fight to win control of a brutal history

After survivors and bereaved families put up a memorial to the mass slaughter in 1992 of Muslims in Višegrad, the response of the Serb authorities in the eastern Bosnian town was as unsubtle as it was symbolic. They ordered the word “genocide” chiselled off the stone monument.

A group of Višegrad widows soon restored the word in lipstick, only for it to be obscured by municipal white paint a few days later. This is a battle the town hall is not prepared to lose. When it sent a surveyor and workman into the town’s Muslim cemetery with an angle grinder to erase the offending term on 23 January, they were accompanied by 150 policemen in riot gear. The message was clear.

The graveyard spat is a skirmish in a much bigger battle being fought in Bosnia – the continuation by bureaucratic means of the murderous four-year war of two decades ago. It is a struggle over collective memory and the power to write history.

“Those who committed the war crimes against us are still winning. They are killing our truth,” said Bakira Hasečić, a Višegrad survivor who was raped multiple times by Serb paramilitaries at her home and in the local police station in 1992. Her sister was raped and killed. Her 18-year-old daughter was raped and had her head smashed by a rifle butt, but survived.

Hasečić now runs the Association of Women Victims of War. She and other Višegrad rape victims tried to protect the monument last month but failed because the town authorities turned up an hour earlier than announced, and in force.

“The huge numbers of police in their uniforms and caps brought back the memories of 1992. You relive those moments. My legs were shaking. When we arrived, we had no idea they had already done that to the monument. People started crying when they found out. I couldn’t bring myself to look at it.”

However, the same morning and less than 200 yards away, Hasečić and other Bosniak survivors were successful in stopping another act of demolition. The Serb authorities want to knock down a house on Pionirska Street, where 59 Muslim women, children and pensioners were locked into a single room and incinerated on 14 June 1992. Relatives of the dead, with Hasečić’s help, are trying to restore the house as a memorial.

The town council has countered by expropriating the building, claiming the road needs to be widened. Yet the house is set well back from the existing road and the immediate Serb neighbours – who have mostly been supportive of the Bosniaks’ restoration attempts, offering to help with water and electricity connections – say no other houses on the street have been targeted in the same way.

But no one in the neighbourhood believes the issue is really about town planning. Serb nationalists are striving to suppress reminders of atrocities committed in the name of separatism, mostly against the country’s Muslims (known as Bosniaks) and to construct an alternative history in which Serbs were the principal victims. Many Bosniaks and outside observers fear that this refusal to come to terms with the past means there are few guarantees that such acts will not be repeated.

Bosniaks and Croats have also been slow to allow memorials to civilian victims from other ethnicities, but it is in the Republika Srpska, the Serb-run half of Bosnia, where the scale of the killing was by far the greatest, and where the culture of denial is now the deepest.

Višegrad is a grim example. An eastern Bosnian town set dramatically along a break in the white limestone ravines of the River Drina, it is home to Bosnia’s best-known cultural artefact, the 16th century Mehmed Paša Sokolović bridge, a graceful span of 11 masonry arches made legendary by the Yugoslav Nobel laureate Ivo Andrić.

In his 1945 novel, the Bridge on the Drina, it is silent witness to atrocities across generations. In 1992, it was spattered with blood once more. Serb paramilitaries calling themselves “The Avengers” and the “White Eagles” went on a killing spree through the town and surrounding villages, executing Muslims. Men, women and over a hundred children were slaughtered, many on the bridge itself, and their bodies dumped in the Drina.

The practice of barricading people into houses and setting them alight with grenades was reproduced several times. In another incident in nearby Bikavac, there were 60 victims, against mostly women and children.

A couple of miles outside Višegrad, young women and girls as young as 14 were held captive and repeatedly raped in the Vilina Vlas spa hotel. It was where the paramilitaries led by a pair of sadistic local cousins, Milan and Sredoje Lukić, made their wartime base. Muslim men were routinely tortured next door to where the women were raped and killed.

The estimates of the total number of victims in the Višegrad municipality range from 1,600 to 3,000. The rest of the area’s Muslims fled; most made their way south to Goražde, which became a Bosniak enclave and survived a three-year Serbian siege. Before the war, the Višegrad municipality had a population over 21,000, two thirds Muslim. Now the population is 12,000, 1,500 of them Bosniaks.

Today’s survivors are post-war returnees to the Višegrad outskirts, often living in villages or houses where their loved ones were executed. Twenty years after the bloodletting they remain a marginalised community, routinely denied the meagre social benefits doled out by Višegrad’s authorities.

After an interregnum in which slightly more moderate parties held sway, the Serb Democratic Party (or SDS for Srpska Demokratska Stranka) regained control of the municipality in October 2012. The extreme nationalist party of Radovan Karadzic, which hacked out the Republika Srpska and oversaw the “ethnic cleansing” of Muslims and Croats, is back in charge in Višegrad and 24 other Serb towns with its own version of what happened between 1992 and 1995, and its own way of doing things. Hence the municipal use of angle-grinders and bulldozers.

“With the old mayor we could co-operate much better. We had different opinions but it was discussed in a more civilised way,” said Bilal Memišević, the head of Višegrad’s Islamic community council. Both his parents were murdered in 1992, when he was studying abroad. “Since the SDS came to power, they started ignoring us. They don’t mention employment, or the economy. It’s all about the war and the manipulation of 1992. They have been able to target a vulnerable population and they have been successful. They have built an alternative reality.”

That alternative reality is visible everywhere in town. In the main square, there is large statue of a knight bearing a cross and a sword, dedicated to “the defenders of the Republika Srpska, with the gratitude of the people of Višegrad”. Nearby a large swath of land had been expropriated for a literary theme-park, Andrićgrad, masterminded by Emir Kusturica, Serbia’s most famous film director, twice awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

The complex, a pastiche on the town’s history, due to be completed in June this year, is being built on the site of a former sports centre that was used as a detention camp by Serb paramilitaries.

In mid-March each year, hundreds of Serbs come from around the region to parade through the town to commemorate Draža Mihajlović, the leader of the ultra-nationalist Chetnik movement during the second world war, who carried out a series of atrocities against Muslims in the Drina valley. They come as Chetniks, with long wild beards, fur hats, and black skull-and-crossbone flags. Many of the killers in 1992 dressed exactly the same way. It is a terrifying annual spectacle for Višegrad’s remaining Bosniaks, all the more so in 2010 when Mitar Vasiljevic, a Lukić henchman sentenced 15 years by the Hague war crimes tribunal for his part in the 1992 killings, made a triumphant return after early release. He paraded in full Chetnik garb and was given a hero’s welcome, complete with patriotic music and a motorcade through the town.

Milan Lukić himself was transferred from the Hague this month to serve his life term in Estonia. His cousin Sredoje is serving 27 years in Norway.

The most powerful man in town now is Miroslav Kojić, a soldier and secret policeman for Republika Srpska during the war and now Višegrad’s SDS representative in the Republika Srpska parliament.

He provides a legal defence of the municipality’s actions, arguing that there have been no convictions at the Hague tribunal specifically for genocide that would justify the disputed memorial. (Višegrad was taken from the list of municipalities in Karadzic’s genocide indictment to slim the charge sheet and speed up his trial, but the tribunal has declared the town was subjected to “one of the most comprehensive and ruthless campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian conflict”). As for Pionirska Street, Kojić says the issue is a long-running non-political town planning matter.

Of his own wartime role, Kojić – an energetic man with a piercing stare – is heated, launching into a strangely inverted version of Višegrad’s wartime history, in which Bakira Hasečić supposedly tortured Serb policemen and soldiers, and Višegrad’s Serbs withstood a brutal Bosniak siege in 1992 and 1993.

The narrative of Serb victimhood is pieced together from sporadic Bosniak acts of resistance during the war. After the former Yugoslav National Army bombarded Muslim areas of Višegrad at the outbreak of conflict in the first week of April 1992, a group of armed Muslims took some Serb policemen hostage and threatened to blow up a nearby hydroelectric dam if shelling continued. The dam was retaken by the army which then withdrew on May 19, handing the town over to Serb nationalists and paramilitaries that carried out the atrocities against Bosniak civilians.

In summer 1992, survivors of the concentration camps helped form a Bosniak First Višegrad Brigade which fought a guerrilla campaign for a year in the wooded hills on the west bank of the Drina, but never came close to surrounding or threatening the city before being driven back into the Bosniak enclave of Goražde in 1993. After surviving multiple rapes, Hasečić, did join the Bosnian army, but there is no evidence of her mistreating Serbs.

Today the Bosniak resistance effort is the justification for public memorials in central Višegrad for Serb soldiers and even Russian volunteer fighters on the Serb side, and the absence of equivalent monuments to Bosniak civilians. It is a pattern repeated around the Republika Srpska. Further up the Drina is the town of Foca which became a byword for mass rape during the war. Bosnian Serbs imprisoned Muslim women and girls and raped them on such a scale the town made legal history. As a result of what happened in Foca, such systematic rape was finally classed as a crime against humanity.

There is no sign of such a grim history in Foca now, just another granite and marble monument to the Serb fallen. There is also no plaque at the most notorious concentration camp at Omarska, now within an iron ore mine run by a Luxembourg-based multinational steel corporation, ArcelorMittal, which says it is a matter for the Serb-run local authority in Prijedor to decide. In the neighbouring camp, at Trnopolje, where torture and rape were rife and where hundreds of Bosniaks and Croats were killed, a concrete memorial to fallen Serb soldiers has been placed at the entrance inscribed with an ode to “freedom”.

In Višegrad, the remaining Bosniaks have become accustomed to the official state of denial. Omar Bosankić and Elvedin Musanović, two Muslim men in their mid-30s out strolling one recent afternoon on Višegrad’s bridge, insist that relations with their Serb neighbours are fine as long as the war is not mentioned.

“No one wants to admit anything. They never want to talk about it,” Bosankić said. As a 14-year-old boy, he helped fish bodies of murdered Muslims out of the Drina at night in his home village of Barimo, five miles downstream. “I still have images that come back all the time. There a woman with her hands tied behind her back and a man with a screwdriver still stuck in his neck.”

Musanović says that Bosniaks on the bridge were slaughtered with whatever the Lukićs’ “Avengers” or “White Eagles” could find, often blades of broken glass. A water tanker would come in the evening to wash away the gore from the ancient stones of the bridge where they now take their daily walk. In the absence of any jobs, there is not much else to do.

The two men are unimpressed by the municipality’s legal objections to the Bosniak memorial.

“What else happened here but genocide?” Bosankić asked. Twenty-six people were murdered in his village in August 1992, the youngest, Emir Bajrić, was only 12 years old. He points out that the fact that no one has so far been convicted for the crime does not mean it did not happen. “Everybody who lives here knows what happened.”

Netherlands to pay compensation over Srebrenica massacre

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Bosnia, Dutch

Netherlands to pay compensation over Srebrenica massacre

The Netherlands has been ordered to pay compensation for the deaths of Bosnian Muslims in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in a ruling that opens up the Dutch state to compensation claims from relatives of the rest of the 8,000 men and youths who died.

The judgment by Holland’s supreme court is the final decision in a protracted claim brought by relatives of three Muslim men who were expelled by Dutch soldiers from a United Nations compound during the Balkans conflict then killed by Bosnian Serb forces.

Although the case related only to the murder of three victims, it confirms the precedent that countries that provide troops to UN missions can be held responsible for their conduct.

The case was brought by Hasan Nuhanovic, an interpreter who lost his brother and father, and relatives of Rizo Mustafic, an electrician who was killed. They argued that all three men should have been protected by Dutch peacekeepers. Mustafic and Nuhanovic were employed by the Dutch, but Nuhanovic’s father and brother were not.

The men were among thousands who had sought shelter in the UN compound as Bosnian Serb forces commanded by General Ratko Mladic overran the area on 11 July 1995. Two days later the outnumbered Dutch peacekeepers bowed to pressure from Mladic’s troops and forced thousands of Muslim families out of the compound.

Bosnian Serb forces sorted the Muslims by gender, then began executing Muslim men and boys. The bodies of approximately 8,000 were buried in hastily dug mass graves.

The international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague has ruled that the killings constituted genocide and Mladic is on trial for crimes committed at Srebrenica. The atrocity was the worst massacre on European soil since the second world war.

The Dutch court ruling held that in the chaos of the Serb takeover of Srebrenica, UN commanders no longer had control of the troops on the ground and “effective control” therefore reverted to Dutch authorities in the Hague.

The human rights lawyer Liesbeth Zegveld, who represented the Bosnian families, called the ruling historic because it established that countries involved in UN missions can be found legally responsible for crimes, despite the UN’s far-reaching immunity from prosecution. “People participating in UN missions are not always covered by the UN flag,” she said.

Toon Heisterkamp, a supreme court judge responsible for briefing the media, insisted that the narrow focus of the case meant it was unlikely to have far-reaching effects.

Outside the courtroom Nuhanovic said he was stunned by the ruling, which ends a 10-year legal battle and opens the door to compensation claims against the Dutch government.

“I was thinking about my family, they are dead for 18 years,” he said. “It does not change that, but maybe there is some justice. It should have happened years ago. In the future countries might act differently in peacekeeping missions and I hope the lives of other people in the future will be saved because this mistake was admitted.”

The Dutch government resigned in 2002 after the National War Documentation Institute blamed the debacle on Dutch authorities and the UN for sending underarmed and underprepared forces into the mission and refusing to answer the commanders’ call for air support.

The government accepted “political responsibility” for the mission’s failure and contributes aid to Bosnia, much of which is earmarked for rebuilding in Srebrenica. But it has always said responsibility for the massacre itself lies with the Bosnian Serbs.

The three men were among the last to be expelled, the 2011 ruling said, and by that time the peacekeepers, known as “Dutchbat” for Dutch battalion, had already seen Bosnian Serb troops abusing Muslim men and boys and should have known they faced the real threat of being killed.

“Dutchbat should not have turned these men over to the Serbs,” a summary of the judgment said.

The Hague appeals court in 2011 ordered the families of the three dead men to be compensated, but no figure was ever reached, pending the outcome of the government’s appeal to the supreme court.

Zegveld said the amount of compensation the families will receive was not important. “It’s far more important what’s been decided today than any amount that will be established in the future,” she said.

The Srebrenica massacre has turned into a national trauma for the Netherlands. Dutch troops returning home faced accusations of cowardice and incompetence.

The Dutch soldiers, many of whom feared for their own lives, helped the attacking Bosnian-Serb troops as they separated Muslim men from women. The men and boys were then bussed to execution sites. A subsequent inquiry exonerated the ground forces.

“Dutchbat decided not to evacuate them along with the battalion and instead sent them away from the compound,” a summary of the supreme court ruling said.

“Outside the compound they were murdered by the Bosnian-Serb army or related paramilitary groups.”

Congo receives £180m boost to health system to tackle warzone rape

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abuse, conflict, Congo, DRC, rape, sexual abuse, sexual assault, Sexual Violence, soldiers, taboo, training, war, War Crimes, weapon of war

Congo receives £180m boost to health system to tackle warzone rape

When Beatrice was raped, by a gang of soldiers who sauntered by her home and saw her alone, she thought it was the end of world. She could not have imagined then that rape was only the start of a terrible downward spiral that would often seem to have no end.

“My husband came and said what happened? You can’t be telling me the truth. He no longer wanted to be with me and he left. I was alone with five children.”

Beatrice, not her real name, now has a sixth child, the result of the rape. The infant is strapped to her back, and sleeps while she sobs at the memories that stalk her, in a dark room in a hospital in Goma, in the violent south-eastern corner of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“My husband’s parents totally rejected my child. The village did. Everyone who sees me, curses me. They say I am a soldier’s mistress.”

Beatrice’s ever deepening tragedy is also a national nightmare. By the United Nations’ very conservative estimate, 200,000 women have been through a similar ordeal since 1998.

On a trip to Goma, William Hague, the British foreign secretary, launched the UK’s plan to help tackle the crisis, announcing £180m in new funding for the DRC health system, some of which will go to training medical staff to give proper care for rape victims.

Jonathan Lusi, a surgeon at the Goma hospital, both tends to the very serious injuries which accompany rape, and oversees his patients’ psychological recovery, training to give them independent livelihoods.

“We are in a war. It’s a legal vacuum. There is no government, no authority and no values. Rape is a warning sign something has gone very wrong.”

The DRC, after decades of conflict and turmoil is just one of the world’s battlefields where the routine sexual abuse of women and girls is a weapon of war. No one has any idea how many have been raped in Syria, for example. It is hard enough to count the bodies. It is a crime against humanity that often goes unmentioned because of the squeamishness of public officials and the many challenges to collecting evidence. Corpses are easier to count than rapes, while the victims of rape live in societies that enforce silence.

The tens of thousands of rapes during the Bosnian war, for example, have only led to 30 convictions.

The British government will attempt to break the official silence over the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war by taking the unusual step of using its presidency of the G8 this year to put it at the heart of the agenda of the rich nations’ club that has in recent years been preoccupied with economic woes.

“It’s time for the governments of the world to do something about this,” said Hague in an interview with the Guardian during a visit to Goma. “I will argue it has been taboo or ignored and taken for granted for too long … We can move the dial on something like this. We are big enough in the world to do something about this.”

As well as the money pledged to support the DRC health system, Hague also announced £850,000 in support for an advocacy group called Women’s Initiatives for Gender Justice to help it document cases in eastern DRC and push the international criminal court (ICC) to take heed of sexual crimes in its deliberations. Other funding will go to Physicians for Human Rights, another NGO, for evidence collection equipment such as locked evidence cabinets for eventual prosecutions.

Such prosecutions are not necessarily a distant aspiration. One of the leaders of the rebel M23 militia, Bosco Ntaganda, handed himself in at the US embassy in Kigali, the capital of neighbouring Rwanda, last week and was flown to face war crimes charges at the ICC in the Netherlands, where he denied charges including murder, rape, pillaging and using child soldiers in his first appearance on Tuesday.

Hague was accompanied in Goma by Angelina Jolie, with whom he has forged an unorthodox partnership to campaign on the issue. He credits Jolie’s film last year about Bosnian rape camps, In the Land of Blood and Honey, with helping to inspire the British initiative.

“The hope and the dream is that next time this happens, it is known that if you abuse women, if you rape the women, you will be accountable for your actions,” Jolie told the Guardian. “This will be a crime of war and you won’t just get away with it.”

Hague and Jolie visited a camp on the shores on Lake Kivu which has sprung up as a result of an upsurge in fighting when the M23 advanced into Goma last November.

Set against a breathtaking backdrop of lake and volcanoes, the camp of 10,000 people is a huddle of meagre straw shelters half covered with tarpaulin.

The women here are forced to venture out of the camp to collect firewood or water. Both make them vulnerable to rape and many of the women and girls have been assaulted. All the International Rescue Committee, which runs the camp, can offer to mitigate the threat are “dignity kits” that contain efficient stoves that require less firewood and extra clothes so the women have to look for washing water less often.

“It’s a sad fact that when you ask how to reduce sexual violence the answer is to help them not have to go out,” Jolie said.

On the way out of the camp a woman who had earlier given Hague and Jolie a reserved factual account of her experiences ran up to them on a last minute impulse: “Please help us. We are being raped like animals.” Hague said: “The memory of meeting her will always stay with me.”

Khmer Rouge genocide tribunal thrown into chaos as Ieng Sary, one of the three men standing trial, dies

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Khmer Rouge

Khmer Rouge genocide tribunal thrown into chaos as Ieng Sary, one of the three men standing trial, dies

The Khmer Rouge genocide tribunal was today facing fresh turmoil after it was announced that one of the three men standing trial for war crimes had died in hospital.

The death of Ieng Sary, 87, who served as foreign minister of the Khmer Rouge regime, underscored the concerns of many victims and families of those who died who are increasingly anxious about how slowly the trial is proceeding.

“As a victim of the Khmer Rouge, I am very disappointed that Ieng Sary escaped justice, escaped the trial,” Ou Virak, whose father was killed by the regime and who now heads the Cambodian Human Rights Centre, told The Independent from Phnom Penh.

He added: “I am also disappointed by the pace of the trial. This is is exactly what we have been saying. There is no time to waste.”

The death of Ieng Sary means there are now only two former senior members of the Maoist-inspired regime on trial – Nuon Chea, also known as Brother Number Two and who was considered the right-hand man of Pol Pot and the regime’s ideologist, and the former president, Khieu Samphan.

As it is, a team of international experts is next week due to check the medical condition of Nuon Chea, who has been in and out of hospital for years, to determine whether or not he is well enough to continue being tried. Ieng Sary was also to have been examined by those doctors.

In 2011, the court decided that Ieng Thirith, the regime’s “First Lady” and the only female leader to be charged, was unfit to continue with the proceedings after she was found to be suffering form dementia.

Lars Olsen, a spokesman for the so-called the Extraordinary Chambers in the Court of Cambodia, said Ieng Sary had died in the Khmer Soviet Friendship Hospital in Phnom Penh where he had been admitted on March 4. “He has been suffering from intestinal problems,” said Mr Larsen. “He has been hospitalised several times during the last year.”

The UN-backed tribunal has been rocked by difficulties since it was established more than a decade ago. Perhaps the most significant challenge was political interference from the government of Hun Sen, Cambodia’s prime minister and himself a former officer with the Khmer Rouge.

His interference meant an effective block on expanding the number of suspects to be tried. Experts had suggested there was sufficient evidence to bring several other former Khmer Rouge leaders before the tribunal – a preliminary examination of documents and witness statements known as cases three and four – but the moves were opposed by Cambodian lawyers in the court, apparently under the influence of Hun Sen. The country’s foreign minister openly stated Hun Sen would not allow “case three” to proceed.

In October 2011, one of the investigating judges, Siegfried Blunk, quit his post, claiming the government of Cambodia was trying to interfere with the proceedings of the court.

The unwillingness of the Cambodian authorities to engage with the tribunal has also been exposed in other ways. In recent weeks, the trial’s proceedings ground to a halt after Cambodian staff went on strike, complaining that they had not been paid for months. The Cambodian government is responsible for paying the salaries of Cambodian staff.

Activists insist that however painful and difficult the tribunal may be, it is an essential step if Cambodia’s wish to move forward from this dark episode in its past. Anywhere up to 1.7m Cambodian civilians were murdered or else starved to death during the rule of Khmer Rouge, between April 1975 and January 1979, when they were forced from the cities and made to work on agricultural farms.

The tribunal has also raised uncomfortable questions for many of the major powers, some of whom are funding the £100m tribunal. China openly supported the regime, while a number of countries, among them the UK, permitted the Khmer Rouge to retain Cambodia’s seat at the UN General Assembly after they were ousted from power by Vietnamese troops.

The tribunal has also drawn attention to the brutalising effect of the massive secret bombing campaign of the US in Cambodia and Laos, directed against Khmer Rouge and South Vietnamese forces and which some historians have argued created the circumstances for the Khmer Rouge to seize power.

So far, the achievements of the tribunal have been modest. Only one former leader, Guek Eav, known as Comrade Duch, who headed the notorious S-21 detention centre where up to 14,000 people were tortured and dispatched to be killed, has been convicted. He was found guilty of war crimes in 2010 and sentenced to 19 years in jail.

The Associated Press reported today that Ieng Sary studied in Paris with Pol Pot and held senior positions, including that of deputy prime minister in charge of foreign affairs. When Vietnamese forces invaded Cambodia in 1979 and drove the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh, both Pol Pot and Ieng Sary were sentenced to death in absentia.

They fled with Khmer Rouge loyalists to remote jungle strongholds in western Cambodia. But Ieng Sary’s 1996 defection to the government, along with thousands of fighters, dealt a death blow to the movement. Pol Pot died two years later.

Ieng Sary was the public face of the Khmer rouge and had a much higher profile than many of his senior colleagues. Yet when he was arrested in 2007, Ieng Sary refused to cooperate with the court, insisting that he had been pardoned by King Norodom Sihanouk. The UN tribunal ruled that the pardon did not cover its indictment against him.

Iraq records huge rise in birth defects

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ammunition, Basra, battle, birth defects, bombardment, brain dysfunctions, Children, Fallujah, health crisis, heart defects, Iraq, lead, malformed limbs, mercury, metals, miscarriage, neuro-toxic metal contamination, pregnancy, stress, toxicology, war, white phosphorus shells, WHO

Iraq records huge rise in birth defects

It played unwilling host to one of the bloodiest battles of the Iraq war. Fallujah’s homes and businesses were left shattered; hundreds of Iraqi civilians were killed. Its residents changed the name of their “City of Mosques” to “the polluted city” after the United States launched two massive military campaigns eight years ago. Now, one month before the World Health Organisation reveals its view on the legacy of the two battles for the town, a new study reports a “staggering rise” in birth defects among Iraqi children conceived in the aftermath of the war.

High rates of miscarriage, toxic levels of lead and mercury contamination and spiralling numbers of birth defects ranging from congenital heart defects to brain dysfunctions and malformed limbs have been recorded. Even more disturbingly, they appear to be occurring at an increasing rate in children born in Fallujah, about 40 miles west of Baghdad.

There is “compelling evidence” to link the increased numbers of defects and miscarriages to military assaults, says Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, one of the lead authors of the report and an environmental toxicologist at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health. Similar defects have been found among children born in Basra after British troops invaded, according to the new research.

US marines first bombarded Fallujah in April 2004 after four employees from the American security company Blackwater were killed, their bodies burned and dragged through the street, with two of the corpses left hanging from a bridge. Seven months later, the marines stormed the city for a second time, using some of the heaviest US air strikes deployed in Iraq. American forces later admitted that they had used white phosphorus shells, although they never admitted to using depleted uranium, which has been linked to high rates of cancer and birth defects.

The new findings, published in the Environmental Contamination and Toxicology bulletin, will bolster claims that US and Nato munitions used in the conflict led to a widespread health crisis in Iraq. They are the latest in a series of studies that have suggested a link between bombardment and a rise in birth defects. Their preliminary findings, in 2010, prompted a World Health Organisation inquiry into the prevalence of birth defects in the area. The WHO’s report, out next month, is widely expected to show an increase in birth defects after the conflict. It has looked at nine “high-risk” areas in Iraq, including Fallujah and Basra. Where high prevalence is found, the WHO is expected to call for additional studies to pinpoint precise causes.

The latest study found that in Fallujah, more than half of all babies surveyed were born with a birth defect between 2007 and 2010. Before the siege, this figure was more like one in 10. Prior to the turn of the millennium, fewer than 2 per cent of babies were born with a defect. More than 45 per cent of all pregnancies surveyed ended in miscarriage in the two years after 2004, up from only 10 per cent before the bombing. Between 2007 and 2010, one in six of all pregnancies ended in miscarriage.

The new research, which looked at the health histories of 56 families in Fallujah, also examined births in Basra, in southern Iraq, attacked by British forces in 2003. Researchers found more than 20 babies out of 1,000 were born with defects in Al Basrah Maternity Hospital in 2003, a number that is 17 times higher than recorded a decade previously. In the past seven years, the number of malformed babies born increased by more than 60 per cent; 37 out of every 1,000 are now born with defects.

The report’s authors link the rising number of babies born with birth defects in the two cities to increased exposure to metals released by bombs and bullets used over the past two decades. Scientists who studied hair samples of the population in Fallujah found that levels of lead were five times higher in the hair of children with birth defects than in other children; mercury levels were six times higher. Children with defects in Basra had three times more lead in their teeth than children living in non-impacted areas.

Dr Savabieasfahani said that for the first time, there is a “footprint of metal in the population” and that there is “compelling evidence linking the staggering increases in Iraqi birth defects to neuro-toxic metal contamination following the repeated bombardments of Iraqi cities”. She called the “epidemic” a “public health crisis”.

“In utero exposure to pollutants can drastically change the outcome of an otherwise normal pregnancy. The metal levels we see in the Fallujah children with birth defects clearly indicates that metals were involved in manifestation of birth defects in these children,” she said. “The massive and repeated bombardment of these cities is clearly implicated here. I have no knowledge of any alternative source of metal contamination in these areas.” She added that the data was likely to be an “underestimate”, as many parents who give birth to children with defects hide them from public view.

Professor Alastair Hay, a professor of environmental toxicology at Leeds University, said the figures presented in the study were “absolutely extraordinary”. He added: “People here would be worried if there was a five or 10 per cent increase [in birth defects]. If there’s a fivefold increase in Fallujah, no one could possibly ignore that; it’s crying out for an explanation as to what’s the cause. A rapid increase in exposure to lead and mercury seems reasonable if lots of ammunition is going off. I would have also thought a major factor would be the extreme stress people are under in that period; we know this can cause major physiological changes.”

A US Defense Department spokesperson said: “We are not aware of any official reports indicating an increase in birth defects in Al Basrah or Fallujah that may be related to exposure to the metals contained in munitions used by the US or coalition partners. We always take very seriously public health concerns about any population now living in a combat theatre. Unexploded ordnance, including improvised explosive devises, are a recognised hazard.”

A UK government spokesperson said there was no “reliable scientific or medical evidence to confirm a link between conventional ammunition and birth defects in Basra”, adding: “All ammunition used by UK armed forces falls within international humanitarian law and is consistent with the Geneva Convention.”

Dr Savabieasfahani said she plans to analyse the children’s samples for the presence of depleted uranium once funds have been raised. She added: “We need extensive environmental sampling, of food, water and air to find out where this is coming from. Then we can clean it up. Now we are seeing 50 per cent of children being born with malformations; in a few years it could be everyone.”

Metal hazards

Lead

Throughout pregnancy, lead can pass from a woman’s bones to her child; the levels of lead in maternal and foetal blood are almost identical. Children and particularly the unborn are more susceptible to lead than adults. At high levels of exposure, lead attacks the brain and central nervous system, causing comas, convulsions and even death, according to the WHO. Children who survive acute lead poisoning are typically left with mental defects and behavioural problems.

Mercury

Exposure to metallic, inorganic or organic mercury can permanently damage the brain, kidneys and developing foetus. Mercury can enter the air, water and soil. Its harmful effects can be passed from mother to the unborn child, leading to brain damage, mental defects, blindness, seizures, muteness and lack of co-ordination.

Depleted uranium

A toxic heavy metal, depleted uranium is what is left over after natural uranium has been enriched, either for use in weapons or for reactor fuel. While the US and UK acknowledge that the dust can be dangerous if inhaled, the jury is still out when it comes to long-term damage to people and their children. Scientists have suggested that its molecules can travel to the sperm and eggs, increasing the probability of cancer and damage to genes.

Cambodia’s war crimes tribunal releases former Khmer Rouge leader

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age, Alzheimer's, Cambodia, Genocide, healthcare, justice, Khmer Rouge, massacre, Torture, Tribunal, War Crimes

Cambodia’s war crimes tribunal releases former Khmer Rouge leader

Cambodia’s war crimes tribunal set free a former leader of the Khmer Rouge on Sunday, upholding a decision that has outraged survivors seeking an explanation of the mass killings committed more than 30 years ago.

Ieng Thirith, 80, who has been declared mentally unfit for trial, was driven out of the UN-backed tribunal’s compound by family members. She made no comment to reporters.

The Sorbonne-educated Shakespeare scholar served as social affairs minister during the Khmer Rouge’s rule from 1975-79, during which an estimated 1.7 million people died of execution, medical neglect, overwork and starvation.

The tribunal initially announced its decision to free Ieng Thirith on Thursday, saying medical experts had determined there was no prospect for her to be tried due to a degenerative mental illness that was probably Alzheimer’s disease.

Prosecutors then delayed her release by filing an appeal demanding that conditions be set to restrict her freedom.

On Sunday, the tribunal’s supreme court said it had accepted the appeal, which is expected to be heard later this month. In the meantime, it set three provisional conditions on her movement.

The tribunal said Ieng Thirith must inform the court of her address, must turn in her passport and cannot leave the country, and must report to the court whenever it summons her.

Ieng Thirith was the Khmer Rouge’s highest-ranking woman and also a sister-in-law of the group’s top leader, Pol Pot, who died in 1998.

She is accused of involvement in the “planning, direction, co-ordination and ordering of widespread purges,” and was charged with crimes against humanity, genocide, homicide and torture.

Three other senior Khmer Rouge leaders are on trial, including her husband, 86-year-old Ieng Sary, the regime’s former foreign minister; 85-year-old Nuon Chea, its chief ideologist and second-in-command; and 80-year-old Khieu Samphan, a former head of state.

The tribunal said earlier that Ieng Thirith’s release did not mean the charges against her were being withdrawn and was not a finding of guilt or innocence. It plans to consult annually with experts to see whether future medical advances could render her fit for trial, although that is considered unlikely given her age and frailty.

Survivors of the Khmer Rouge called Ieng Thirith’s release shocking and unjust. They said they had waited decades for justice and found it hard to feel compassion for her suffering.

“It is difficult for victims and indeed, all Cambodians, to accept the especially vigorous enforcement of Ieng Thirith’s rights taking place at the [tribunal],” said Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, a group that researches Khmer Rouge atrocities.

In a statement on Sunday,, he noted the irony of Ieng Thirith receiving “world class health care.” As social affairs minister she was “personally and directly involved in denying Cambodians even the most basic health care during the regime’s years in power,” he said.

The tribunal began in 2006 – nearly three decades after the fall of the Khmer Rouge – following years of wrangling between Cambodia and the UN. The lengthy delays have been costly and raised fears that the former leaders could die before their verdicts come.

Guatemalan war rape survivors: ‘We have no voice’

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femicide, Genocide, Guatemala, human rights abuses, international courts, Mayan, rape, Sexual Violence, soldiers, Spain, stigma, Torture

2011:

Guatemalan war rape survivors: ‘We have no voice’

“When the soldiers found me they grabbed me, took me to the river, and raped me. ” Teresa Sic recalls. “On the same day, they raped other women in the village. They burned everything. They tied me up, but I freed myself aided by my five-year-old daughter. I went to seek help. I was hungry and afraid, but nobody would take us in.”

Horrific as it sounds, the 58-year-old’s story is not a one-off. Between 1960 and 1996 more than 100,000 women were victims of mass rap in the Guatemalan civil war, between CIA-backed rightwing generals and leftwing insurgents, that evetually left 200,000 dead. After General Jose Efraín Ríos Montt grabbed power in a 1982 coup, it reached fresh peaks of brutality.

Many victims, such as Sic, were indigenous Mayans, who were caught in the crossfire, accused of collaborating with the guerrillas or targeted simply because their ethnic group became seen as the enemy. More than a decade ago Spain’s national high court, which has a long history of taking on international human rights cases – including pursuing Augusto Pinochet and jailing Argentine military officers involved in death squads – began investigating claims of genocide. Yet Guatemala not only refuses to try or extradite Ríos Montt, despite an international arrest warrant issued in Madrid, but he is now a congressman.

As for the rapes, the state refuses to acknowledge them – leaving the attackers to walk freely through the streets and live in the same villages as their victims. “We want the state to acknowledge the truth. We have no voice, and officially the rapes during the conflict never happened,” says Feliciana Macario, one of a group of women who have worked for 20 years to bring the rapes into the public arena. Patricia Yoj, a native Mayan lawyer, says that “even the representative of the National Indemnity Programme that was established to make reparations to victims of the conflict has said that he doesn’t believe in the rapes”.

But many of the women have refused to be silenced – giving evidence to the genocide trial in 2008, and now, for the first time, their voices will be heard; Spain’s national court has agreed to investigate the mass rapes and gender violence as part of the generals’ alleged strategy to wipe out a large part of the Mayan population. The investigating magistrate Santiago Pedraz said on Wednesday the rapes appeared to be part of a campaign of terror designed to destroy Mayan society – with soldiers instructed to carry them out.

Campaigning lawyer Almudena Bernabeu, of the US-based Center of Justice and Accountability, says rape, mutilation, sexual slavery and the killing of foetuses were all part of a plan to eliminate the Mayan people. “Gender violence has been used as a weapon to eliminate ethnic groups, and that’s genocide,” she says. The army and the members of the paramilitary “civil self-defence patrols” tortured the women they didn’t kill in order to stigmatise them. Teresa tells how days after she was raped, she was forcibly taken to a military barracks, raped for 15 days by countless soldiers and given bulls’ blood and raw meat to eat.

“To eliminate all the Mayans is a very difficult task, but if you destroy the women you make sure that the population is reduced and eventually disappears – it’s one of the cruellest ways of getting rid of an entire people,” says Paloma Soria, a lawyer working for the Women’s Link Worldwide NGO, which is backing Bernabeu.

Many of the women also endured being abandoned by their husbands as a result of the rapes. One of them was Maria Castro, now 59, who was with her two children – one just a baby when she was horrifically assaulted. “The soldiers ambushed me. My little girl was with me. She was very frightened and she cried, but the soldier threw me to the ground. I remember there were three of them who raped me, but I don’t know how many more because I lost consciousness. When I came to, I saw them pick up their guns and leave hurriedly for some other place. My daughter helped me by carrying her little brother, but she was still crying. She saw everything.” When Maria made it home and told her husband, he rejected her, saying that if she had come back alive, it was because she had let the soldiers rape her.

Others have faced horrific retributions from their attackers for their willingness to give evidence. “They point their fingers at us, they insult us, and some of the men who raped us now laugh at us,” one victim says. Castro breaks down as she tells how her son was murdered after she travelled to Spain to give evidence.

María Toj, 70, another victim, says the violence hasn’t stopped, but she is still determined to speak out. “They tortured me and my son. They burned everything, leaving me with nothing but my dead husband and my pain. I hope our efforts will stop this from ever happening again.”

Jacinta Guarcas, 65, lost seven of her eight children in the conflict, when they were forcibly displaced. One was killed by soldiers and the rest starved when they were forced to flee into the mountains after their crops were burnt: “First I buried my one-year-old son since I didn’t have enough milk for him because we had nothing to eat.”

The effect of the impunity for the rapes and killings can be seen in the deep scars on Guatemalan society. In 2010 alone, 685 women were killed. So far this year there have been 120 cases of rapes, torture and even dismemberment. “This trial will help open a debate about femicide, because the lack of justice actually contributes to increasing gender violence,” says Bernabeu. Only about 1% of these cases go to trial in Guatemala. “There are times when foreign or international courts are the only recourse for victims, since they can get no justice in their own country,” she says.

The lawyer will bring Patricia Sellers, the woman who succeeded in having rape defined as a weapon of war at the trials for genocide in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, to be an expert witness.

While Spain may be unable to extradite the accused, international arrest warrants at least prevent them leaving Guatemala. Pressure from Madrid has forced Guatemalan courts to start trying human rights cases from the war. They may eventually be persuaded to investigate the rapes. In the meantime, the courage of these women, who face rejection for speaking the truth, will help others who suffer rape as a weapon of war to become more visible.

“This sets a precedent for national courts around the world. Hopefully we will now see how it spreads to other countries from Spain,” says Soria. “Society puts the rape and torture of woman on a par with stealing cattle or burning crops. This must change, and these women have to stop being invisible.”

Two Burmese children a week conscripted into military

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Burma, Child Soldiers

Two Burmese children a week conscripted into military

Children are being sold as conscripts into the Burmese military for as little as $40 and a bag of rice or a can of petrol. Despite assurances from Burma’s ruling junta that it is cleaning up its act in a bid to see Western sanctions lifted, recruitment of child soldiers remains rampant.

The Independent understands that 24 instances of children being forced to become soldiers have been verified by the UN in the first three months of 2012 alone – the equivalent of two a week. The International Labour Organisation is investigating a further 72 complaints for underage recruitment between January and April this year. The new details of child soldier recruitment have emerged at a time when Burma is desperately trying to attract foreign investors and persuade Western nations to lift sanctions against the country’s ruling military elite.

Some significant steps have been made, including recent parliamentary elections for a handful of seats and the release of prominent opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, who flew into Britain last night for her first visit in more than 20 years. The fact that Burma’s generals have allowed Ms Suu Kyi to embark on a European tour is an indication that it has changed some of its ways. Known as The Lady to her supporters, the 66-year-old’s release is part of a series of recent public shows by the junta to curry favour with the international community.

Many observers, particularly in the business community, have begun lobbying for an easing of sanctions. British businesses are keen to re-enter Burma, partly because so many Asian economies have already done so and it is seen as an untapped market. But human rights groups are concerned that reforms have been implemented very slowly. They point to the ongoing recruitment of child soldiers as an example of how little has really changed. Researchers for Child Soldiers International have just returned from a trip to Rangoon and the Thai border in which they interviewed child conscripts. They reported that military and civilian brokers scour the streets looking for vulnerable children whose identity documents are then forged to make them seem over 18. Soldiers who want to leave the army often have to find three to five replacements and young teenagers are often the first people they look to conscript.

“Children remain vulnerable to forced recruitment and use in hostilities by the Burmese military, due to the high rates of attrition in the army and the on-going conflict,” said Richard Clarke, director of Child Soldiers International, a London based advocacy organisation. “It is incumbent on the international community to put pressure on the Burmese government to stop this practice.”

Aung Myo Min, a Burmese exile who helps child soldiers from neighbouring Thailand, has concerns about sanctions being lifted without meaningful reform.

“Don’t be so quick to jump into Burma with business,” he warned. “It is still a country which has very little protection for its workforce, let alone the military. The government really wants these sanctions lifted but we still have repression.”

Case study: ‘No one checked our ID or age’

San Win Htut was 15 when he was drafted into the military. He left this year after human rights groups found documents proving he was a minor.

I met a sergeant on the road in June 2010. He said he was from the army and persuaded me to join. He said I could earn good money and buy a motorcycle. I didn’t have a job so I decided to go with him. He said I could leave the army after five years. I then went to a recruitment camp in Rangoon. Three other youths were taken with me and we were all under 18. Officials did not check our ID because the sergeant told them he knew us. Our days were filled with hard work. We were placed on sentry duty and ordered to work on farms. Everyone treated us badly because we were the youngest. They forced us to spend our salary on their drink and food. I was beaten up by a corporal because I did not buy oil for him. I eventually managed to run away.

Ivory Coast mercenaries train child soldiers for attacks across Liberia border

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Child Soldiers, Teens, war, War Crimes

Ivory Coast mercenaries train child soldiers for attacks across Liberia border

Militias loyal to the former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo are recruiting child soldiers in Liberia to launch attacks similar to that which caused the death last week of 15 people, including seven UN peacekeepers.

Child soldiers as young as 14 are being groomed in training camps and used as scouts in increasingly deadly attacks in the volatile west of Ivory Coast, witnesses said. Human Rights Watch said that youths aged between 14 and 17 were being trained.

“They call us ‘small boys unit,’ and we are always safe when we go to the war zones in Ivory Coast. I don’t know the total that we have killed,” a child soldier told the campaigning group.

Ivory Coast’s rugged western region is a stronghold of Gbagbo, whose refusal to leave power landed him in the international criminal court last May after five months of post-electoral conflict dislodged him.

But neighbouring Liberia has been reluctant to clamp down on mercenaries notorious for recruiting child soldiers, while high-profile members of the regime’s inner circle live unhindered in upmarket villas in Ghana despite international arrest warrants.

“There are training camps in Liberia, you can walk there in 20 minutes. They send boys over several hours before attacks, then they join in later,” said Traore Adama, an Ivorian soldier who fled to Abidjan after attacks in recent months. “Youths can make up to a third of the attacking groups. Some of them are older teenagers but others are waifs you’d never imagine carrying guns.”

On Friday, UN “blue helmets”, deployed to a suspected raid in a remote western village, were ambushed and killed by a large group of Liberian-based “militias or mercenaries,” Paul Koffi Koffi, Ivory Coast’s deputy defence minister, said. Eight civilians also died in the attack.

Liberia has since closed its 435-mile border with Ivory Coast, whose dense forests and maze of creeks make policing difficult. Hundreds began fleeing the mineral-rich region, where long-simmering ethnic tensions exploded in the massacres during last year’s political conflict.

Alassane Ouattara, president of Ivory Coast since 2010, has struggled to unify a post-conflict army composed of quarrelling former rebels (who are also accused of war crimes) and government soldiers whom they once fought against.

One former rebel soldier, Aboubacar Souleymane, said” “It’s very visible when an attack is imminent. Last week I told my superiors that Liberian mercenaries were planning an attack with the help of pro-Gbagbo supporters in the area. He said there was not enough evidence, so I fled the area. I wasn’t prepared to stay there and get killed.

“There are too many cases of soldiers not being on their post when they should be, and disappearing from barracks at odd hours.”

Officials say arms funding for the cross-border raids comes from Ghana, where several wanted Gbagbo insiders fled after the regime fell last year. Among them is Charles Blé Goudé, leader of the Young Patriots militia, whose armed supporters helped crush dissenters of the Gbagbo regime. Goudé, whom sources say is under investigation by the ICC, has said he is willing to face trial.

An African diplomat said cooperation was unlikely to be forthcoming from either of Ivory Coast’s neighbours in the near future. “Liberia’s armed forces’ capability is limited by its small size and corruption because they’re highly underpaid. But there’s more than just a lack of capacity in both countries for failing to go after well-known criminals.”