Drink the Bitter Root. Gary Geddes

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СКАЧАТЬ were essentially land and resource wars, a scramble to control the traffic in oil, diamonds, gold, copper and coltan that was rapidly unravelling the achievements of civil society.

      I reclined in the seat and closed my eyes for a moment, trying to control my anxiety. My seatmates on either side were a young African businessman in the window seat wearing an expensive three-piece suit and reading the Times, which he had folded in that clever English way of making narrow vertical strips several columns wide, and a middle-aged African woman reading a Bible with the aid of granny glasses perched on the end of her nose. She had a long scar on her right cheek that I took to be a tribal marking. While I struggled with my fears and the claustrophobia of being wedged in the middle seat, the possibility of idle chat or religious testimony posed a greater menace. I thanked the gods of aviation that my companions had serious reading material to distract them.

      Once I had quieted my nerves, I had time to go over my notes on the week I’d spent in The Hague two months earlier visiting the International Criminal Court. Violence, human rights abuses and the miscarriage of justice are problems without borders, and no country is immune. The disproportionate number of African Americans in jails in the United States and First Nations individuals incarcerated or living in squalid conditions in Canada indicates that racism is alive and well and that injustice thrives in democratic countries. I’d seen justice miscarried yet again when the Commission of Inquiry into the Deployment of Canadian Forces to Somalia was discontinued at a key juncture, and Private Kyle Brown, a minor and reluctant participant in the killing of Shidane Arone, became a scapegoat for the guilty officers and a dysfunctional military hierarchy. To learn more about international justice and its response to war crimes and crimes against humanity, I’d read Erna Paris’s meticulous history The Sun Climbs Slow: Justice in the Age of Imperial America, in which she traces the development of Western concepts of justice and the colossal struggle to put in place legal mechanisms to administer justice at the international level. Establishing the International Criminal Court was a gargantuan task, but the principles and procedures were hammered out at the Rome conference in June and July 1998 and ratified by sixty nations on April 11, 2002. The ICC officially came into being on July 1, 2002, with the United States, China, Israel, Iraq, Libya, Qatar and Yemen in opposition.

      I needed to know how witnesses are selected and protected by the ICC and how international justice, in a remote corner of Europe, could possibly change things on the ground in Africa. I wanted someone to convince me that George Orwell was wrong when he wrote, “All kinds of petty rats . . . are hunted down while almost without exception the big rats escape.” I was also keen to learn how international justice might be perceived by African victims and their families. For example, how would the conviction of Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, a Congolese rebel leader facing charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the forced recruitment of child soldiers, benefit a child in South Kivu who was still suffering from the trauma of being forced to kill his parents? How would such a conviction benefit a raped woman in need of fistula surgery, rejected by husband and family and still struggling to cope with her severely altered state? And what about the shadowy Congolese and Ugandan officials and businessmen who enlisted and supported Lubanga? Would they go unpunished? Already, the case against Lubanga was in danger of being thrown out of court because of procedural irregularities. Chances were good that he would go free, an insult to his presumed victims and a great embarrassment for the ICC, which was facing public criticism and struggling to prove its effectiveness.

      The road to the International Criminal Court can be as brief as zooming in from outer space on Google Earth, or it can be an extremely long and drawn-out process, thanks to procedural matters, delays, appeals and the difficulty of accumulating reliable witness reports. Radovan Karadzic, the so-called Butcher of Sarajevo, had managed to evade capture in the Serbian capital of Belgrade for more than a decade by growing a Whitmanesque beard and posing, with all due irony, as a practitioner of holistic medicine.

      In spite of its glass and white marble exterior, the ICC is an imposing structure with bars and electrified wires discouraging uninvited guests. Don’t even think of it, the architecture seems to say. It didn’t take long for the two security guards posted in the outer entrance to place me in the unwelcome category, especially after I confessed that I did not have an appointment. I’d forgotten my list of names and phone numbers. When the doctor-professor-visitor-from-abroad routine didn’t work, I dredged up a name from memory. “I’m here to see Claudia,” I said. “Perdomo?” one guard prompted. I nodded, though I’d forgotten Claudia’s last name from the brief e-mails we’d exchanged weeks earlier. I made myself at home in the locked lobby, amidst a few utilitarian chairs and an ATM. Cash, in case someone had to bribe his way into or out of this fortress of international justice? Just as I finished replenishing my modest stock of euros, the door opened and Claudia Perdomo materialized.

      Claudia ushered me through the next set of locked doors, and we fetched drinks before selecting a table by the window. The cafeteria at the main entrance served as a reminder that this was a place of serious business: no art, no frills, no lounging about. Claudia told me she was Guatemalan and had worked for the UN on human rights issues. Now she was head of the Outreach Unit of the Public Information and Documentation Section. She explained that her team worked directly with victims and potential witnesses to help them understand the aims and procedures of the court and to create an environment in which they felt safe to share their stories. Her department used various methods to get out the ICC message: posters, booklets, radio programs and something called un club d’écoute, a listening circle for communities where there may be only a single radio. In addition to town hall meetings, where videos were shown and response from the victims and their families was encouraged, much use was made of what Claudia called socio-drama, where traumatic events were enacted in front of a group of victims.

      “Theatre of the Oppressed,” I suggested. “Paolo Freire and all that?”

      “Yes, yes,” Claudia said. “Freire, politicized language. And art as an enabling process. Sometimes the witnesses make up their own scenes to enact. Sometimes we help them along by providing a very limited script.” I knew a bit about drama therapy. It is a powerful medium, but also very volatile for the kinds of emotions it can arouse or release.

      I told Claudia about The Man We Called Juan Carlos, a self-reflexive documentary made in 2001 by my friend David Springbett with the help of his wife, Heather MacAndrew, that examines the pitfalls of humanitarian intervention. As a young filmmaker, David had gone to Guatemala with Oxfam America to make a film for CBC/Man Alive that looked at questions of short-term aid versus long-term development in the aftermath of the devastating 1976 earthquake. An American NGO, World Neighbors, had worked with a small community of highland Maya to help them learn how to improve their yields of corn. In a few years, the community had become almost self-sufficient and relied less on picking coffee for cash on the large ranches or estates. Classes for women in health and nutrition followed. “Each one teach one” was the credo. A young Mayan father named Wenceslao Armira, also known as Juan Carlos, went on to work with neighbouring communities that were also struggling with subsistence agriculture. It was grassroots development in the best sense, but inevitably all these changes pushed up against entrenched power structures, especially the big landowners, who preferred their potential labour force poor and uneducated. Juan Carlos, who had started to use David’s 1976 film as a teaching video, was fingered as a troublemaker to be eliminated. As political repression intensified, he joined one of the guerrilla groups and fled to Mexico. His children were killed by army death squads while he was in exile there, and his wife never forgave him.

      Unsparingly, The Man We Called Juan Carlos examines the culpability of the filmmakers in these subsequent events.

      Claudia shook her head slowly. “We need sensitive people working in this area.” She glanced at the clock on the wall, then ripped a page from her notebook and wrote down the names of her Outreach colleagues in four of the countries to which I was heading. Her handwriting was bold, the spacing generous. I was glad to find myself included under her protective umbrella.

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