Or so thinks the International Criminal Court, it would seem.
If you kill one person in Texas, your death at the hands of a county executioner is almost a certainty. While I am steadfast in my opposition to the death penalty, this line of thinking — however barbaric and useless it may be — seems, at least superficially, more in keeping with justice than what the ICC just doled out for Congolese war criminal Germain Katanga.
“The chamber sentences Germain Katanga to 12 years in prison,” the presiding judge, Bruno Cotte, told the Hauge-based court in nits second sentencing since opening in 2003.
The almost seven years that Katanga has already spent in detention will be deducted from the sentence, he said.
Katanga, 36, was convicted in March of war crimes and crimes against humanity including murder an dpillaging for his role in the “particularly cruel” attack on Bogoro village in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in February 2003.
Judges found that he armed fighters of the Patriotic Resistance Forces in Ituri (FPRI), who carried out the massacre in which more than 200 people died.
“The scares of the fighting that occurred that day are still be seen today,” Cote said on Friday. The use of machetes in the attack was “particularly cruel and caused extreme suffering,” he added.
Twelve years? Minus time served? For arming up a company of hillbillies with machetes and sending them off against defenseless villages? Are you fucking serious?
It is bad enough that the ICC has no balls, that since 2003, this smug fucking machetemonger is only the second criminal to have been convicted by the court, but what about its goddamned teeth?
No doubt it was argued that Katanga was just a businessman. That he sold the yokels machetes despite knowing what they would do with them and that was that. It wasn’t as if he swung the sword himself, right?
And that’s bullshit. Guys like Katanga are tearing Africa apart at the seams. It is because of goons like him that the former Zaire has been in near continuous war with itself for the past thirty years. If we do not prosecute them commiserate to the severity of their crimes, then what is the point in prosecuting them at all?
In five years, Germain Katanga is going to walk out of prison.
Walk.
This is a privilege he knowingly denied more than 200 people, 178 of whom were under the age of 18. If the ICC were serious about what it aims to do, Katanga would be spending the rest of his natural fucking life in a goddamn concrete box. By himself. With only the screams of the innocent to keep him company.
Act of Reparation 