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ONE TIME VICE
PRESIDENT OF DR CONGO CHARGED BY ICC WITH CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY, BY CAROLINE PATTON:
12/01/2009
(MaximsNews Network)
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UNITED
NATIONS - / MaximsNews Network / 12
January 2009 -- The
International Criminal Court handed down charges today on Jean-Pierre Bemba
Gombo, who is alleged to have committed crimes against humanity and war crimes
in the Central African Republic, where he allowed fighters from the Mouvement de
libération du Congo to kill, rape, and torture non-combatants and to plunder
and destroy villages.
Mr.
Bemba has served as Vice-President
of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)
and President and Commander in Chief of the
MLC. He was arrested in May 2008 in
Belgium
and has been in jail at The Hague
for the last six months.
The
crimes of which Mr. Bemba is accused took
place between 25 October 2002 and 15 March
2003, while the CAR was wracked by internal
fighting. He allowed CAR’s President Ange
Felix Patassé to use the MLC to carry out
attacks on civilians.
The
ICC has charged the former Congolese leader
with five counts of war crimes and three
counts of crimes against humanity and
pre-trial proceedings on these charges commenced
today and last through Thursday. This will be the first step in
determining whether Mr. Bemba will go on
trial. The pre-trial Chamber will determine
whether the evidence provides grounds for
moving to the next stage.
This
is not the only ICC inquiry bearing on the DRC
but charges have not yet been filed in the
others. In addition, evidence is being
gathered in cases having to do with Darfur and
Uganda.
In
the meantime, talks continue in the DRC where
insecurity and violence have reigned in recent
months. More than a million people have been
forced from their homes, 250,000 of them in
the last three and a half months. The
North Kivu
province in particular has been a hotbed of
clashes, killings, and displacements.
At
the center of the discussions has been the
potential for a ceasefire between the
government and the opposition militia, the
National Congress in Defense of the People (CNDP).
One of the two men overseeing the talks, one
time Tanzanian president Benjamin Mkapa,
explain, “We have been going into details of
elements of the security arrangements such as
a ceasefire and cessation of hostilities
agreements.”
However,
Mr. Mkapa’s co-arbitrator, former President
of Nigeria and Ban Ki-Moon’s Special Envoy
for the Great Lakes Region Olusegun Obasanjo,
says that he was misrepresented to the press
by General Laurent Nkunda, the head of the
CNDP.
General
Nkunda had told Reuters that Mr. Obasanjo had
said, “MONUC [the UN peacekeeping mission in
DRC] was wrong” not to heed accusation by
the CNDP that Congolese troops had moved into
UN buffer zones. Mr. Obasanjo has been clear
that, “he did not express such an opinion”
and that the allegations of the rebel leader
were untrue.
--- by Caroline
Patton
Labels:
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