In its final report, the panel investigating Liberia’s successive 1989-2003 civil wars included Sirleaf’s name in a list of people it accused of being “the financiers and political leaders of the different warring factions”.

“They (those named) should be banned from occupying public office for 30 years beginning the day of the passage of the report at the parliament,” the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) said.

These are initial reactions to the TRC’s report since I haven’t read the thing myself:

What exactly are the people on the list being punished for? Over the course of the war, but especially in its early stage, almost every Liberian supported one rebel group or the other. Almost every Liberian who was old enough to understand the stakes took sides in one way or the other. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that prominent Liberians supported an armed rebellion against a dictatorial, election-stealing, incompetent, run-the-economy-into-the-ground, president (Samuel Doe). Nobody has made an argument against the rebellion. When a political system becomes so oppressive that there are no longer any legitimate channels to voice dissent, rebellions are justified.

However, in classic warlord fashion, Charles Taylor said all the right things. His NPFL called themselves “freedom fighters”. He putatively had no political aspirations himself and would have ceased fighting had President Doe resigned. He promised to remove Doe and restore the true Liberian democracy to the people. There are no speeches of Taylor promising kill tens of thousands of Liberians and export instability to the sub-region. One could arguably make the claim that Charles Taylor was initially earnest in his pursuits only to be subsequently corrupted by the lure of power. It is thus difficult to indict people who supported him then. The distance from the events must not diminish how courageous this was. Fear and loathing were the dominant sentiments President Doe inspired and back then many called Taylor “courageous.” That he would go on to become a war-mongering egomaniac comes after.

The closer Charles Taylor got to Monrovia, the more dangerous the orbit around him became for his closest friends and the “Special Forces” (that original band that was trained in Libya). In his cold, murderous and calculating estimation, each of them posed a legitimate challenge to his ultimate goals. Anyone and anything that would divert the limelight from Mr. Taylor had to go. Any person he perceived as posing a legitimate political challenge had to be eliminated, whether such a challenge were true or not was inconsequential.  He proceeded to eliminate them: some of them ‘died on the front’, others died in ‘accidents’ and still others were executed for ‘planning to overthrow’ him. A prominent politician like Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was an obvious threat to him. She and others of her caliber recognized as much and cut their ties with Taylor. Banning everyone who provided material or other support to a rebel group in Liberia is equivalent to making almost every Liberian of age ineligible for politics. That’s both unfeasible and undesirable.

Now if the TRC can establish continued support, on the part of Johnson-Sirleaf, for Taylor and other warlords long after their atrocious ways had been established, that’s a different thing.  This was a war that continued on and off for over 15 years. As in all wars, especially civil wars where most of the victims are civilians, atrocities happened. It is quite clear that some are more responsible than others for these atrocities and in the interest a building a rule-of-law society, they must be held accountable. But such accountability must have limits lest it destabilizes the country and disrupts the fragile peace.

TRC’s are meant to establish objective facts about the past, memorialize the victims and those events, bring the worst perpetrators to justice and establish a way to rebuild. This recommendation doesn’t really do much for the final part and I’m not sure it adequately meets the ‘justice’ criterion.

Prosecuting these crimes will definitely be portrayed by Republicans as a “witch hunt”. The Obama administration will be accused of vindictiveness and introducing a “precedent” in American history where a new administration pursues the outgoing administration in a version of “victor’s justice”.  But not pursuing some form of justice is out of the question.

No other nation so identifies itself with the preservation and promotion of human rights than the United States. As I have noted elsewhere, unlike nation-states founded on kinship, the United States was founded on ideals. It has always prided itself as a “city upon the hill”. At its core, this episode threatens the very ideals that give this country its identity. It is now impossible to “move on”, to forget this dark passage and behave as if nothing happened. This period looms over the American experience – an existential threat to its core identity.

Beyond the domestic and existential implications of these activities is the implicit threat it poses to the international ethos we (all God’s children) have pursued since 1948.  The adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights have progressively nudged a global convergence of values. It has orchestrated a confluence on the limits of the power of the state, its obligations to its citizens and their rights vis-a-vis the state. What had initially been Western philosophical ideals spread and were embraced in many parts of the world. There has been no greater state champion of this ethic than the United States. For pro-democracy and human rights activists, imprisoned and tortured anywhere, there was always the assurance that the United States would speak out in their behalf. Should the United States itself now give in and become a torture state, whence their respite?

The efficacy argument does not stand, nor does the argument that the threat was so great that torture in its prevention is justified. That the United States is now reduced to justifying torture because it worked is abhorrent.  Both of these arguments are objectionable and repulsive. Dictatorial and autocratic regimes have justified arbitrary arrests, torture and extra-judicial killings with these same arguments. When they did, the United States always (and rightly) rejected those arguments. They cannot and will not stand in this case.

I don’t envy the Obama administration, but being president of the United States is not an easy job and this is the life he chose.

…In the end, Icelanders amassed debts amounting to 850 percent of their G.D.P. (The debt-drowned United States has reached just 350 percent.) As absurdly big and important as Wall Street became in the U.S. economy, it never grew so large that the rest of the population could not, in a pinch, bail it out. Any one of the three Icelandic banks suffered losses too large for the nation to bear; taken together they were so ridiculously out of proportion that, within weeks of the collapse, a third of the population told pollsters that they were considering emigration…

They inhabited their remote island for 1,100 years without so much as dabbling in leveraged buyouts, hostile takeovers, derivatives trading, or even small-scale financial fraud. When, in 2003, they sat down at the same table with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, they had only the roughest idea of what an investment banker did and how he behaved—most of it gleaned from young Icelanders’ experiences at various American business schools. And so what they did with money probably says as much about the American soul, circa 2003, as it does about Icelanders…

A handful of guys in Iceland, who had no experience of finance, were taking out tens of billions of dollars in short-term loans from abroad. They were then re-lending this money to themselves and their friends to buy assets—the banks, soccer teams, etc. Since the entire world’s assets were rising—thanks in part to people like these Icelandic lunatics paying crazy prices for them—they appeared to be making money. Yet another hedge-fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: You have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that they are each worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners, but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets…

How could this have happened? Why? Who was lending Icelanders such ungodly amounts of money? Why? What did they know about the Icelandic financial system? Growing up, I always assumed that in the West, if a person were in a position of prominence, that person had to be competent. It seemed like a no-brainer. Who, in their right mind, would entrust a complete moron with decisions that could have life and death implications? Suprise, surprise – apparently, this stuff happens all the time! (Gasp!) The Iraq war banished my childhood assumption and now the financial crisis has plunged the dagger through its heart. Never, ever assume competence.

The Kenyan governed dismissed the report out of hand asserting that it “…finds it inconceivable that someone who has been in the country for less than ten days can purport to have conducted comprehensive and accurate research on such a serious matter, as to arrive at the recommendations he made.” This is ridiculous and besides the point. There are human rights activists in Kenya who have been making these allegations for a while and there has been movement on the part of the government to investigate. A BBC reporter who went along with Kenyan police on a ‘raid’ last year spoke of hearing gun fire from the home the police was investigating and observing the police emerge with bodies in bodybags.

One of the human rights organizations in Kenya that has made similar accusations is the Oscar Foundation. Founded by Oscar Kamau Kingara, the foundation provides legal aid to the poor in Kenya. Last year the Oscar Foundation issued a report accusing the police of having kidnapped or killed over 500 people in its attempt to curb the activities of a criminal gang, Mungiki. CNN reports that Kangara and a colleague were gun downed while driving near state house, home of the Kenyan president, last evening.

The killings sparked student protests which resulted in the police fatally shooting one student. Initial suspicion points to the Kenyan police, especially because Kangara and his colleague colloborated with the Rapporteur on his scathing  report.

It is not enough that laws are written and published. Many countries have excellent laws on the books. Take Pakistan, its constitution provides for certain inalienable rights for Pakistani citizens, but go tell that to young girls in Swat valley. The test is in the application of law. Is there recourse for citizens against infringements by the state? Are law enforcement personnel held accountable for their actions? The presumption of innocence is fundamental to the rule of law because circumstantial evidence sometimes implicates the innocent. There is no greater travesty in the execution of justice than punishing the innocent. That is a perversion. And it appears that this perversion has become the status quo among law enforcement officers in Kenya. This can’t stand.

The African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC) launched a liberation war against the Portuguese colonizers in 1961. Joao Bernardo Vieira, the ex-president is a prominent figure in the liberation movement.  In 1974, Guinea-Bissau becomes independent with Luis Cabral as President and Viera (Nino) as Prime Minister. Viera overthrows Cabral in 1980. Vierra is himself overthrown in 1999 and goes into exile in Portugal. Elections are held later that year, but the elected president is overthrown in 2003 by the Army Chief of Staff. Viera returns from Portugal and wins the 2005 election to become President of Guinea Bissau.

Viera and the Army Chief of Staff, Gen Tagme Na Waie, (who had been a member of the junta that sent Viera into exile) hold each other in mutual contempt. The two are at odds for months. Then early in the morning of November 23, dissident soldiers open fire and launch rocket-propelled grenades against the home of the president. The president survives the attack, some of the dissidents are captured and the president is given his own 400-man militia to guard him.

In January a few members of the newly recruited presidential guard open fire near the home of the Army chief of staff, supposedly trying to kill. The president is stripped of his militia.

On March 1, a bomb concealed under the stair case at the army chief’s office goes off, killing him. The next day a group of soldiers attacked the home of the president destroying it in the process. Frederick Forsythe, the British author (Day of the Jackal) was in the country doing research for a novel he’s writing. He told the BBC :

They went to his villa, threw a bomb through the window which hurt him, but didn’t kill him…The roof came down, that hurt him but didn’t kill him either. He struggled out of the rubble and was promptly shot. This, however, still didn’t kill him.They then took him to his mother-in-law’s house and chopped him to bits with machetes.

Guinea Bissau is among the poorest countries in the world. It is 171 out 179 on the human development index. As if Bissau-Guineans do not have enough problems, their country has been taken over by Latin American drug cartels. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime warned that:

[[A]t least 50 tons of cocaine from the Andean countries are transiting West Africa every year, heading north where they are worth almost $2 billion on the streets of European cities. Most cocaine entering Africa from South America makes landfall around Guinea-Bissau in the north and Ghana in the south. Much of the drugs are shipped to Europe by drug mules on commercial flights.

Mix Latin American drugs and drug money with volatile Bissau-Guinean politics and you can’t help but draw the conclusion I did in my first sentence.

Against such a backdrop, most normal people would put off lavish parties, but not President Mugabe. As his country starves and is laid waste by disease, he threw a lavish party to celebrate his 85th birthday. In ‘response’ to toasts, he vowed to continue seizing farms and called the SADC (Southern African Development Community) Tribunal ruling against farm seizures “nonsense”.

It must have been some kind of a party.

However, on a very practical level it is difficult to see how taking officers hostage and summarily executing them and ( in some instances) members of their families would address those needs. It must not stand because of the precedent it sets. A defining characteristic of a healthy democracy is that the military and other armed forces remain under civilian control. The border guards demand for a pay increase jeopardized the entire country and a fragile democracy that was only restored in early January after two years of army rule.

The Prime Minister initially offered amnesty to guards who surrendered, but once the scale of the killings was revealed, the government promised to punish those responsible. “Operation Manhunt” is currently underway for over a thousand guardsmen and their accomplices.

Sanctions and travel bans are imposed, yet these thugs survive, in fact they thrive. They can afford to send their children to live in the West while they lay entire countries to waste and send other people’s kids to die in useless causes. Enter Joyce Mujuru, the Vice President of Zimbabwe and currently under European trade and travel sanctions. Here is a member of Mugabe’s inner circle, who will surely be prosecuted for crimes against humanity for her role in the death and destruction wrought in that country. Of course, As is characteristic of their ilk, she has a daughter in Spain, Nyasha del Campo, who is putatively a commodities trader.  Ms del Campo recently attempted to sell 3.7 tons of gold, which would have brought in over $9m dollars. Once it was discovered that she was the daughter of Mujuru, the deal was called off and their names were placed on the company’s black list.

And of course, Mujuru doesn’t disappoint. She called the company, threatening to “send people there” if they do not remove her name from their list. (Sigh)

I am not advocating that relief aid be witheld from Zimbabwe, but unless Mugabe demonstrates commitment to the process, Zimbabwe must not receive that quantity of money. The current system is too rigged, too corrupt and unaccountable to adequately/prudently absorb that kind of money. As it stands, the default attitude toward that government will be the same skepticism and suspicion. Mugabe must free political prisoners, end the land grabs that have increased in the last few days, fire corrupt and discredited members of his regime and pay Tsvangirai the respect he deserves. Anything short of that should mean the maintenance of the status quo.

Yet the only reason anybody speaks about Somalia is because of the threat of piracy. There is more to Somalia than piracy. Piracy is only a sympton of the general ungovernability of the country. Sadly, the story remains the same for poor Somalis, who have been reduced to common disposable pawns in the power of game of corrupt warlords and criminal neglect by the rest of the world.

The last two years has radicalized militant Somali Islamists and their fight against the Ethiopians has drawn other radicals from neighboring states (Afghanistan-lite). As the NY Times analysis points out, these radicals will return home at some point and could very much put their skills to use against their governments.

As failed and failing states become increasingly common and dangerous, the world community will have to become creative. There is a need for permanent institutions specifically adapted to this problem instead of the piece-meal, hapharzard mechanisms that now exist. There needs to be a world body à la Trusteeship Council to study fail states, track indicators and exercise stewardships over states that have forfeited sovereignty.  Call it something else if Trusteeship smacks of colonialism, although I find it difficult to believe that people living in failed states would wrangle over semantics.

Sovereignty cannot remain an inviolable and irrevocable status that obviously failed status can brandish about even as the contagion of their failure destabilizes their neighborhoods. The idea of a state and the government which represents it is based on a “contract” of sorts. When a state consistently fails to deliver on its end of this contract, it by a function of said failure, forfeits the privileges that come with fulfilling the contract. Why does Somalia still have a seat at the UN while the government can barely protect its citizens from marauding thugs? Why does Somalia still have a seat at the UN while its citizens starve?

What will it take for the world to see the need to create standard institutional structures to cope with the very real problem of state failure and its attendant, incalculable cost of human misery?