Global News Journal

Pop star freed but Mexican attitudes still on trial

Mexican pop star Kalimba, accused of raping a 17-year-old girl in December, walked free on Thursday after a judge ordered his release for lack of evidence. For fans of the dreadlocked singer and dj, it was a justice of sorts, given that 73 percent of Mexicans believe he was innocent, according to a poll in leading newspaper Reforma.

Guilty or not, the case gave Mexico a bit of homegrown celebrity gossip over the past few weeks in a country where relentless news of horrific drug killings is daily fare. Seeing the singer arrested in El Paso, Texas, where he was recording a new album, then dressed in a orange jump suit and imprisoned in a Mexican jail and then crying on his release, made top news and created plenty of  chat both in Mexican homes and on the Internet.

Did the voice behind local hits such as “Tocando Fondo” (Hitting Bottom) and Disney’s Spanish language version of “The Lion King” really sexually abuse the minor after hosting a show in the Caribbean coastal city of Chetumal in Quintana Roo state on Dec.19, or was the girl just creating a stink to get some attention?

What’s most revealing about the case is what it says about the dysfunctional Mexican justice and prison systems, partly responsible for feeding Mexico’s brutal drug war that has killed more than 34,000 people since December 2006, not to mention the racism against black Mexicans that remains deeply embedded in the country’s culture.

The judicial system’s strong presumption of guilt was on display even before Kalimba was arrested, with the Quintana Roo state prosecutor and a state judge both talking to the media and vowing to put the pop star behind bars.  Sadly, it also came as no surprise that prosecutors were unable to build their case, something that has let countless drug traffickers go free.

Meanwhile, the racist undercurrent was notable in Mexican media, with TV shows and newspapers including La Prensa, playing on the word “black” in headlines and stories to point to both a dark period in the singer’s life and his African heritage, while also needlessly inviting  readers to judge whether Kalimba was guilty or not in online polls.

And on being imprisoned, a fellow inmate jailed for drug trafficking offered to protect Kalimba while he was inside, a reminder that Mexican authorities do not control what goes on inside the country’s penitentiaries. No wonder he cried with relief on being set free.

The murky deaths of Mexico’s kingpins

Mexican drug baron Tony Tormenta died in a hail of grenades and gunfire on Nov.5 on the U.S. border, a victory for U.S.-Mexico efforts to clamp down on the illegal narcotics trade. Or did he?

Five days after the Gulf cartel leader’s death at the hands of Mexican marines in Matamoros, no photographs of his body have surfaced. At the navy’s only news conference, there was never any clarification about the whereabouts of his body. Mexico’s attorney general’s office did say on Wednesday that his body was handed over to his wife and daughter on Tuesday. The navy has declined to comment.

It was a similar story with the death of top Sinaloa cartel trafficker Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel in July. The only photograph of the body was leaked to a magazine days after his killing by the Mexican army in western Jalisco state.

In a country where few Mexicans believe in their government, President Felipe Calderon is asking people to take his word that these powerful, billionaire drug lords have, in fact, died.

Over the past five years, Tony Tormenta (Tony Storm) has been repeatedly reported killed and arrested, only to re-emerge weeks later.

Some Mexicans refuse to believe that drug baron Amado Carrillo Fuentes, who used fleets of jets to fly Colombian cocaine to the U.S. border, died during plastic surgery in a Mexico City hospital in 1997. He is still out there trafficking drugs, they say.

When marines killed kingpin Arturo Beltran Leyva in December, the navy did hand out photos of his bloodied, bullet-ridden body, but first they covered his body in wads of cash — a failure of basic human respect that brought widespread criticism.

from FaithWorld:

Gunning for Godfried? Belgian abuse probe asks what Danneels knew

Are the Belgian judicial authorities gunning for Godfried? It looks like Cardinal Godfried Danneels, the popular grandfatherly Catholic prelate who stepped down in January as archbishop of Brussels-Mechelen after three decades, is the main target of the incredible "tomb raider" sweeps that shocked the Church last Thursday. The police who swooped down on the diocesan headquarters in Mechelen, Danneels's own apartment nearby and the offices of the Church commission on abuse in Leuven did not suspect the cardinal of abuse himself. But it seems the investigating magistrate behind the raid is convinced that Danneels hushed up cases during his long reign.

The media seem to be too -- just take a look at last Saturday's front page of the Brussels daily De Standaard at the right.

There may be something there. Let's see what the investigators come up with.

Does the magistrate actually think Danneels also crept down to the crypt at St. Rumbold's Cathedral in Mechelen one night and stashed incriminating files in the tombs of his predecessors?  Now we're in Da Vinci Code territory. This would be laughable if it weren't a sign of the Marc Dutroux cloud that hangs over any case like this in Belgium. The Belgian police suspected Dutroux of kidnapping girls in the 1990s and actually inspected his house and missed the dungeon for the girls in the basement. There were huge protests against police incompetence when this came out. Dutroux was arrested and convicted of the murder of four girls. So the police are going to be extra tough and thorough to make sure they don't bungle it again.

The change in tone about Danneels is striking and dates to the April resignation of Bruges Bishop Roger Vangheluwe after admitting he had abused his own nephew. Danneels said at the time that he first learned of Vangheluwe's transgressions only days before they became public, a fact that has been challenged by a Brussels priest, Rik Devillé. In the eight weeks since that shock, 475 people contacted the Church commission on sexual abuse to report their cases. Only 30 cases had been registered with the commission in the previous 10 years and none or almost none with the police. This is a sea change.

That so much information was flowing into the Church commission and so little of it getting out to the judicial authorities seems to have been the trigger for the investigating magistrate following abuse cases to take action. Justice Minister Stefaan De Clerck accused the commission of dragging its feet.

The commission head, Peter Adriaenssens, said it had planned to draw up an initial report on its cases in October. One of the things he had on his agenda was a meeting with Danneels on July 5 to discuss his role. According to Adriaenssens, the cardinal's name came up in about 50 dossiers, not as an abuser, but as someone who knew what was happening.

from Africa News blog:

Where will Nigerian bank crisis lead?

The list published by Nigeria's central bank of those who owe money to the banks it has just bailed out makes clear that the situation has already gone well beyond just being a banking crisis.

The list cuts across the business elite and Nigeria's regions and also includes many politically powerful figures. (And it doesn't even appear that all those who could have been named as directors of the debtor companies have been identified).

It raises a question as to whether so many of the great and good are simply unable to pay their debts and if so what that means for business in Nigeria as a whole? If they could pay up, then why haven't they?

It also raises a question as to how those 'named and shamed' will react, particularly those with major political sway, in a country where behind the scenes manipulation is a way of life.

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission has set a deadline for the debtors to start coming up with money or face arrest, but its efforts to prosecute former state governors in the past were sometimes stymied and its former boss Nuhu Ribadu driven from office.

What will be the fate of Central Bank Governor Lamido Sanusi (left), only recently picked for the post by President Umaru Yar'Adua?

How well do you think the crisis is being handled? Please take your chance to vote below. We welcome your comments too.

Back to the future in Malaysia with Anwar sodomy trial II

By Barani Krishnan

A decade ago, Malaysia’s former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim was on trial for sodomy and corruption in a trial that exposed the seamy side of Malaysian justice and the anxieties of a young country grappling with a crushing financial crisis and civil unrest.

Anwar is Malaysia’s best known political figure, courted in the U.S. and Europe and probably the only man who can topple the government that has led this Southeast Asian country for the past 51 years.

Anwar vowed in a recent interview to fight what he says are trumped up charges.

The 14 months I spent covering the 1998 trials saw Anwar accused of sodomy with three men and having sex with a woman over a period of years. This case is simpler, there is just one accuser. All homosexual acts are illegal in this mainly Muslim country and sex outside marriage is illegal for Muslims.

The first trial was gruelling. Lines began as early as four in the morning as people tried to get into the court that could seat less than 200. Most of the spectators were ordinary people, but there was a sprinkling of dignitaries and businessmen who had known Anwar when he was in office.

There was a separate media queue and again a fight to get in line as dozens of reporters from local and international outlets jockeyed for space. Ringing the court were hundreds of riot police, backed by watercannon, waiting for trouble in a country where there were daily protests at the time, often involving tens of thousands of people.

Was Communist East Germany unjust or just corrupt?

By Jacob Comenetz

A debate about whether Communist East Germany was an “Unrechtsstaat” (“unjust state”) or merely not a “Rechtsstaat” (“state based on the rule of law”) has been dividing the German political class for months — and it now has spilled onto the front pages this week as the reunited country celebrates its 60th anniversary.

What might seem like a nuance of history has turned into a full-fledged battle that is splitting many eastern and western Germans once again along the fault lines of the long since dismantled Wall that separated them during the Cold War.

Many easterners are annoyed that some of their western brethren are labelling the Communist East German state an “Unrechtsstaat” – a term they see as denigrating not only the state, but also its people, as somehow morally inferior.

Few in the east, a region that is also far poorer than most of the prosperous west, would disagree that East Germany was not a “Rechtstaat”. The German Democratic Republic (GDR), as East Germany was officially known, had no independent judiciary, no free elections and a surveillance system run by the Stasi that used brutal methods to quash dissent for four decades.

But many easterners are rallying behind Gesine Schwan, a westerner who is running for president. Schwan has fuelled the debate by saying she would not label East Germany an “unjust state”, saying that was too “diffuse” a term.

“It implies that everything that happened in this state was unjust,” said Schwan, who is trying to defeat President Horst Koehler in a vote in the Reichstag by a special 1,224-seat Federal Assembly on Saturday. “I would not go this far in the case of the GDR.”

Germans have to live with Nazi past a bit longer

More than six decades after World War Two and the Holocaust, and just when it is starting to take a more assertive role on the world stage, Germany has been confronted by its Nazi past – again.

Retired U.S. auto worker John Demjanjuk, 89, has been deported to Germany and prosecutors in Munich want to put him on trial for assisting to murder at least 29,000 Jews at the Sobibor extermination camp in 1943. With most Nazi criminals dead, it is likely to be the last big Nazi war crime trial in Germany.

The case raises a number of questions which affect the way Germans look at themselves and relate to the world around them. The deafening silence from politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, says a lot about how intent Germans are on viewing the case as a purely legal matter.

Demjanjuk’s health poses one problem. While his family says he is is too frail to stand trial, some Germans argue it will not do their justice system any good to have a sick old man in the dock and that he could even end up winning sympathy – a potentially embarrassing outcome.

Others simply ask what purpose his trial would serve. Born in Ukraine, Demjanjuk was a prisoner of war who, his defenders say, was forced to become a death camp guard. He played his part in the enormous horror of the Holocaust but many Germans are all too aware that other major war criminals have escaped justice. Some fled to live in exile and others received light sentences.

It is surprisingly difficult to pin down figures of the number of Germans tried or convicted of war crimes since 1945 but most experts agree with the Simon Wiesenthal Center that the number of criminals brought to justice is way below the total of those involved in the Holocaust.   

Some reports say that of an estimated 200,000 Germans and Austrians involved in the Holocaust, about 106,000 were investigated by German prosecutors and of those, only 6,500 were convicted.

from Africa News blog:

Putting Africa on trial?

Look down the list of the cases the International Criminal Court is pursuing – Congo, Central African Republic, Darfur, Uganda – and it doesn’t take long to spot the connection.

Of the dozen arrest warrants the court has issued, all have been against African rebels or officials. On Monday, the court begins its first trial - of Thomas Lubanga, accused of recruiting child soldiers to wage a gruesome ethnic war in northeastern Congo. Earlier this month, former Congolese rebel leader Jean-Pierre Bemba was in court for a decision on whether to confirm charges of ordering mass rape to terrorise civilians in the Central African Republic.

The judges are also deciding whether to indict their first head of state, Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, accused by the court’s prosecutor of instigating genocide and other war crimes in Darfur. All those being pursued by the prosecutor reject the accusations against them.

There is no doubt there were atrocities in all the conflicts in question - families, villages and countries scarred for ever by murders, rapes, mutilations, kidnappings and burnings.

The question is why the court is only targeting conflicts in Africa, which may have a higher proportion of troubles than other continents, but certainly has no monopoly on evil. Ongoing or recent conflicts elsewhere include Iraq, Afghanistan, Russia-Georgia, Israel-Palestinians and Sri Lanka among others.

"We have the feeling that this court is chasing Africa," Benin’s president, Thomas Boni Yayi, commented last year of the moves to prosecute Sudanese President Bashir. Boni Yayi is no maverick. He is the leader of a peaceful pro-Western country with a record of democracy as good as any on the continent.

One explanation for the ICC’s focus on Africa could be that justice systems on the continent are not in a position to pursue those accused of war crimes.

Update-Is ICC setting its sights too high in Sudan?

On Friday I wrote that the International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor was readying a genocide charge and arrest warrant for Sudan’s President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.  It came to pass today. A defiant Khartoum has said it will not bend to the court and has warned of an eruption of violence; the opposition too has said the warrant could threaten peace. Is this a case of justice versus peace and do the two have to be irreconcilable?

Here’s Friday’s blog:

Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court are readying arrest warrants for senior Sudanese officials, possibly even President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, sources at The Hague court have told Reuters. The Washington Post said it understood Bashir would face charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Would the world’s first permanent international criminal court be wise to take on a serving president? There is a precedent – another war crimes court in The Hague, the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia,  issued an indictment for Slobodan Milosevic while he was still president.

Milosevic did finally appear before the court to answer the charges, although his trial was cut short by his death. Supporters of that court said bringing top commanders to justice was essential if the Balkans were to find lasting peace.

But Sudan is not Serbia. Sudan expert Alex da Waal has warned that going after Sudanese leaders could embolden rebels in Darfur and reignite conflict. International aid organisations operating in Sudan fear a backlash.

Would it be wiser to work with Sudan’s leaders for peace rather than pursuing them through the courts? And what chance of securing arrests even if warrants are issued?