by Kofi Annan
On the day they were supposed to take a vote, India proposed a “poison pill”—an amendment that would have killed the whole process. If the amendment was defeated, that was the last obstacle to be overcome. If the amendment passed, then there would be no court. The existence of the court was on a knife-edge.
I phoned Corell and said, “I’m going to a meeting. The last flight out of Argentina for Rome leaves in an hour and a half. Let me know if we have an agreement.”
“Well I don’t know,” he replied. “Call me in twenty minutes.” His call was put through to me twenty minutes later, and Corell held his phone in the air. “Can you hear it?” he asked. The amendment had been defeated and the mood was clearly euphoric.
I sent my apologies to my Argentinean hosts and headed to the airport. I made it to Rome for the signing of what is now the Rome Statute at one of the most extraordinary meetings of my professional life. Not only the activist NGOs but some of the governments that had fought for the ICC were clearly elated. There we were on the platform, with people spraying champagne, saying, “We did it! We did it!”
Beforehand, I had opened the conference in Rome by appealing to the delegates to proceed as if “the eyes of the victims of past crimes, and of the potential victims of future ones, are fixed firmly upon us. It was their cry for justice that had to spur us on to our final destination.” Our goal, I said, is a court that would “put an end to a global culture of impunity.”
This culture of impunity could not be eradicated with just the formation of the court, but when taking steps to advance its work we must remember what prompted us to act. It began in the burning villages of Rwanda, their paths, fields, and even their churches, strewn with corpses. And the next year, in the bombed-out buildings of Bosnia and the horror of Srebrenica, where upwards of eight thousand defenseless men and boys were shot and dumped into pits. In both cases, the UN and the international community failed tragically to take decisive and forceful action to protect the victims.
These terrible events did, however, shock the world into action. Ad hoc tribunals were set up to bring those responsible to justice and the Rome Statute had now established a permanent court to help end the global culture of impunity.
The parties to the establishment of the Rome Statute have much to be proud of. More than two-thirds of UN member states have, as of 2011, signed or ratified the Rome Statute, tipping the balance in favor of justice. In the face of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide, the default position of the international community is now accountability, not impunity. Where credible allegations of such crimes are made, it is up to those denying the need for international justice to make their case and demonstrate that their own legal response is adequate.
The remarkable success of the creation of the court was the result of strong political will. Further progress will require vision, a strong sense of purpose, and even courage. Take my own home continent of Africa: encouraged by a few African leaders, the African Union in 2011 called on its member states not to cooperate with the ICC in enforcing the indictment issued against President Bashir of Sudan.
But it is not Africa that is hostile to the court, only certain leaders. When I meet Africans from all walks of life, they demand justice: from their own courts if possible, from international courts if no credible alternative exists. The ICC does not supplant the authority of national courts. Rather, it is a court of last resort, governed by the principle of complementarity—it is there to support people and nations in their pursuit of justice.
I am proud, as an African, of our continent’s contribution to the success of this great undertaking. African countries and their civil society organizations played an active and progressive role in the creation of the ICC. Thirty of the countries in sub-Saharan Africa have become parties to the statute—the largest single regional block that has joined the court. I am proud, too, that in four of the five cases from Africa currently before the ICC, African leaders have either referred those cases to the court or actively cooperated with the investigations.
In doing so, these countries have sought the support of an international judicial mechanism in the face of their own limited judicial capacity. In the specific case of Kenya, where the ICC’s prosecutor has, for the first time, used his own authority to initiate an investigation, he has undertaken his work with the cooperation of the Kenyan government. In all these cases, it is impunity, not the African countries, that is being targeted.
Some people in Africa—and elsewhere—have a genuine concern that our search for justice might obstruct the search for peace. They ask, “How do we convince the leaders of warring parties to make peace if prison awaits them?” Some allege that the prosecutor’s work in Uganda and Darfur has delayed or hampered peace efforts. But Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor—these and other cases have taught me that justice is a partner, not an impediment to peace.
The parallel pursuit of justice and peace does present challenges, but these can—and must—be managed. The prosecutor’s discretion in matters of timing is crucial. So is the sensitivity of those mediating conflicts to the legal obligations arising from the Rome Statute. The choice between justice and peace is no longer an option. We must be ambitious enough to pursue both, and wise enough to recognize, respect, and protect the independence of justice.
Further progress also depends on states genuinely exercising their primary responsibility, as set out under the Rome Statute, to investigate, prosecute, and punish those responsible for grave crimes themselves. There must be no going back or lessening of momentum on the issue of impunity in world affairs. Our challenge is to protect the innocent by building a court so strong, universal, and effective that it will deter even the most determined of despots.
Questions of credibility will persist so long as three of the five permanent members of the Security Council—the United States, China, and Russia—refuse to reconsider their position and join those who have taken the courageous step to become parties to the Statute. Others that aspire to permanent membership on the Council also refuse to ratify the Rome Statute. It is my hope that support for the ICC will become a condition for joining any future reformed Security Council.
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More than a decade after the Rome Conference, the International Criminal Court has begun its work. It is important to emphasize that the court exercises its jurisdiction only when a state is a party to the Rome Statute and is unable or unwilling to investigate crimes like genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity.
In the case of Uganda, for example, the court’s help was—initially, at least—welcomed. In Kenya, by contrast, the ICC prosecutor himself initiated an investigation into the violence surrounding the 2007 election. But this was only possible following Kenya’s ratification of the Rome Statute in 2005, and this signing and the ensuing investigation was supported by many in Kenyan civil society.
Sudan was a slightly different case. Given the reports of severe atrocities in Darfur from 2004, I asked Antonio Cassese, the former president of the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, to chair an international commission of inquiry to examine the nature of the violence. He concluded that there had been crimes against humanity, gross and systematic human rights abuses. He was cautious on the question of genocide, which has a specific legal meaning that crimes were committed with the specific intent to eliminate an ethnic or racial group. In addition, he gave me an envelope with fifty-one names that he said might properly be passed to the prosecutor of the ICC.
I went to the Security Council with the report, and told them about the envelope and the list of suspects. “I have not opened the envelope,” I said. “And I suggest you don’t open it, either. I’m not even going to give it to you. I will send it on to the prosecutor.”
The Council passed a resolution formally referring the situation to the ICC, and I sent the unopened letter to the prosecutor, who later issued indict
ments for the crimes in Darfur following his own investigations. Among them was the president of Sudan.
Critics are correct that most of the early cases are from Africa. But that does not mean that Africa is being targeted. As I tried to make clear at the 2010 review conference in Kampala, which added a definition of aggression to the statute, the ICC is simply needed more in Africa because of the weaknesses of its judicial systems. As these systems strengthen, there will be less need for the ICC. But until then, as we saw once again in the role of the court in Libya in 2011, it provides a useful alternative.
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Much as the U.S. opposition to international criminal law resembles an act of faith, there are some advocates of prosecution that put it above any other consideration. “No peace without justice” is a cry sometimes heard in these circles. As we discovered in the tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s, criminal prosecution may be used as a substitute for real action. In Yugoslavia it was in part an expression of outrage at Europe’s inability to prevent massacres on its own doorstep; in the case of Rwanda, it was, perhaps, an expression of regret at failing even to try.
Yet the idea that all crimes against humanity can and should be prosecuted in international tribunals is naive. In the first place, the ICC statute makes it clear that international institutions should get involved only when national institutions fail. But a more interesting question is whether international involvement can actually undermine hopes for peace. This is the argument that one sometimes hears in the context of peace negotiations: if a leader has an indictment hanging over his head, what incentive is there for him to strike a deal in which he would lose his privileged position?
My own view is that the threat of an indictment is an important deterrent against abhorrent conduct, or can encourage a leader to change his behavior. If an indictment is issued too early, however, it can negate such leverage. This was a concern that we faced in Sudan with President Bashir. In Bosnia, it would have been impossible to get an agreement if Slobodan Miloševic had been indicted before the Dayton negotiations. Holding off on a possible indictment, however, is not the same as granting an amnesty.
What causes much misunderstanding in these situations is the assumption that, if you are unwilling to prosecute, then you are willing to give amnesties. In 1999, in Sierra Leone, the group demanding amnesty was the Revolutionary United Front, headed by Foday Sankoh. This group was notorious for its use of child soldiers, brutal mass rapes, and tens of thousands of amputations. It was inconceivable that the UN could lend its authority to such an amnesty.
The peace negotiations had reached an advanced stage without my involvement, and I did not want to derail the process completely. But the prospect of amnesties crossed a line. I took the very unusual step of instructing my special representative to Sierra Leone, Francis Okelo, to write into the agreement by hand that, for the UN, there could be no amnesty for genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity. The incident crystalized my views on the subject, and I later gave similar instructions to all my representatives and envoys engaged in peace negotiations to avoid such situations in the future.
As it happened, Sankoh broke that and other agreements. Military intervention by Britain and Nigerian forces ended the conflict a year later. He was later charged before the special court for Sierra Leone with seventeen counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, but he had a stroke and died before he could stand trial. As the prosecutor grimly noted, Sankoh enjoyed the peaceful end that he denied to so many others.
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As I delivered my Nobel Prize lecture in 2001, I sought a way to link all of our grand aspirations for the organization to something more concrete, more real. And so I spoke of a girl born that day in Afghanistan. That girl’s mother would hold her and feed her, comfort her and care for her—just as any mother would anywhere in the world. In such basic acts, humanity knows no divisions. Yet to be born a girl in Afghanistan in 2001 was to begin life centuries away from the prosperity that part of humanity has achieved, and under conditions many would consider inhuman.
Today’s real borders are not between nations but between powerful and powerless, free and fettered, privileged and humiliated. The United Nations and its secretary-general cannot right all these injustices, but it is his or her job to speak to all the peoples of the world, and to speak for them when larger forces ignore them.
One of my predecessors in the post of secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, said in 1954 that the United Nations was created not to bring humanity to heaven but to save it from hell. In the aftermath of World War II, with the world divided by a new Cold War and the looming prospect of a nuclear confrontation, his modesty was as ambitious as it was necessary.
Today, however, the UN has to be about more than simply saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war. That concern is only the first line of the Charter. In the lines that follow, it stresses the need to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person. The Charter was also a promise “to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.” I took those final words, “in larger freedom,” as the title of my most important report on UN reform, which was ably supervised by Robert Orr and Stephen Stedman. In that report, I argued that the UN must continue to play a role in peace and security, but that must be matched by its commitment to human rights and development.
Though the organization remains in many ways a club of states, in all that we do the human being must be at the center. This is an evolution in thinking about the UN, but it reflects transformations that have taken place within states themselves: the rise of democracy and human rights, the acceptance of the Responsibility to Protect.
Throughout all these changes, and of all the difficulties we confronted during my tenure as secretary-general, perhaps the most sustained problem was the management of expectations. This problem was, in part, a difficulty we had in dealing with the media. But it was also a structural issue because in many ways there are two UNs. The first UN is the organization, the Secretariat, headed by the secretary-general. The second UN is the member states. If things go well, everyone is keen to take credit. But all too often it is only that first UN that gets blamed, even though it depends on the second UN for all of its resources and, indeed, its political direction and power to act decisively.
At the same time, the UN needs to be wary of raising expectations about what it can achieve. Within the Secretariat, statements are sometimes issued that create the impression that we expect to save humanity overnight. This can be dangerous and member states are sometimes complicit in this. We learned some of these lessons in Bosnia, when the Council declared safe havens that were not safe. Srebrenica has become synonymous with that disjunction between words and deeds.
We have not always lived up to our own words. But perhaps that is the fate of the UN: to disappoint the expectations of those who see it as the panacea to the world’s problems, but to succeed, however incompletely, in giving voice to aspirations of individual men and women struggling in every country to live lives of dignity and opportunity, free of the threat of conflict and repression.
V
THE FATE OF THE CONTINENT
Africa’s Wars, Africa’s Peace
The Nigerian secret servicemen leaped into the three black Peugeots after they bundled us into the middle car. The driver hit the accelerator so hard that it felt as though we might take off into the night sky. We quickly breached one hundred miles per hour, and as we took the corners, the driver was oblivious to the justifiably anxious reflexes of Lamin Sise, one of my most trusted advisors, who was seated beside me. At every left turn his body was pushed heavily against mine. At every right turn, mine did the same against his. We didn’t know where they were taking us, and as the car swung through each harassing curve, something heavy slid in the trunk with the weight of a boulder, hitting one side, then the next
.
I didn’t want the Nigerian secret serviceman to understand what we were saying, so I now spoke in French. “Where is Nick?” I asked, involuntarily wrestling with the forces of gravity in the speeding car. Nick Panzarino was my bodyguard.
“He’s in the car in front,” Lamin assured me. It turned out Lamin did not actually know this, or even if Nick had made it into the three-car convoy, such was the pace at which the Nigerians had moved us.
There was a pause in our dialogue as we took in our surreal situation. “He’s going rather fast,” I said casually to Lamin, noting the stressed speedometer as we blasted through the streets of Abuja.
“Yes, he is,” Lamin politely agreed, nodding in the style that one remarks upon the weather. The situation suddenly seemed comic: we were talking in French so we could not be understood, but banally discussing the speed as if we were commenting on the taste of our morning tea.
“What is that in the back?” I asked.
“I caught a glimpse as we were getting in,” Lamin said, glancing at me with some trepidation, albeit still with that good-humored twinkle this Gambian always carried in his eyes. “I’m pretty sure each car is carrying a heavy machine gun.”
Earlier that night in June 1998, at 9:30 p.m., an unknown Nigerian secret service officer—an agent of the five-year, brutal military regime of the recently deceased General Sani Abacha—unexpectedly knocked on the door of Lamin’s Abuja hotel room. “Sir, I’m here to inform you that the Secretary-General is to see Mr. Moshood Abiola immediately,” he said. When Lamin came to my room it was clear something was going on.
“Are you here to say good-night?” I asked him, smiling.
