There is an old adage that goes: You can run, but you can’t hide.
And so Ratko Mladic ends up at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Netherlands (in other words The Hague) . . . shouting at the top of his voice at the devil.
People have very short memories.
The 1945-46 Nuremberg Tribunals which saw Nazi generals tried for their war crimes were groundbreaking in establishing relentless international retributive justice for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Adolf Hitler, who had suborned his army generals to commit some of the most heinous crimes known to mankind, that were to be known as the Holocaust, never thought that one day power would shift and he, and his generals, would have to account.
Hitler thought he was the ultimate ruler and untouchable.
Hitler lived in some delusional romanticism of perennial power until the chips fell.
Up until today, Nazi generals are high value species, for retributive justice, wherever they may be found, their advanced ages notwithstanding.
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They have been arraigned before the courts in wheelchairs, stretchers and on their last breath.
No one is too old to face justice and to answer to the people.
The long arm of the law is forever bending towards justice.
Nicolae Ceausescu, Saddam Hussein, Augusto José Ramón Pinochet, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Mobutu Sese Seko, Radovan Karadzic, Slobodan Milosevic, Charles Taylor, Al Bashir . . !
The list of inhuman rulers is endless, with some current tin-pot dictators arrogantly prancing around like they will last forever.
And so Ratko Mladic ends up at the ICC . . . shouting at the devil, his lawyers having unsuccessfully tried to cushion him in the humane considerations he, himself, denied others. He is too sick to attend trial, they said . . !
But why should an inhuman brute be judged by human standards?
Not so far back, Pinochet cut a pitiful figure, in a wheelchair, in England, to extract the most public sympathy, only to jump out of the wheelchair the moment he touched his home soil.
Dictators are vermin and should be treated with the ruthlessness they deserve and their ill-gotten gains should be sequestrated and given back to the people from whom they would have been stolen, in the first place.
What is now happening to Taylor and Hosni Mubarak and his family, should be the official treatment and user-manual for treatment of all dictators and human rights abusers. There should be no amnesty, if impunity is going to be stamped out.
Mladic and his sidekick Karadzic are responsible for the loss of over 8 000 lives, why should their own lives be regarded as more important?
All people are created equal, and those who deprive others of the right to life and the full enjoyment of this God-given blessing, do not, themselves, deserve to live.
