Hello!
The other week I was writing about the Democratic Republic of Congo, and yesterday these news fell into my lap:
The news is on Swedish but it is about two Norwegian mercenaries who has been sentenced to death by a military court in Kisangani. The crime they were convicted for included spying for Norway and killing a local driver, (the driver was the father of six children). It is not clear what the Norwegian men was doing there and the story is very unclear. When they were arrested they were both carrying two different types of identity cards, one from the Norwegian military and one for SIG (Special Intervention Group), which is a Norwegian based security group sort of like Blackwater. The Norwegian Ministry of Foregin Affairs have made it absolutley clear that these two men have NOT been conducting business for Norway in any shape or form.
So, a lot of focus has been put on the fact that these men got the death penalty and how Norway now is trying to stop this. I would like to add that according to Omalanga (Congo's minister of communication) the death penalty has not been carried out in Congo for ten years, so how this exactly will play out is hard to say. But the two convicted men said that 'a lifetime punishment in in Congo is to us the same as the death penalty'.
I am not really gonna state my own point of view in this case but I would like to flip the coin around and focus on the parts that no one else seem to care about or even think that much about. And that is the fact that they are mercenaries. This is a concept that is not that well known to the public. So if you look up the word mecenary in the dictionary it states:-Adjective
| 1. | working or acting merely for money or other reward; venal. |
| 2. | hired to serve in a foreign army, guerrilla organization, etc. |
There is a few legal problems when it comes to mecenaries. A normal soilder that serve their nation has to play by the rules. And there are a lot of laws to concider when it comes to war. (Check out the book Of war and Law by David Kennedy). To explain it simple, if you commit a war crime hopefully you are held responsible, and you go to your own nations military court. They decide the punishment and so on. So as a soilder this works as a form of security for you, because if you mess up you are not on your own in a foreign nation, that might have a very different jurisdiction than where you come from. But if you decide to work as a mecenary you don't have this security. Which in one way has created a legal vacuum. You are not representing your own nation, which means you are not obligated to follow the rules in the same way you should when you are in the official army. But this also means that when you mess up you are on your own. If you commit a crime, depending on where in the world you are, it is the local laws that counts.
And this is the case for the Norwegian mercenaries. If it is true that they were not on a mission for Norway. The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, say they are gonna try to help them, because 'Norway has a very strong stand on the death penalty, and we are very much against it'
My point is that it becomes a very big deal when people from the West get's into trouble in the South or the East. The media is all over it and we are very quick to point out the legal flaws and the barbarism of the punishments. But when the west decide, or should I say the US decide to open up prisons like Camp X-Ray, not many people care. It sort of shows that perhaps on paper all men (and women) are equal, but in reality white men are better.
It sickens me.
PS
There are so many more interesting topics in this blog enrty that I might bring up later but for now this is it. I am also very much aware that there are so many more angles and details to this story that can be debated. What if they are innocent?, Do all nations have a responsibility to protect and help their own citizens? If so, what about poor nations that don't have a say in anything? Is it always a bad thing being a mecenary? What about the legal vacuum? And so on.
So long,
