The News Review:

- Can Khadi help Sierra Leone?
- ‘Don’t Even Let Them Know About Her’
- Angered by Bombing, Shiites Erupt in Karachi
- So much for international humanitarian law and justice…

Can Khadi help Sierra Leone?
BBC News – Jun 2, 2004
This has raised questions as to whether the 56 year-old former international is the right man to end the country’s football crisis. There has not been any competitive football in Sierra Leone for the last 10 months because of the internal power struggles in the SLFA and many are questioning whether Khadi’s recent appointment will help solve those problems. Veteran football administrator Alhaji Unisa Alim Sesay has said that Sierra Leone’s problems are managerial ones and that Nahim Khadi’s lack of experience in that area mean he will struggle to find solutions for the problems. Khadi insists that he has what it takes to take the game forward in the Sierra Leone.

‘Don’t Even Let Them Know About Her’
Washington Post – Jun 3, 2004
I don’t know how long God will allow me. Sending the baby back to Sierra Leone with Claudia is unthinkable. All of Smith’s seven children are in America or England. All of her brothers and sisters are dead. There are no friends to call on for help. Or nobody who would help if they knew the truth about Claudia.

Angered by Bombing, Shiites Erupt in Karachi
Washington Post – Jun 2, 2004
SHANGHAI — A Shanghai real estate magnate once ranked as China’s 11th-richest man was sentenced to three years in prison for stock market fraud and falsifying documents, the New China News Agency said, in a case that focused attention on official corruption. Zhou Zhengyi was detained in May 2003 after an investigation was launched into $242 million in loans obtained from Bank of China. AFRICA FREETOWN, Sierra Leone — Al Qaeda suspects in the 1998 bombings of U. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania took shelter in West Africa in the months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and converted al Qaeda funds into untraceable diamonds, according to findings of a U…
The allegations were part of an investigation by the Sierra Leone war crimes court into suspicions that former Liberian president Charles Taylor acted as a middleman between al Qaeda and diamond traders. David Crane, the court’s lead prosecutor, said Taylor “harbored al Qaeda operatives in Monrovia as late as the summer of 2001.

So much for international humanitarian law and justice…
ZNet – Jun 3, 2004
On 3 June 2004, the UN-created Special Court for Sierra Leone began prosecution of those it alleged bear “the greatest responsibility” for war crimes, violations of humanitarian law and related offenses during Sierra Leone’s decade-long dirty war. It was a “solemn occasion,” said the court’s American prosecutor, David Crane, whose many shortcomings surely does not include modesty or under-statement. Crane summoned all of mankind to “once again [assemble] before an international tribunal to begin the sober and steady climb upwards toward the towering summit of justice. ” Waxing poetic—rather in the manner of high-pitched tele-evangelists of the American south—Crane declared: “The path will be strewn with the bones of the dead, the moans of the mutilated, the cries of agony of the tortured, echoing down into the valley of death below. Horrors beyond the imagination will slide into this hallowed hall as this trek upward comes to a most certain and just conclusion…
” We are solemnly informed, in case we still do not get it, that “The light of this new day-today-and the many tomorrows ahead are a beginning of the end to the life of that beast of impunity, which howls in frustration and shrinks from the bright and shining spectre of the law. The jackals whimper in their cages certain of their impending demise. The law has returned to Sierra Leone and it stands with all Sierra Leoneans against those who seek their destruction. ” Even the great scribes of the Old Testament would not better this. But how valid is the implication that the CDF leaders should even be remotely considered as “most responsible” for the recently-ended war and its almost unique atrocities? And how do we react to this odd American awakening to the necessity to address impunity and rights violations around the world?LIKE THE RUF, LIKE THE CDF?Sierra Leone’s war started in March 1991 when a self-adoring former army corporal and photographer, Foday Saybanah Sankoh, led a petty army—of mainly Liberian rebels and a few Sierra Leonean insurgents—from territories controlled by then Liberian warlord Charles Taylor into southern and eastern Sierra Leone. Sankoh had trained in Libya with Taylor, and he fought alongside the Liberian from the start of Liberia’s civil war in 1989 until intervention by West African troops, known as ECOMOG, led to a bloody stalemate in late 1990. It was then that Taylor opened another front, so to speak, in Sierra Leone by launching the Sankoh-led Revolutionary United Front rebels.