LONDON – Three militia generals found guilty for their roles in Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war are expected to be sentenced Monday in the first step towards winding down the four-year, $90 million proceedings at the ad hoc war crimes tribunal. “The AFRC committed untold horrors — mutilations, rapes, massacres, abductions — throughout the towns and villages of Sierra Leone,” Human Rights Watch researcher Corinne Dufka told WPR, who herself documented scores of cases of abuse by those under the command of the generals in custody. “They effectively waged war against the civilian population, leaving a trail of loss and [...]
The Russian government warned that it might implement its threatened unilateral “moratorium” on observing its commitments under the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty after an extraordinary conference of the treaty signatories, held this past week in Vienna, failed to address Moscow’s concerns. Russia called for the emergency meeting, the first in CFE history, after complaining for months about the stalemated status of the treaty’s implementation. Anatoly Antonov, the chief of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s security and disarmament department and head of the Russian delegation to the conference, told the session that Russia remains committed to conventional arms control in [...]
Zambia’s former president, Frederick Jacob Titus Chiluba, is famous for his clothes. In a raid, 349 designer shirts, 206 jackets and suits, and 72 pairs of shoes, many of them bearing Chiluba’s personalized FJT monogram, were seized as part of an investigation into corruption and graft. In May, he was found guilty of siphoning millions from state coffers while in power, and his clothes were cited as “the most telling example of corruption” by the London high court judge presiding over the case. The story of Frederick Chiluba and his monogrammed designer clothes, in a country where the majority of [...]
