The Three-Eyed Watchman: Survival tips and counselling for Sudan president

By:

John Penn de Ngong, The New Sudan Vision (NSV), www.newsudanvision.com

July 22, 2008 (Juba, South Sudan) - I hear my president is an international criminal, and that he is most wanted! But he is my leader. I know he alone can take me and everybody to court. Now who dares so, and why drag him to the criminal court? Before I give my advice and tricks on how Mr. Beshir should dodge these ICC guys, if at all they have the gut to come and handcuff our man in his Republican Palace in Khartoum, let us first look at what this thing means.

By the way, if there is any word I admire in English language, it is 'criminal.' Criminal, stemming from the term 'crime', is a chameleon word. It evolves with history and involves many stories. It changes with changes. In this case, it applies many scientific, social, political and economic laws of grows and motion. Crime can climb. For example, the higher you go in terms of status, attitude and altitude, the more pronounced it becomes. Not limited by age like whooping cough and measles, not limited to class like poverty, crime is like Aids, which I describe in one of my poems as:

Ageless and sageless
Statusless and stateless
Classless and sexless
Religionless and regionless.

What I like with the word criminal is it twists the same law. I mean it recycles the used or useless portion of the law in such a way that a law-maker becomes a law-breaker, and the reverse is always true. Look at the constitution of the country where you live in. For your pre-warning, do not look at it in detail, or you will discover yourself a criminal therein. This is worse with international constitutions like the UN's and Human Rights', and universal and holy constitutions like The Bible and The Quran. The time I read the Bible and heard the Quran read, I discovered the reader was the first criminal. And discovered that the leader was the second criminal. And then realized later that even God or Allah was somehow a criminal. Somehow how? Fanatics, before you rush into declaring me blasphemous, have you ever come across a verse or sura that says "If you see a crime or sin being committed, and do not intervene to stop it, you are that criminal or sinner"?

I am tempted to sin here because I revisited the history. See the holocaust. When the God of Israel watched 6,000,000 Jews being slaughtered by the Nazis and said (in the Bible) that let them do it, I will get them in the Last Judgment, didn't he connive with the criminals? When God saw even His own priests refereeing the genocide by the time the UN watched 1,000,000 Rwandans being butchered, and said, let them do it, of course, they will appear before the last judgment in the Hague. When Allah watched the Twin Towers smouldering with smoke and flame, and even his imams on horsebacks in Darfur, all these being done in His own name, and keeps it all for the Final Judgment, is He being free from the wrath of the law?

That is why I dare repeat Pope Benedict XVI's questions and quotations that he was tempted to ask when he stood on the Place of Horror, the so-called Auschwitz, where Hitler's Nazis roasted alive millions of lives in Germany. The 'Holy Father' asked about the whereabouts of the Holy Father, thus:

" How many questions arise in this place! Constantly the question comes up: Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil? The words of Psalm 44 come to mind, Israel’s lament for its woes: 'You have broken us in the haunt of jackals, and covered us with deep darkness ... because of you we are being killed all day long, and accounted as sheep for the slaughter. Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Lord? Awake, do not cast us off forever! Why do you hide your face? Why do you forget our affliction and oppression? For we sink down to the dust; our bodies cling to the ground. Rise up, come to our help! Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love!'” (Ps 44:19, 22-26).

I hear – and if at all it is not a rumour – that my president is a criminal, and so if he travels carelessly, he could be dragged off to join Charles Taylor in the Hague! Why? Wow! How? You know, the law is something funny, especially this law of the United Nations. Basing on Bush and Mugabe's case study, I do not want to blow the whistle like the rests that it is either selective or elective; I am just an eye watchman. So I just want to assure my President that he should rather be calm and should continue with the implementation of our CPA (Compressive Peace Argument). Just like no one stands in front of the Universal Seat of the Final Judgment before s/he dies, no one is taken to the International Criminal Court of Justice in The Hague unless s/he is out of power. So the formula is simple: cling onto the power till death. Or in case you are dropped out of power prematurely, dash into the dark and join Mr. Bin Laden at Tora Bora, or consult Mr. Joseph Kony on how to coexist with the UN soldiers in Garamba forest or Darfur desert. Your Excellency, I assure you, they do not go there.

One outstanding rumour-humour here is that H.E. The President has just sent our Abyei Region (the case he failed to settle at home) to the very ICC tribunal with his Deputy's deputy, Ustaz Tah, and his Vice's vice, Dr. Machar, to the Hague. So Abyei is an international criminal, too. Umm, but before it is Darfur's turn to the Hague, the Big Man himself is being invited there. It's like a certain man who once dragged his adulterous wife to the police but later turned out to be the one remaining in jail. That is what we call shooting oneself in the foot. If Dr. Riek and Tah were allowed to take Abyei case (not Abyei culprits) to the Hague, what then is wrong with that same court calling upon the Big Bull himself to answer his own complaints in the same court he proposed for solving his home affairs?

Sometimes, I love to refer to what I was doing by the time I wrote any article. This question of 'what a criminal/crime is' popped up on my mind first when I came across a skull, a wreckage of Mig 27 and a scrap of an armoured vehicle between Jalle and Kolmarek in Bor County. Another sight comprised an assortment of human bones and skulls, now crushed into pieces, some of which had marks of both Bor and Nuer tradition on, at Payom, Twic East County , like Jalle, one of the hotspots of the 1991's deliberately undocumented genocide in Southern Sudan. I discovered this Places of Horror this month when I was on a socio-economic baseline research in that rich but barren land that is spread over a lake of oil. This reminds me of the bitter days of the war, and arouses a question to whom it may concern: who and Why did this? Like Pope Benedict XVI, I can still ask, where was the ICC and its UN then? Not to disturb God again; Him already asked above.

It is not only my hobby but now my habit to conclude my piece with a poem from my
'The Black Christs of Africa' poems.
Therefore, you can now end your good read with the description of a human fate as follows.

HUMAN BEING

You man being
A human being

Can see
Not foresee

Can get
But forget

Can give
Not forgive

Can take
Not partake

Can seek
But forsake