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If Found Guilty, Execute Roland
Kaine and Charles Bennie for Margibi Massacre
Monday, June 23, 2008
By Tewroh-Wehtoe Sungbeh
Since the end of
the civil war in 2003, Liberians often would whisper
among themselves about the high crime rate in the
country and the obvious lack of value placed on human
life years after the war, especially when the life of
another person can be taken away senselessly by
individuals who believe it is their right to do so.
From the
recent massacre of over a dozen in Ti-Mour, Margibi
County involving two powerful former rebel leaders,
Roland Kaine and Charles Bennie, to armed criminals
reining terror on the business community, and the
recent tragedy at the football stadium, which took the
lives of nine Liberians, should have and could have
been avoided had the respective government agencies
responsible for a national occasion of that kind done
the right thing to prevent the stadium tragedy.
Crowd
control, seating the appropriate number of people into
the stadium, supervising the supervisors to stop the
sale of recycled and stolen tickets to scalpers, and
tightening all the loop holes to prevent unscrupulous
individuals and corrupt government officials from
giving out stolen tickets to family members, friends
and their girlfriends, would have helped curtailed the
flow of so many people into the stadium.
“Life
don’t mean a thing in that country anymore,” a
Liberian quipped frustratingly about the rise in
violence that continues to shatter the confidence of a
nation and its people still recovering from years of a
brutal civil war.
The killings
in Margibi County over farmland, which took the lives
of 13 Liberians and wounding dozen more, implicating
Senator Roland Kaine, formerly of the National
Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), and Charles Bennie,
former official of the LURD rebel group and now
Director of Foreign Trade at the Ministry of Commerce,
is an unfortunate incident that tops the list of
cruelty and lawlessness in 2008.
Sen. Roland Kaine
This should
not have happened, not from a lawmaker who supposed to
have been above the fray and should have known better
in dealing with such matter; and not even from a
middle-level civil servant who should have restrained
himself by joining his colleague in working out their
differences. And if the duo couldn’t reach a
settlement in their land dispute, the best way out of
this mess would have been to go at each other’s
throat by killing each other and not get others
involved in murdering so many people. For their
alleged involvement in this senseless crime, Kaine and
Bennie should be put on trial, and if they are found
guilty should be put to death immediately.
The Margibi
massacre says a lot about the unpredictable and
unstable nature of the former rebels and their
leaders, who intentionally or unintentionally are
making us all to wonder who else among them have not
yet turned in their weapons, and is waiting to snap
and explode and randomly kill innocent people because
of a feud with a former counterpart, or a grievance
with the Republic of Liberia that went unsettled?
However,
because of their high-profile political positions in
government as a lawmaker and a bureaucrat, and because
of their brutal war past, one would think Kaine and
Bennie would be in the forefront of seeking peace
through dialogue as a way of settling their dispute,
which would have set the tone for others to emulate in
future and current land crisis.
There is
this temptation, however, for individuals like the
gentlemen, who are still armed to use their incredible
power and influence to manipulate the weak and
powerless into toting their water and doing all things
wrong on their behalf, reminding us all of the bad old
days when Kaine, Bennie and the other warlords killed
countless Liberians, raped Liberian women and
intimidated an entire population into submission.
This is the
reason why I am not a fan of the Truth and
Reconciliation Commission (TRC), period, because I
honestly believe individuals who commit crimes against
the helpless and innocent should be men and women
enough to answer to the legal system, and should not
hide behind a toothless commission that has no legal
mandate to enforce anything, but is meant to save
those cowardly and wicked violators from prosecution.
And that
people like Kaine, Bennie and the rest of the rebel
leaders of the various factions should have been
arrested after the civil war, put on trial and put to
death (if found guilty) for their crimes against the
nation and the Liberian people.
I have been
constantly reminded that Kaine, Bennie and their rebel
friends were rightfully brought back into the greater
society and into government for the sake of peace. But
how can there ever be a peaceful Liberia, especially
in wake of the meeting of the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (TRC), trying to get Liberians to let
bygone be bygone when renowned gangsters and hoodlums
like Kaine and Bennie and their minions, who supposed
to be sitting in prison today or put to death for
crimes they committed against their own people during
that heinous war for greed and power continued to
engage in acts that threatens the security of the
citizenry and the nation?
Long before
the civil war, there have been clashes about land
between individuals whose land were sold and re-sold
countless times to the highest bidders. These buyers,
desperately wanting a piece of land to build their
dream house could afford to acquire the land but did
not know what they were getting into since the person
who claimed to be the original owner, and the surveyor
did not care to be honest during the transaction.
The end of
the civil war and the returned to Liberia of the
original and actual landowners heightened the tension
as those original owners, rightfully so, demanded to
get their land back only to meet stiff resistance from
those who were duped by the criminals posing as
landowners.
Back in
2005, when Mandingo citizens and some citizens of
Nimba County were engaged in a heated land dispute
that threatened the nation’s peace and stability, I
wrote then on this same page that the government or
some highly-respected tribal elder should intervene
quickly before the dispute boils over into a major
national conflict.
With land
disputes raging like an inferno in Nimba, Maryland,
Lofa, Margibi and in other parts of the country, it is
imperative that the Sirleaf administration hurriedly
set up the land commission it has been talking about
to tackle this very pressing problem to avoid another
Margibi massacre.
When that is
done, the Kaines and Bennies of the world and other
copycats will not be so quick to injecting their own
form of vigilante justice to settle a land dispute
their way.
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