Dec 16, 2009

Legacy

I wrote the story of a woman I met last week, when she was holding a talk in Munich.  Her picture is annexed - Raniah Salloum
Photo: Renate Winter copyright Special Court of Sierra Leone



A judge from Austria assists child soldiers in Sierra Leone – against all odds.

Renate Winter knows what confronting obstacles means. “Twice they tried to shoot me. Then I got six bodyguards.” Winter is a judge for the United Nations. The shootings happened when she was an international judge on the Supreme Court of Kosovo. Since 2003, Winter heads the Special Court for Sierra Leone. There, she only has one bodyguard and says she wouldn’t need him. The obstacles are of a different kind.

“In a court room, you can’t accomplish reconciliation”, Winter says. Yet, this is precisely what Sierra Leone needs after a decade-long civil war that left ten thousands dead or badly mutilated – many of them women and children. Winter adds: “If I were to describe the things that happened in Sierra Leone, you would not be able to sleep or to eat for three days”.

And how does she deal with the accounts of horror? She brushes off the question. “I’m a judge – if I couldn’t do that, I would have had to choose a different profession.” But it is not that simple. The question of how to heal Sierra Leone’s society has not left Winter’s mind.

Sierra Leone is a small country. Eleven years of civil war mean: eventually, everybody was implicated. Victims and perpetrators encounter each other on a daily basis. Add 90 percent unemployment – and reintegration becomes impossible. At the same time, Renate Winter never gives up hope.

She can’t make undone the brutality that almost 3,000 child soldiers unleashed – and experienced – in the civil war. “My youngest [defendant] was so small, he couldn’t even carry a Kalashnikov”, Winter remembers. But she can try to prevent it ever happening again.

“Legacy” is what she calls the most important accomplishment of her court. It set standards for the entire world.

Child soldiers are perpetrators and victims at the same time. They are enslaved by warlords who give them with weapons - and often drugs. It was after the warlords Renate Winter wanted to go, not after the children. With a bit of judicial creativity, her tribunal sanctioned the enlistment of child soldiers as a war crime. It also considered enforced marriages, through which warlords enslaved women, a crime against humanity – a first in the history of international law.

Renate Winter calls these achievements the tribunal’s legacy. So what about her own? Winter set up an NGO that supports former child soldiers – “female ones because nobody cared for them.” Her NGO teaches them to stitch and sow traditional garments. It also provides them with basic education - and a home. “Maybe this is my legacy”, Renate Winter says.

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