Word: warlords
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...mass extraditions have stymied Colombian prosecutors looking into paramilitary massacres and land grabs and hamstrung their efforts to compensate the victims of these crimes. True, the extradited all face lengthy prison terms in the U.S. But because they only have to answer for their drug crimes, the warlord defendants now have little motive for elaborating on their human rights atrocities back in their homeland. Only one has provided Colombian prosecutors with extensive testimony, though teams from the Colombian attorney general's office are in the U.S. this week to try again. "The investigations lost a lot of momentum because...
...headed the Northern Valley cartel. After he was arrested in 2007, Montoya presented such a security risk that prison officials decided to house him on a Navy ship off Colombia's Pacific Coast. But during his transfer there, clueless Colombian agents picked up the wrong prisoner, a paramilitary warlord known as Don Berna. After the confusion was cleared up, the two dons were eventually extradited...
...Administration signals that it intends to devote more attention to the war in Afghanistan, many Afghans claim that in the name of fighting the Taliban, the West is ignoring abuses committed by its Afghan proxies. One of the worst offenders, alleges Samimi, is Abdul Rashid Dostum, an ethnic-Uzbek warlord who helped in the triumphant ousting of the Taliban in 2001, when, backed by U.S. special forces, he led hundreds of men on horseback to liberate the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif. Dostum's militia is accused of that war's worst human-rights atrocity, in which hundreds...
...years of diplomatic and legal disputes, the International Criminal Court (ICC) opened its first trial in the Hague on Jan. 26. The self-described "court of last resort," which operates independently of the U.N., was created to oversee large-scale human-rights violations--like those allegedly orchestrated by Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga, the court's first defendant. The trial of Lubanga for training child-soldiers during the region's 2002-03 ethnic conflict is also the first test of an international law allowing victims--like the 93 people expected to testify against him--to play a direct role in court...
...Seven years and billions of dollars have brought Afghanistan no closer to the peaceful democracy that George W. Bush promised at the beginning of the war. Instead, the country more closely resembles the warlord-led kleptocracy of the 1990s that led to the rise of the Taliban in the first place. Corruption is the defining characteristic of the central government, and President Hamid Karzai is largely seen as an American puppet unable to rein in the excesses of government ministers or even his own family. And he's not even a good puppet - Karzai routinely and publicly berates his foreign...