Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Power of the Heart

A couple of days ago, Khieu Samphan, the Khmer Rouge's former head of state of Cambodia, was arrested. He was taken from a hospital in the capital to a UN-backed genocide tribunal. He was in the hospital because of a heart stroke! Under the Khmer Rouge, more than one million people died from starvation or overwork as leaders strove to create an agrarian utopia. In addition, hundreds of thousands of the educated middle-classes were tortured and executed in special centres.

On March 11, 2006, Slobodan Milosevic, the formal president of Serbia, has been found dead in his cell in the Hague, the Netherlands, after suffering from a heart attack. He was indicted in May 1999, during the Kosovo War, by the UN's International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for crimes against humanity in Kosovo. Charges of violating the laws or customs of war, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions in Croatia and Bosnia and genocide in Bosnia were added a year and a half later.

Iraq's former deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, has suffered a mild heart stroke in 2005, while he was under the imprisonment of US forces. He is one of the high profile officials during the dictatorship rule of Saddam Hussain, which is accused of genocide and persecution of millions of Iraqis for almost three decades.

On December, 2006, Augusto Pinochet, Chile's former military leader has died from a heart attack after some time in hospital, Santiago... He is accused of killing thousands and thousands of political rivals, in addition to torture, forced disappearance, and assassination accusations took place during the Military Junta in the 1970s.

Did they finally realize, after all these years in power, that justice will always prevail?

1 comment:

Chelsea + Shiloh said...

Possiibly proves that dictators have bad hearts...both figuratively and literally ..I wish I had the capacity to mourn there losss...but its in these instance where I hope their attacks were excruciately painful...