John Maxwell COMMON SENSE
Sunday, April 25, 2004
Petionville, Haiti - Escorted by police, rebel commander Louis-Jodel Chamblain waves as he walks to a jail to surrender to justice officials in suburban Petionville, outside Port-au-Prince last Thursday. At right is Chamblain's lawyer, Stamblei Gouse. (Photo: AP)
Nowhere is it more true that the pen is mightier than the sword than in an efficient bureaucracy. Millions more were killed by Adolf Eichmann, the dispatcher, than by the armies of Rommel or Timoshenko.
But the machete wielders and the pistoleros are not to be despised as they do the work of the often faceless placemen who sign the orders, or like Henry II, simply express the wish to be rid of turbulent priests, journalists or human rights agitators.
The Guatemalan government has just admitted its responsibility for the 1991 slaughter of an American anthropologist. She had angered the then government by reporting that the government was massacring civilians, indigenous Mayas, in what it called a counter-insurgency campaign backed and financed by the United States.
In Haiti, on January 24, 1991, the family of 24 year-old youth leader, Yvon Desanges, found his body just outside their gate. They knew him by the clothes he was wearing, his face too badly mutilated to be recognised. There was a rope around his neck. His hands were tied. His eyes had been gouged out. His tongue had been cut out. He had been stabbed so many times it was impossible to count the wounds. He had been shot several times. His abdomen had been slit so that his guts spilled out onto the street.
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