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January 11, 2006

The United Nations Own Private Gulag (Oh yes, they have one folks!)

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has all their defendants, material witnesses, and such locked up in a UN run gulag in Netherlands. While you would think given the high-minded rhetoric coming from the UN and its membership in re prisons and prisoners that this place would be a penologist’s version of utopia, according to the inmates you’d be wrong. However reading about it does offer some interesting insights on how the blue helmets run their show when it comes to imprisonment.

Who knows. Maybe in few years, (when and if they do end up running the show, eh?), we can see what we are all gonna be in for.

“Wrenched away from everything they know,” the Slate.com article says”, “these inmates have been dropped in someone else's country, surrounded by someone else's language, and forced to confront the massed resources of a thousand-person tribunal that they believe exists solely to railroad them into guilty verdicts. Under these alienating circumstances, bunking next door to people who share the same language, who enjoy the same food, who have overlapping traditions and pop-culture touchstones, and who share the same enemy in the tribunal's head prosecutor—all of this can overwhelm whatever ideologies seemed so important when Yugoslavia was ablaze with ethnic passion.”

Well shucks. Why couldn’t these thugs show such cultural unity in their homeland? Prison planet indeed.

And this:

“Seselj's [an ex-Serbian military officer & defendant] rage and contempt were saved entirely for his fellow Serbs who had proved to be ‘really rotten’ not because of the unarmed prisoners they had killed, but because they had turned on their erstwhile comrades and copped a deal with the tribunal prosecution.”

Jeez. I could hear the same kind of outrage and pain from anyone currently locked up in their local county jail’s gang unit too. Thugs are thugs I guess.

Posted by Ali Massoud at January 11, 2006 11:46 AM

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