Measuring success

The International Criminal Court in The Hague has found someone guilty.

I mention this because the ICC has been in existence for nearly ten years and has cost something around a billion dollars, and this is the first person it has found guilty. Just one.

His name is Thomas Lubanga and he is from the Democratic Republic of Congo, better known as Zaire, or the Belgian Congo. The country is huge, the people poor and uneducated. It has been at war for most of its unhappy existence.

Lubanga has been found guilty of recruiting and using child soldiers ten years ago. Obviously it is a disgraceful act and something I myself, living as I do in Europe, would never do. But I didn't know it was illegal. Wrong, yes; illegal? Did you know this?

Supposing one lived in an area of the world - Central Africa, for example - where using child soldiers was the norm. Life expectancy is around 45 so presumably to commit an atrocity you have to catch your employees young.

I don't wish to be flippant but what we have done here is impose a set of western values and call people who don't live up to them criminals. In my view the concept of a universal morality set is nonsense, and is there merely to appease the bien pensant in the civilised world.

A billion dollars spent educating Congolese might have been worthwhile.