South Sudan: Demonstrate Commitment to Rule of Law

Salem-News.com Eye on the World report.

President Salva Kiir Mayardit

(HONG KONG) - Deep concerns exist over the invitation that the government of South Sudan has extended to President Omar al-Bashir to attend the April 2012 presidential summit in Juba. With open fighting now reported along the border between Sudan and South Sudan, it appears increasingly unlikely that Bashir will accept the invitation. Still, South Sudan's government should adopt policies banning such visits.

Our goal with Eye on the World is to illustrate and highlight politically oriented problems and tragedies that traditional media channels don't have time or interest in covering.

The world has its own set of laws that were agreed upon by the ruling nations in 1948, and many people are not aware of this simple fact. At the root of the concept of world citizenry itself, is the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an overriding and supreme law that ensures many essential human rights that governments today fail to observe. Also central to any hope of human success, is the understanding of the human hierarchy of needs, as defined by Abraham Maslow- more information on this at the conclusion of this entry. We must use the Internet as a tool of justice at every junction, and we need to assist all human beings, everywhere, and not allow cultural, racial or religious preferences as determiners.

In his letter to President Salva Kiir Mayardit, Mr. William Gomes urges the adoption of a policy of holding any meetings with Omar al-Bashir and other Sudanese officials wanted by the ICC outside of South Sudan. Mr. Gomes also calls on the government of South Sudan to demonstrate that it is committed to rule of law and accountability by moving quickly to ratify the Rome Statute and international human rights treaties.

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Dear President Salva Kiir Mayardit, I am are writing to express my deep concern about the invitation that the government of South Sudan has extended to President Omar al-Bashir to attend the April 2012 presidential summit in Juba. With open fighting now reported along the border between Sudan and South Sudan, it appears increasingly unlikely that Bashir will accept the invitation. Nonetheless, we urge the government of South Sudan to adopt a policy of holding any meetings with Bashir and other Sudanese officials wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) outside of South Sudan. No nation knows President Bashir’s cruelty more than South Sudan. Since Bashir came to power in a military coup in 1989, countless numbers of our people have been killed and displaced by the actions of his regime. Over the course of the war, Khartoum extended its criminal warfare methods to other marginalized regions in Sudan. In Darfur, Bashir’s regime instituted a particularly brutal campaign of mass killings and ethnic cleansing that left more than 300,000 people dead and several million displaced. In response to these grave violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, the United Nations Security Council issued Resolution 1593 (2005), referring the situation in Darfur to the ICC. The Resolution called on all United Nations member states—whether or not they were party to the Rome Statute—to cooperate fully with the Court and its prosecutor. Four years later, the ICC issued two warrants for Bashir’s arrest on charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Overnight, Bashir’s ability to travel became severely restricted. In accordance with Resolution 1593, responsible nations across the globe have refused to receive him. With each refusal, the survivors of Bashir’s atrocities come closer to seeing justice done in their lifetime and to knowing that Bashir will never again subject others to a similar pain and torment. As a nation that has suffered so much at the hands of Omar al-Bashir, South Sudan has a moral obligation to the survivors of his atrocities take a principled stance on the warrants for his arrest. The millions of South Sudanese who have lost loved ones to Bashir’s criminal acts have the same interest in seeing him held accountable as the women and children that continue to be raped in killed in Darfur and the hundreds of thousands of people that are now at risk of conflict-induced famine in Southern Kordofan and Southern Blue Nile. I congratulate you and your negotiating team for maintaining open channels of communication with representatives of the government of Sudan and for making progress on the ‘four freedoms’ agreement. The presidential summit and its implications for peace between Sudan and South Sudan should not be understated. But to host the international fugitive, Omar al-Bashir, in Juba, to turn a blind eye to the warrants for his arrest, to grant him leave to set foot on South Sudanese soil for the first time since independence, does a disservice to the survivors of his atrocities. For little more than a public relations exercise, South Sudan could join the short list of countries that have tacitly condoned Bashir’s crimes by failing to respect the ICC’s warrants for his arrest. Your Excellency, I strongly urge you to adopt a policy of holding any meetings with Omar al-Bashir and other Sudanese officials wanted by the ICC outside of South Sudan. I also call on the government of South Sudan to demonstrate that it is committed to rule of law and accountability by moving quickly to ratify the Rome Statute and international human rights treaties. Yours sincerely, William Nicholas Gomes William’s Desk www.williamgomes.org

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Maslow's hierarchy of needs

As children we are educated in right and wrong, we are told how to conduct ourselves; we learn both expectations and limitations, and from that point we go forth with these tools, and our individual personalities, and fail or succeed accordingly.

In school we quickly understand that without paper, there is no place to write. Once we have paper, a pen or pencil is required to move to the next point. There is a great analogy that exists between this simple concept of paper and pen, and what we know today as Maslow's hierarchy of needs- the theory in psychology proposed in Abraham Maslow's 1943 paper A Theory of Human Motivation.

He demonstrated how without the correct necessities, a person can do little good for themselves, and has none to offer for others. However when people are housed and have clothing, heat, food, health and security, anything is possible. However if just one of these dynamics is removed from the mix, the chance for success can be adversely affected.

Wikipedia describes Maslow's hierarchy of needs as a pyramid consisting of five levels:

The lowest level is associated with physiological needs, while the uppermost level is associated with self-actualization needs, particularly those related to identity and purpose.

The higher needs in this hierarchy only come into focus when the lower needs in the pyramid are met. Once an individual has moved upwards to the next level, needs in the lower level will no longer be prioritized. If a lower set of needs is no longer be met, the individual will temporarily re-prioritize those needs by focusing attention on the unfulfilled needs, but will not permanently regress to the lower level.

For instance, a businessman at the esteem level who is diagnosed with cancer will spend a great deal of time concentrating on his health (physiological needs), but will continue to value his work performance (esteem needs) and will likely return to work during periods of remission.

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Special thanks to William's Desk

williamgomes.org

He is also active in advocating for free and independent media and journalists’ rights, and is part of the free media movement, Global Independent Media Center – an activist media network for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate telling of the truth. He worked for Italian news agency Asianews.it from year 2009 to 2011, on that time he was accredited as a free lance journalist by the press information department of Bangladesh. During this time he has reported a notable numbers of reports for the news agency which were translated into Chinese and Italian and quoted by notable number of new outlets all over the world.He, ideologically, identifies himself deeply attached with anarchism. His political views are often characterized as “leftist” or “left-wing,” and he has described himself as an individualist anarchist.