Lavish life of a war criminal inside a Rwandan jail
Issa Hassan Sesay, centre, at his trial on April 8, 2009 in Freetown.
By all standards, Issa Hassan Sesay, a convicted international war criminal and former leader of Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebel group, is a remarkable man.
“Imagine, I am convicted for rape, torture and killing and sentenced to 52 years in jail,” he tells a young student of journalism from Uganda somewhat wistfully. “Yet the UN Tribunal knows, or should know, that that is the stuff war is made of.” Convicting him for such crimes, Sesay believes, is like convicting Lionel Messi for scoring a goal in the European Champions League or the Spanish La Liga. He adds that the Allies committed worse war crimes during World War II and were not punished for them.
