“Members of the armed forces of Guinea limit their use of weapons to engage lawful targets!”

One slide from a PowerPoint presentation that would have encouraged Guinean soldiers to respect human rights.

Sometimes I think I should create a tag called “truth is stranger than fiction.”

David Crane and Alan White, two lawyers who indicted Charles Taylor in 2003, consulted for Moussa Dadis Camara’s short-lived junta in Guinea, and offered to advise Camara’s military on the rules of armed conflict.   Part of their proposal to advise the military included a PowerPoint slideshow, which you can see on Foreign Policy’s website.

Slides are along the lines of:

Members of the armed forces of Guinea treat everyone they find humanely and with respect.  Civilians!  Medical Personnel!  Prisoners!

(The official language of Guinea is French.  Why did Crane and White put together a slideshow in English?)

The proposal fell through after Camara was shot.  One might be inclined to laud this interesting attempt at promoting respect for human rights among a military junta no one was sure how to deal with.  But it is hard to forgive the internal assessment they wrote for Camara on the September 2009 soccer stadium massacre (first reported in Africa Confidential).   The report found the scale of violence to be significantly lower than human rights groups found, and downplayed the role of Guinea’s leadership.  Foreign Policy quotes an “international human rights researcher who investigated the massacre” saying:

“The CW [Crane and White's company] report is a dishonest and misleading report, and it is shameful that persons formerly associated with the Sierra Leone Special Tribunal authored it…It is absolutely clear that they ignored evidence that was widely available to them, both in terms of the scale of the atrocities and the responsibility for the massacre. Their motives in writing a white-wash report for the Guinean authorities have to be questioned.”

What were Crane and White thinking?  Were they trying to cozy up to the junta with an ultimate goal of transforming the regime?  Or were they just in this for the money?