IT’S THREE O’CLOCK in the morning. Every time I reread Josué’s testimony, I cry. I don’t even have a picture of him. I don’t know if he’s big or little, skinny or well built, but I love him. I’d like to listen to his tape. At the trial, they won’t reveal even his first name. Only how old he was at the time of the events. He will never have his moment of truth out in the open. We have to protect the witnesses, it’s an obsession here. There are maybe a dozen of us at the Court who know his first name. At least Josué will be able to look Kabanga in the eye—it won’t be easy for a victim to do that—and say, “You stole my life from me, Mr. Kabanga. I was a child, and now I’m not anything at all.” No, that’s not what he’ll say, and if he did, the defense would object and the judges would sustain. Stealing a childhood is not a crime. Josué won’t understand why he can’t just tell the truth the way he saw it, the plain truth. He won’t understand either why Kabanga is as well dressed as ever, while he’s dressed like a Bunia cigarette vendor, just a little better than the others, maybe. He’ll wonder about all this palaver and putting on airs and why White men in suits are questioning him as if he were the criminal. Poor children, whom we will subject to the torture of the law and not the liberation of justice.
I’m getting carried away and I know it. I am departing from my methodical, rational approach. How do you reconcile the search for truth with legalities? It is the first time I’ve asked myself that question, the first time I think that statutes and procedures and legal guidelines don’t guarantee the administration of justice. What if law were only an intellectual exercise with no relation to what is just, decent, and self-evident? Kabanga is guilty. Hundreds of thousands of people experienced his guilt in their flesh. Why do we have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, like in an ordinary murderer’s trial? And whose reasonable doubt—that of thousands of victims, or of three cold-eyed, distant judges who have never set foot in Ituri?