The Sixth Station (6 page)

“Let us then be guided to find the truth so that justice, not the mindless will of the mob, will prevail.”

She then looked directly at the accused. “This tribunal will now arraign the defendant, Demiel ben Yusef. Mr. ben Yusef, are you represented by counsel before this tribunal?”

Ben Yusef neither answered nor looked up, which prompted Bagayoko to ask again, “Mr. ben Yusef, are you represented by counsel?”

When again he did not acknowledge her or the court, she asked rhetorically, “Perhaps you need an interpreter, Mr. ben Yusef?”

One of the attorneys assigned by the International Criminal Court to represent ben Yusef, Randall Mohammed of Amnesty International, stood. “Your Honor, if I may speak for my client, Mr. Demiel ben Yusef? My name is Randall Mohammed, and I, along with my co-counsel, Ms. Johanna Edmonds, am representing Mr. ben Yusef.”

He was dressed to the nines in a bespoke suit, with a red-striped tie and foppish matching pocket handkerchief.

“Mr. Mohammed,” snapped the judge, her Mali accent beginning to surface, “does Mr. ben Yusef need an interpreter? And if he can’t answer for himself, then I will assume that he does not speak English.” She knew full well, as we all did, that the defendant was in fact fluent in English and perhaps as many as eight other languages.

“Well, ah, no, Your Honor, the defendant can in fact speak English—” Mohammed said, before the chief judge again cut him off.

“Perhaps
you
need an interpreter then, Mr. Mohammed, because if he understands, then your client,
not
you, is instructed to answer the question.” She bored her eyes directly into the defendant sitting calmly in his cheap suit, not displaying pride, shame, or even any indication that he was present in mind or spirit.

“Mr. ben Yusef, once more I’ll ask you: Do you need an interpreter?”

Again, ben Yusef neither acknowledged the judge nor his counselors, who were beginning to look distressed even though the tribunal had yet to get under way. Johanna Edmonds, second-chair attorney from South Africa, a slim Caucasian woman, hair pulled back in a conservative bun, wearing an understated blue suit, stood.

“On behalf of our client, we state to the court that there is no authority in this tribunal to pass judgment on our client.”

“Noted,” Bagayoko answered. “Regardless of what you or your client thinks, this tribunal will proceed as scheduled.”

Edmonds then sat back down and whispered in her client’s ear. Ben Yusef picked up the pad and pen in front of him and wrote something down, which he handed to her.

She stood again.

Edmonds asked, “May I approach the bench, Your Honor?”

“Yes, you may, counselor.”

“A plea? This early?” Dona suggested.

Edmonds walked across the platform and handed the judge a piece of paper, which she looked at briefly, clearly confused. “What is this?” Bagayoko asked, holding the paper in her hand like she’d been handed a used tissue.

“It’s a note given to me by my client, Your Honor,” Edmonds answered.

On the note, which was later reprinted and released to the media, was written:
.

“I can see where this is headed.…” Judge Bagayoko said sotto voce, turning the note upside down and around, clearly annoyed that the terrorist had already gotten one up on her. She put on reading glasses and then said, exasperated, “What language is this exactly?”

Edmonds answered, “I believe it is Aramaic, Judge.”

“Oh, I see. Is there a United Nations translator of Aramaic present in the courtroom?” When no one stood, she then asked, “Is there any spectator present that can interpret Aramaic?” A man in a white galabia (robe) and red-and-white-checked keffiyeh draped around his head stood up while everyone in the entire room craned their necks, shocked.

Bagayoko stared at him a second before saying, “What is your name, sir?”

“Mahmoud Haniyah, Your Honor.” The senior representative of Hamas! “I speak all forms of Aramaic.”

“Then please step forward, Mr. Haniyah.” The courtroom was abuzz. A terrorist using a terrorist as an interpreter? Fantastic!

A court officer took the paper from the chief judge and handed it to the representative of Hamas, who looked at it and then said loud enough for most of us to hear, “Your Honor, it is Aramaic; I believe it is Herodian, as used in the time of Jesus Christ. It says:
. This means, ‘I answer only to my father,’ or it can be interpreted as ‘He answered to my father,’ or both.”

“Both?” Bagayoko asked, removing her glasses.

“Your Honor, it is much the same way that the English word
read
can be both present or past depending on the context.”

The courtroom was absolutely silent. Everyone was thinking the same racist thing: a terrorist who speaks ancient Aramaic and modern English? How many of us can do that?

“Thank you, sir. I appreciate that. You may return to your seat,” which the Palestinian did with a pleased expression on his face.

Then the chief judge addressed ben Yusef directly. “Your father, according to FBI documents, was named—” At this she keyed something into the built-in tablet in her bench and continued. “Yes, one Yusef Pantera, who was listed as a soldier of fortune. Killed in a plane crash in 1982.”

With controlled anger in her tone, she added, “Mister ben Yusef. It is your right not to answer, but that is the last time you will interrupt these proceedings with your manipulations.”

She asked him to stand, and when he refused, his lawyers on either side of him took hold of his elbows and gently persuaded him up, and then the chief judge began to read the Crimes against Humanity charges for which he stood accused.

They included twenty counts of conspiracy to commit murder, fifty counts of terrorism, one thousand counts of murder in violation of the law of war, attacking civilians and civilian objects, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, destruction of property in violation of the law of war, and providing material support for terrorism. The death count she estimated at “tens of thousands.”

“How do you plead, Mr. ben Yusef?” Silence.

Randall Mohammed stood. “Once more, Your Honor, on behalf of our client, we state to the court that there is no authority in this tribunal to pass judgment on our client.”

“Then let us proceed with or without your client’s consent,” and she called on the prosecution to give their opening statement.

The prosecution was represented by an international band of attorneys under the ICC banner but newly appointed for this tribunal.

“It’s the dream team of media whores,” I whispered to Dona, taking in the group who would have practically skinned themselves alive for a chance at this much exposure.

The lead prosecutor, Lawrence Finegold from Great Britain, gave as expected a rousing opening statement, which was capped by him holding up photos of each bombing for which ben Yusef stood accused.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the monster before you, Mr. Demiel ben Yusef,” he thundered as he held up photo after photo of carnage and heartache, “isn’t a man of the cloth. He is nothing but a psychopathic killer who claims”—he sneered in disgust at the defendant, who still hadn’t moved a muscle or shown any emotion whatsoever—“
claims
to be, yes, a man of
God
!

“A devil claiming to be a man of God, or maybe God Himself.” He laughed disgustedly. “Caligula claimed to be a god; Hitler thought he was a god, too. Shall I go on?

“Demiel ben Yusef is no god, nor even a man of God, despite his claims to some sort of dubious connection to early Christianity! This is enough to make any God-fearing Christian sick with disgust!

“Yet this mass murderer, who is responsible for every death, dismemberment, and ruined life you see before you, claims he’s doing”—again he paused and then pointed his finger directly at ben Yusef—“God’s work. God’s work?

“He of the shadowy life, who seems to have no history before he suddenly appeared a few years ago, on Web sites and, yes, YouTube. YouTube! If Jesus, Moses, Mohammed walked among us today, I promise you they wouldn’t be making videos on
YouTube
!”

The audience broke out in inappropriate chuckles as Dona and I exchanged knowing glances. “Damn, he’s playing us like a bunch of cheap fiddlers,” she whispered.

Finegold waited until the snickers stopped before continuing as though he’d never heard the snickering. “Now his latest ploy is to say he answers only to his
father
? Who
is
the father of Satan, or for that matter, the mother? We have some loose information that Mr. ben Yusef
once
had a father who died in a plane crash. And there is
no mother of record
. Astonishing, really, in this day and age when it is impossible to keep anything hidden. Yet this, this man just appeared and
has no history
?

“How is that possible? I’ll tell you how: Demiel ben Yusef has no history of record because intelligence leads us to believe that his birth, his schooling, his very life have never been recorded because he was born and reared to become an enigma—a way to make the deluded
believe
he somehow miraculously just appeared out of nowhere to save us all!

“Well, the truth is he is a thirty-three-year-old man reared by parents, or perhaps by others who took him in, inside a terrorist camp
,
somewhere, probably Afghanistan. Nothing glorious or mysterious about that, is there?

“So who could have even birthed such a soulless creature? We don’t know; that’s how terrorists operate, in back corners and filthy desert hovels. But I
can
tell you this: Whoever his parents are or were, they weren’t people of God. The devil, perhaps, but not God!”

At that the Reverend Bill Teddy Smythe pounded his fist and declared, “Amen, brother! Amen!” He did this knowing it would create a commotion and knowing that the judge would admonish him. But the good preacher didn’t get to where he was by missing his moment. Ever.

Bagayoko rapped her gavel, while Bill Teddy smugly looked unfazed and even quite righteous—or quite self-righteous, at any rate.

Finegold let the furor die down and continued as though he’d not been interrupted. “Again, no one seems to know precisely the who, what, where, and, for the love of God,
why.

“What we know is that Demiel ben Yusef suddenly appeared out of the desert four years ago, with dubious claims and clichéd sermons about how we should all love one another, while masterminding terrorist attacks around the world. We know this, and we will prove this beyond any doubt—to this august body.

“Nonetheless, via cyberspace he has, as you’ve seen outside this hallowed assembly hall this very day, amassed a worldwide following of deluded believers.

“Why, you may ask, could,
would
anyone follow a man who preaches ‘love of every living thing’ and yet carries out a personal jihad against the innocent whom he thinks deserve death because they are not ‘true believers’?

“Believers of what? Of the endless suffering and death of the innocents? Are the thousands of children and adults who have been killed and maimed merely the detritus of war? What war? Demiel ben Yusef’s personal holy war?

“Why indeed would anyone call this monster a man of God?” He finished and held aloft a horrifying photo of a mother and dead child lying on the once-grand steps outside the Matriz Church in Manaus, Brazil, a city at the tip of the Amazon.

The photo showed the woman covered in the blood of her child, screaming while holding her dead five-year-old, whose legs had been blown off. They lay amid the rubble of the bombed-out steps, after an explosion that took the lives of 350 churchgoers that Sunday morning, including 120 Sunday-school kids.

He then turned to the judges and addressed them.

“Judge Bagayoko, assembled justices, if I may, I would like to bring in some of the children who will be called before this assembly.”

Since everyone in or near the courtroom had been cleared well ahead of time, the gesture was a mere courtesy. The dramatic move had most likely been approved beforehand by Bagayoko, who quickly consented and gestured for the chamber doors to open.