12
operations to be investigated by the civil police"37. The Moiwana massacre was State-planned,
State-calculated and State-executed: it was a crime of State. As I sustained in my Separate
Opinions in the cases of Myrna Mack Chang (2003) and of the Massacre of Plan de Sánchez
(Merits, 2004) before this Court, both concerning Guatemala, crimes of State do exist.
Whether international lawyers like it or not, such crimes do exist. They do not cease to exist
only because some - or most - international lawyers do not like the expression. Individual and
State responsibility co-exist, they are complementary to each other.
33.
For the first time in almost two decades, since the massacre at Moiwana village in
1986, the survivors found redress, with the present Judgment of the Inter-American Court. In
the meantime, the N'djukas did not, and could not, forget their innocent and defenceless
beloved relatives, murdered in cold blood. And they will never forget them, but their suffering theirs together with their dead - has now been at least judicially recognized. Their longstanding longing for justice may now be fulfilled, so that they can rest in peace with their
beloved deceased.
V.
The Illusion of the "Post-Modern" and the Incorporation of Death into
Life.
34.
May I move on to my next point in the present Separate Opinion, an important lesson
to be extracted from the Moiwana Community case. Human suffering projected in time is
generally minimized or ignored in the so-called "post-modern world", - a world that cares less
and less about human suffering and death (preferring simply to minimize or ignore them), and
values more and more, to its own detriment, the ambition of materialism and accumulation of
wealth, armamentism and the use of force. The question has thus been timely asked: how can
one wake up the contemporaries, how can one convey the necessity of spirituality?38 The
International Law of Human Rights has attempted to do so, has done its best, but appears
nowadays to be under fire and hostility, on the part of those engaged in its deconstruction, the
usual heralds of the use of force and the accumulation of material wealth.
35.
Yet, the usual blindness of power-holders as to human values has not succeeded - and
will never succeed - in avoiding human thinking to dwell upon the conception of human
mortality, to reflect on the enigmas of existence and death. In the fragments of his play
Faustus - Subjective Tragedy, inspired by Goethe's masterpiece, the universal writer Fernando
Pessoa remarked, in the early XXth century, precisely on the mystery surrounding life and
death:
"Silente, medonho,
Embebido em sonho
Sombrio e profundo
É o mistério do mundo.
Quero fugir ao mistério
Para onde fugirei?
Ele é a vida e a morte
. Paragraph 86(27).
37
. E. Kübler-Ross, La Rueda de la Vida, 2nd. ed., Madrid, Ed. BSA, 2000, p. 385.
38
Select target paragraph3
Connect to a paragraph
Connect to an entity
Disable highlights
Add to table of contents