There is an expression that goes: “Justice is like a hot dog.  If you love it, you shouldn’t watch how it is made.”

No one understands peace better than those who have had it wrongfully stripped from them in the name of justice. 

In 2005, my friend Ben was walking alongside a river path in his neighborhood of Sekei (Arusha, Tanzania).  Little did he know that the choice to walk this way into town would almost cost him his life.

Earlier in the week two thieves had robbed someone’s home in the nearby neighborhood of Kijenge, and at the time Ben was walking along the river, the thieves were now being chased by several men who decided to take the law into their own hands and punish them for it.  Community mobs to punish thieves are common and extremely violent here.  As one of the thieves ran away alongside the river near my friend Ben, the angry punishers assumed that Ben was the second thief.

They broke both legs of the first thief and then shoved a screw driver into his head, eventually killing him.  No one was there to speak for Ben’s innocence.  They beat Ben profusely and then dragged him into a car where he was taken to their neighborhood and doused with kerosene to be burned alive in front of everyone.  Luckily, someone recognized Ben and called his family who begged the police to intervene immediately.  The police stopped the mob just before Ben would have been murdered, but Ben’s life has never been the same. 

He was detained by the police for questioning for several days until they found the real thief, but he still had to pay the police $300 (his entire life savings) to get out.  Harsh blows to the head meant that Ben needed expensive hospital care for two months and couldn’t work for over a year.  His bag had been taken by the mob, so long gone were his salary paid the day before, identification documents for working or voting, newly gifted weather gauge he was hoping to use with his clients that he guides on safari and so many more valuable things to him.  The police told him that if he paid them enough, they would go find his stolen belongings, but Ben had no money left.  For months, Ben didn’t want to leave his house; he stopped playing the drums and singing at church even though it used to be the center of joy in his life. 

When Ben and I began to talk about this, his words burned in my head like fire:  “I hated my country.  I just wanted my liberty.  I just wanted justice.  I had to pay to be released even though I was innocent and they found the real thief.  They even wanted me to pay more to get my bag back.  I was left with nothing.”

Some of Ben’s friends urged him to get revenge on the men who did this to him, but Ben refused.  Experiencing such violence, Ben has since become especially sensitive to conflict and has found a deep understanding of the value of peace.  “When I see people corralling or someone begins to argue, I just try to calm everyone down and I don’t get upset because I know peace.”  He told me how he prayed for a thief he saw getting taken away by the police after being beaten in the street for stealing a mobile phone.  Ben is only 27 years old and was working hard to create a long happy future ahead of him.  With the challenges of AIDS, malaria and poverty so extreme here in East Africa, people like Ben should not be forced to look into the face death at the hands of their neighbors.

Strong well-functioning justice systems prevent community mobs from taking the law into their own hands and wrongfully killing or torturing people like Ben, you or me.  Ben and I spoke about how things might have been different if only the police and courts did the job they were supposed to and people believed in them.  We also talked about Karen Tse, who I learned about at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship last month.  Karen leads International Bridges to Justice, which is dedicated to every person having effective defense council.  Her work means that people are less likely to be tortured and wrongfully sentenced in Cambodia.  She went out and trained public defenders, conducted rights campaigns in prisons, helped build some of Cambodia’s first arraignment courts and made manuals to inform judges on how the law is ‘supposed’ to work. 

So I agree that justice is like a hot dog in that even when it’s not being imposed by a community mob, there are parts of it that we would be horrified to know were inside the formal systems of many countries.  Corrupt police and court systems are often rooted in the systemic failures sparked by poverty and politics.

While I knew of Karen Tse’s work, I hadn’t really valued it at a gut level like I do now having heard Ben’s story.  It was nice to be able to talk with Ben about how people around the world do care about justice and how they are taking action towards ensuring it is granted to the deserving- everyone.
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