Lock them up in a public cage

Legal principles have meant nothing to them, and yet it has been their responsibility to administer the law. Joseph Stalin was one, Gadhafi and Assad are two more.

The pain, the suffering, the anguish that creatures such as these have wrought on so many surely puts them above, or out of, the realm of safety, that the principles of an evolving international law provide. By "many" I don't refer only to their thousands (millions) of victims but to all the people that their indescribably cruel and enormous crimes have touched. What have they given to the countries that they, personally, have raped and pillaged for so long? Nothing but more of the same.

Surely the latter two (mercifully Stalin is dead) are not entitled to the protections that modern, civilised law provides. Let us hope that the well-meaning rebels do not give them the easy exit that they do not deserve - a bullet in the brain. Let us hope that they are captured alive and imprisoned.

The death penalty, and regimes of torture, demean the people who inflict them. To lock them away for the term of their natural lives is a superior course, but it does little for those who have suffered on their account.

Would it be inhumane or cruel simply to imprison them publicly? Let them spend the rest of their lives in a public cage, well fed and with a controlled benign environment, by all means. But let the people they have abused come and look at them, confined in a small room for the rest of their lives. It might even raise some tourist dollars to compensate for those that they stole. I for one would go to Libya, purely on the prospect of seeing Gadhafi in a cage. My pleasure would be small in comparison to that of his victims.

George Cuppaidge

Hua Hin