Guards, Part III:"The Trial"

The warlord's heart sank as he did as he was told, dropping to both knees on the hard-packed earth. A flood of questions poured through his mind: who were these people? Agents of the UN, an armed NGO, that was unheard of! Entering the country and getting past all of bureaucracy and corruption and then proceeding to train helpless villagers how to fight and defend themselves against his militia, impossible! Foreigners in these parts only ever engaged in useless aid efforts for the peasants or contacted his militia if they wanted to take part in illegal diamond trades – so what was this all about? How could he have become so helpless?
The two black-clad strangers, dressed almost identically, now stood on either side of him as the villagers gathered around. Even the women and children began to appear, some of the women, like the strange black-clad woman, with guns in their hands. Women with guns?! To Rambo’s mind this too seemed impossible and yet here it was.

 His mind was reeling as the man addressed the villagers, a fiery passion evident in his otherwise calm voice: “Citizens, the warlord who has oppressed you for so long, now kneels powerless before you – he is in your hands – now justice can be done!” The villagers roared their approval.

Rambo now noticed that the woman did in fact wear a different badge than the man: a badge on her left shoulder showing a black weigh scale on a red background: The scales of justice. She stepped forward and addressed the assembled villagers, “A Judicator is presiding – citizens, name this man’s crimes against you.”
The villagers spoke, one after the other, men and women alike recounting Rambo’s crimes against the village and other villagers in the area: rape victims, women and men whose families had been murdered by his militia, people who had been burnt out of their homes, men who had been tortured, and the parents of abducted children, on and on the testimony went, sometime calm, sometimes tearful, until Rambo thought that he would go mad. Evidence was presented, not only testimony, but pictures, drawings, fragments of human bodies – it was as though the villagers had preparing this for years...