Transitional Justice Forum

Peace and justice, Northern Uganda

Posted by Helena Cobban at 14:06 | TrackBack

Janet Anderson of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting published a well researched piece recently on issues surrounding the ICC's indictments of five leaders of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in Northern Uganda. (She even quoted something that our own Jonathan Edelstein posted here earlier this month!)

Back on June 1, the office of ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo had raised the stakes in Northern Uganda by getting Interpol to issue worldwide "Red Notices" for the arrest of the five indictees.

Anderson noted that LRA forces were believed to have abducted some 25,000 children to become fighters or sex slaves and that at the ICC LRA leader Joseph Kony now faces 33 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

She added:

For human rights groups which have long tracked the misery caused by LRA activity in northern Uganda – where nearly two million people have been displaced from their homes and are reliant on food handouts – the more Kony is isolated, the better.

"They go from being individuals associated with evil acts to becoming indicted war criminals" said Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch's International Justice Programme. "This isolates and undercuts their support."

... But there are other voices calling for Kony to be given one last chance.

In the video footage filmed on May 2, the LRA chief - seen for the first time in many years - launched a bid to negotiate a peace deal. Also appearing on the tape shot near the border between southwestern Sudan and the north-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC, was Riek Machar, the vice-president of southern Sudan’s autonomous government, who offered to broker talks between the Ugandan government and the rebels.

In the video, Kony said, "The LRA is ready to talk peace and end the war in a good way, not by force. We are fighting for peace and I am not a terrorist."

On June 14, IRIN reported from Kampala that two days earlier, coalitions of church-based bodies from both Uganda and Sudan, urged the government of Uganda

to embrace the initiative by Salva Kiir, first vice-president of Sudan, to mediate in the northern Uganda conflict.

In a joint statement issued on Monday, the churches called upon the leadership of the LRA to take advantage of the forum offered by the government of southern Sudan to seek a negotiated solution to the conflict. The councils urged the African Union to offer diplomatic and other support to the southern government to enable it to successfully accomplish its mediation role. "We appeal to the international community to support the mediation effort by the government of southern Sudan," they said.

As Anderson noted in her article:

The Kony case presents the ICC with one of its toughest challenges to date, as it must weigh the merits of seeking accountability for chronic human rights abuses against the broader, and somewhat different, goal of ending the conflict that has given rise to these abuses.

Well, Uganda is certainly-- and quite appropriately-- in the news these days. The July-August issue of the Washington DC-based magazine Foreign Policy has a poignant article by Olara Otunnu, who from 1997 through 2005 was the UN Secretary-General's Special representative for children and armed conflict, in which he urged readers to understand the full political dimensions of the suffering of the people of northern Uganda. The piece is thought-provokingly titled "The Secret Genocide". (To read the whole text, you have to subscribe to either the paper or the online edition of the mag. But the lead to the article-- and ordering info-- are available here.)

And just in case you didn't understand Otunnu's genocide reference, it is clearly the Ugandan government that he is accusing of committing it. "The genocide in northern Uganda is a burning test for the United Nations' declaration on the "Responsibility to Protect"," he writes. And at the end of the piece, this:

The LRA is frightening, but northern Uganda's people have more to fear from their own government. It's time the world understood that.

He also writes,

For more than a decade, government forces have kept a population of almost 2 million (from the Acholi, Lango, and Teso regions) in some 200 concentration camps, where they face squalor, disease, starvation, and death...

In March, a survey by a consortium of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) reported that the death rates in the concentration camps are three times those of Darfur.

(I received independent confirmation of that order of magnitude in talks I had with humanitarian aid officials in New York last week.)

So it is not surprising at all that some people should consider what is going on in northern Uganda is "gemocide"... Though in this case as in that of Darfur I am still not sure how helpful it is to peacemaking efforts to affix this particular label to the gross rights abuses that are being perpetrated.

What does seem clear to me, though, is that both the major parties to the armed conflict in northern Uganda have been committing rights abuses serious enough that they qualify as some form of "atrocity"-- whether these are war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide. And I agree with what Jonathan wrote earlier, and was quoted as having written:

Prosecuting five militia commanders, despite their atrocities, is trivial in comparison to ending a war that affects millions of people, and the ICC should follow the lead of the peacemakers rather than trying to override their efforts.

But there is also another important issue that arises concerning the direction and broad effects of the Prosecutor's work. Since there does seem to be much prima facie evidence that both sides to the conflict have committed atrocities, it seems a great pity that Ocampo has issued indictments and arrest warrants against members of only one side.

For those who hoped that the creation of the ICC would strengthen the hand of non-governmental groups against governments that are abusive, this must surely come as a disappointment. You could argue that it is just a case of Ocampo "bowing to reality"-- that he presumably understands that his access to the "scenes of the crimes" inside Uganda, and to most of the witnesses he needs in order to prove a case, are both controlled mainly by the Government in Kampala. Indeed, it was the government that "referred" the case to him in the first place. So he might realize it would be very hard indeed to mount any kind of a case if he should displease Kampala at this point... After all, we have seen over at the UN's ad-hoc court for Rwanda, how adept the government of Rwanda proved to be in withholding vital witnesses and other forms of cooperation whenever it looked as if Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte was about to indict some pro-government people... And then, poof!, suddenly she wasn't Chief Prosecutor for Rwanda any more, after Kigali was able to persuade its allies to block the renewal of her term...

It is indeed hard, given the current, very heavily state-weighted structure of the UN and of the sovereignty-based international system as a whole, to see how governments and non-governmental groups could ever in practice be given "equality of arms" before a UN-related court, though we might all want to continue to work for such an outcome.

In the meantime, in a situation in which there continues to be great distrust between Kampala and most of the people of northern Uganda, the one-sided nature of the ICC's indictments may well prove to be yet another reason for the northern Ugandans to be wary of the court's proceedings.