Transitional Justice Forum

Uganda's challenge to the ICC

What follows is a long post, that contains much material from the research trip I made to The Hague and Uganda in late July 2006.  The following links to different portions of it can only be used if you're looking at the archived version, not the "front page" of the blog.  

After an introductory section the post addresses the following: a brief decsription of the dimensions of the anti-humane crisis in northern Uganda;  the main points gleaned from a short focus-group discussion I held in an IDP camp near Gulu; my interview with ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo; a reflection on the effects of the work of the ICC and the ad-hoc tribunals; how Ugandans have been pursuing a way forward ; and some additional points.

In addition, you can read two columns I published in The Christian Science Monitor in mid-August about the situation in northern Uganda and the dilemmas it causes for the ICC: here and here.  You can read early, unedited field-notes from my time in Uganda, as posted on my personal blog Justworldnews.org, here , here , and here . And you can access the other valuable resources TJF has on Uganda, here.

Uganda may or may not now have a ceasefire in the long-running conflict between government forces and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).  The Kampala Daily Monitor indicated in an August 25 story  that the ceasefire was just about to go into effect.  The BBC's story that day was a bit more reserved...  But it does seem that some kind of significant watershed re the cessation of hostilities has been reached at the peace talks the Kampala government has been conducting with the LRA since mid-July in Juba, South Sudan.

This situation is extremely important to the future of transitional justice since it forms a large portion of the first workplan of the infant International Criminal Court.  No fewer than five of the first six arrest warrants issued by ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo have been against leaders of the LRA.  (The sixth is against a leader of an anti-government armed group in the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC: He fell into the ICC's hands as a "target of opportunity" when the DRC government handed him over to Ocampo earlier this year.)  

One consequence of the arrest warrants that the ICC issued against LRA leader Joseph Kony and his four colleagues (one of whom was reportedly killed in a firefight in mid-August) was that from that point on it became technically illegal for any government party to the ICC to engage in negotiations with them.  States party to the ICC, as Uganda is, were thenceforth supposed merely to arrest the indictees.  

However, that did not stop the President of the Government of South Sudan , Dr. Riek Machar, from inviting Kony and the government to send representatives to peace talks in the GOSS's capital, Juba.  (Sudan is not a party to the ICC, though Ocampo thought he had won a special commitment from the Sudanese government in Khartoum that they would cooperate in the arrest of the LRA leaders. The GOSS is not, actually, a sovereign government but is supposed to be subordinate to Khartoum.  However, in its pursuit of this peace process it seems to be acting very much like a soveriegn government, and Khartoum has shown no inclination whatsoever to try to stop this initiative.)

Nor the did the fact of the ICC having issued arrest warrants against the LRA leaders stop the Ugandan government, led by President Yuweri Museveni, from sending his representatives to take part in the Juba peace talks.  Museveni explicitly offered an amnesty to Kony and his colleagues if they should come back home to Uganda and live in peace; and he even reportedly told them that if they did so his government "would fight tooth and nail" to protect them. He and his government ministers have repeatedly talked about their desire in the peace talks as being to "give Kony a soft landing" in Uganda.

For their parts, Kony and his fellow-indictees have so far not taken part in the Juba talks directly.  They have remained holed up in a barely accessible portion of the rain forest along the South Sudan-DRC border, most likely in the DRC's Garamba National Park, and have sent only lower-ranking emissaries-- mainly members of their networks of supporters amongst the worldwide Acholi diaspora-- to the talks in Juba.

The northern Ugandan situation thus represents an acute and real-time "case" of the conflict between the demands of peacemaking in and for northern Uganda and the demands of the ICC (which preclude amnesty.)  Given that one of the major themes of my upcoming book Amnesty After Atrocity?: Healing Nations After Genocide and War Crimes is precisely whether amnesty offers should be offered as part of negotiations that end atrocity-laden conflict, in late July I traveled to The Hague and Uganda to learn as much as I could about what has been going on. ⁽¹⁾   In The Hague, I was able to interview ICC prosecutor Ocampo.  In Uganda I intervierwed a number of heads and officials of NGOs in Kampala and Gulus, two significant ethnic-Acholi politicians, the Anglican Bishop of Northern Uganda, and spokesmen for the army and the government's Amnesty Commission.  (I had also previously interviewed Uganda's ambassador to the UN, in New York.). While in Gulu District, I had a discussion on current issues with a group of ten community leaders in the Unyama IDP camp...

-----

Let us recall  here that UN humanitarian affairs chief  Jan Egeland some months ago described the humanitarian situation of the 1.7 million Ugandan citizens currently confined to "IDP camps" in the north of the country as being worse than that in Darfur. (Some dimensions of the often lethal situation in the camps are described here. )  Another possible way to describe the nature of those camps-- given that back in 1996 the government relocated some 90% of the residents of some northern areas off their own lands and into the camps by force-- would be to call them "strategic hamlets."  The majority of the people thus forcibly relocated back in 1996 are still not allowed to return to their hones and farms.

In addition to the bad effects of this forced villageization, the peoples of northern Uganda (mainly Acholi, but also Lango and Teso peoples) have been subjected to more "spectacularly" atrocious violence from the LRA, including killings, mutilations, rapes, and-- most painful of all for many North Ugandans-- the widespread abductions of young people and their violent induction into the LRA's ranks as fighters or sex-slaves.  They have also been exposed to rapes, torture, and other abuses from members of the Ugandan armed forces.  Human Rights Watch's round-up of gross abuses committed against noncombatants by both the LRA and the government forces during 2005 can be found here.  (Note that that summary does not include any mention of the government's continued maintenance of the forced villageization system, which was almost certainly the one single policy that inflicted the greatest number of-- otherwise avoidable-- deaths on northern Ugandans. Moreover, the camps haven't even reliably provided the protection against continued LRA depradations that the government had promised to their residents/detainnes. Indeed, James Otto, the head of the Gulu-based NGO Human Rights Focus, said that the camps had often offered the LRA a "one-stop shopping" opportunity whereby in a single raid on an IDP camp they could abduct a whole group of children together...)

Be that as it may, evidently the peoples of northern Uganda have suffered quite enough during the 20-year civil war in which their region has been mired.  Fortunately for them, however, they have a number of effective civil-society organizations, both religious and secular, and have also built up an apparently sturdy presence within Uganda's still-democratizing national political system. In recent years leaders from within, in particular, the Acholi community have come to form a solid and consistent bloc arguing for the importance of peacemaking as the key to ending the atrocities their people have suffered.  Many of the Acholi people I interviewed in July spoke of the particular pain of the situation they have been in:  Their community has borne the brunt of both the LRA's violence and the government's counter-violence-- but at the same time, they still  consider themselves to be loyal members of the national political community, while they also look at Kony and his followers as errant members of their own ethnic community.  (Indeed, a high proportion of the LRA fighters started out their time in the organization as abducted and forcibly impressed children.)  So the Acholis have felt badly caught in the middle of all the violence that has swirled around them.

Dr. Morris Ogenga-Latigo, the (Acholi) leader of the national parliamentary opposition, reflected the complexity of the situation the Acholis have found themselves in when he described a very troubling spate of violence that erupted in 2001-2001. He told me, "There were so many atrocities by the LRA then, especially in Pader District-- that was when they even took some people, including children, and cut them up and cooked them!  And the publicity about this put so much pressure on the government, that they decided from then on that they would probably need a political strategy to complement the military campaign they were waging, which was called Operation Iron Fist... You see, the government had told us they had solved the problem of the LRA.  But evidently they had not.  And they seemed incapable of assuring the security of the people."

I then asked Latigo what the main emotional response of Acholi  had been on hearing the news of those atrocities.  Had they felt anger, or fear, or what? "When we hear of such atrocities, our main feeling is one of resignation," he said.  "We ask, 'Why is God sending us this fate?'  It is no longer useful for us to get angry with either the government or the LRA."  (You can read a longer-- though still not well edited-- account of that interview here. )

Nearly all of the Acholi people with whom I talked said that in their view, the most important thing to do in order to end the war was to get Joseph Kony and his colleagues 'out of the bush', and reintegrate them into civilian Acholi society.  They saw this is the best guarantee they could have that the LRA's violence, or violence from a successor group very similar to it, would not re-erupt in the future.  

---------------------

I had a very informative discussion on this point, and on the effect the ICC's prosecutions have been having on the peace process, during the focus-group discussion I had with camp leaders in Unyama camp (population 20,400), on July 27, 2006. Camp leader Odoki Raymond Ladaka and his assistant Harry Okello kindly convened this group for me, immediately after I met them at the entrance to the camp.   My journalistic colleague Arthur Owor had come with me to help with my enquiries in the camp.  He had helped describe to Mr. Odoki the kind of group we wanted to meet with, and during the discussion he ended up interpeting all the proceedings between Luo and English.  Although the group participants all seemed fluent and easily comprehensible in English they said they felt more comfortable expressing themselves in Luo; and from my part,  having the interpretation going on gave me more time to be fully present with them and listen to them respectfully while I was also able to take my own notes in the interstices.  (I generally hate to use recording devices in my work as in my experience they very frequently squelch the free expression of views.)

In a small amount of time Mr. Odoki and Mr. Okello had gathered together seven other adult members of the camp community-- most of them "influential" persons within the community, though one was described simply as a "peasant farmer" and another as a "housewife."  We all sat in a circle on the rough grass under a thorn tree in an open space between the tight-packed mud huts used as shelters by the camp's population and the smaller circle of (less densely packed) huts where the government soldiers slept.  We were joined in the circle by Robert, a 35-year-old taxi-driver and resident of Gulu Town, who had driven us to Unyama, and later by another influential member of the camp community.  At that point, Mr. Owor and I were seeking and recording the views of eleven persons, ten of them camp residents, of whom five were women and five were men.

During the discussion the driver, Robert, and Florence, the deputy leader of one of the "zones" in the camp, both spoke in favor of the ICC indictments and arrest warrants.  Everyone else spoke against them.  I found it heartening that these people felt able to express a variety of opinions in a large group, and that they listened very respectfully to each other as they talked.  I also found the balance of opinion there--with just two of the 11 participating in the discussion voicing support for the ICC-- fairly notable.  

Here are some of the comments I recorded:

I first asked how my hosts here, and my new friends, looked at the work of the ICC and its effect on the peace process.

Dep. Camp Leader Harry Okello:  The ICC should be suspended, to give peace talks a chance.  because if the prosecutions proceed, Kony won't ever come out of the bush.

Camp Defense Secretary Kito:  The ICC is looking only at the commanders.  But what about the other LRA fighters?  They would just spread out if the arrests proceed, and make more problems everywhere.

Driver Robert:  If you arrest Kony, though, it would be like doing away with the head of the household and it would be good because it would end the problem.

Vice Zone-leader Florence:  What mechanism does the ICC have to arrest Kony?  I hope it works.  I compare it to the situation of a hen and its chicks.  If you do away with the hen, the chicks will scatter.  That's good.

Camp Women's Chair Margaret: The ICC is not delivering the peace we need.  It will take a long time to do its work, anyway.  So meantime we should pursue peace.

Camp Leader Raymond Odoki:  I consider that the war here has become a kind of business.  But if the ICC arrests  its indictees then the backlash would come against the people.  We should make peace.  Look at the example of Sudan:  President Bashir sat down with Garang, and it was good.  We should avoid careless statements of the kind that President Museveni sometimes makes-- but he is also given false reports about what's happening by people who don't directly feel the pain of the conflict, as we do.

Housewife Wiliberti:  The arrest warrants won't work.  I see no way to end the conflict through issuing arrest warrants.  Therefore we should concentrate on making the peace talks work.

'Mobilizer' Dennis: The arrest warrants should be revoked so Kony and the other commanders can themselves come to the negotiating table.

Kito:  The UN is the biggest world body.  Why is the UN reluctant to go and fight Kony in Garamba?  [Note:  If this comment was correctly recorded, then it seemed to represent two views that I heard with some frequency in Gulu: first, a general misunderstanding of the ICC as being somehow a part of the UN, and of the UN as having impressive but suspiciously under-utilized policing and coercive capabilities; and second, a view that the 'international community' in general was involved in conspiracies to perpetuate northern Uganda's already lengthy civil war. See below: Ester.]

'Councillor' Catherine ( also, the Chairperson of her Sub-County, before she was relocated here):  I agree with what Dennis said.

... Peasant Farmer Angelo:  Why doesn't the ICC speed up its process and be done by August so we can can all back to our lands for the new planting season?

I asked what kind of a reception they expected Kony to get if he should come back to the Acholi area, Odek, that was his homeplace.  Our hosts had a short discussion among themselves, which Mr. Owor then described to me as expressing a consensus view that "He should just come back to Odek and people would accept him."  However, Florence threw into the discussion the additional idea that he should come back and be absorbed into the national army.  (Not as crazy as it seems if you remember what happened with the Renamo forces after the Mozambique ceasefire, or the ANC forces after democratization in South Africa.  However, I failed to explore further with Florence whether she thought this path would prove to be a punishment of sorts for Kony or would be valuable because it would at least offer him a livelihood.)

I asked a general question about what should be done:

Harry Okello:  If the peace talks fail, then the governments of Sudan and the DRC should let theUgandan army go and get Kony.

Camp Women's Vice-chair Ester: The UN is the biggest world body.  Why is the UN not arresting Kony?  ... I believe the ICC is reluctant to arrest Kony themselves because they're all in business together.

Kito: The ICC should make an agreement with Kony that he could come out of the bush.  And both sides should keepo their contract.  

I asked how the war had most affected them:

Harry Okello: We lost nearly all our livestock and so many valuable trees.  These were the sources of our livelihood.  We've lost our education system.

Raymond Odoki:  HIV and AIDS have come into our community.

Ester: We've had such an erosion of our traditional culture.

Raymond:  It used to be that our elders would sit with the children and talk with them and pass on their traditions.  But now, no more.  The kids don't even know their ancestral homes!  There will certainly be many land disputes when we do get back to our lands.  I also want to stress the issue of food.  What we are given here in the camp is certainly not enough to feed our families.

Earlier, as Mr. Odoki and I had walked slowly through the camp, he had given me many mnore details about camp life and his family's experiences during the war.

His family's homestead was not far away, on a very green-looking hillside that was clearly visible from inside the mud-brown confines of the camp.  He had had 12 children, but had lost seven of them to villageization-related and other conflict-related problems, including the terrible access to medical care.

He said that prior to his forced relocation into the camp he had worked as a recptionist in the teacher's training college that was also located right here.  (Indeed, it seemed as if the army camp and the IDP camp had grown up around the few battered concrete buildings that were all that was now left of the college.)  

He said,

This was my third relocation during the war.  This relocation was in 1996.  Rebels had come to this general area and killed four people there [he pointed to one portion of hillside], six people there [he pointed elsewhere], and burned huts in other places.  The LRA and the army had both been very active in the region.  But at that point the government came in and gave us 48 hours to move ourselves and our families into this camp they were creating here.

Some people stayed outside the camp until 1997.  But then the army brought big, big guns to shoot at them. [He pointed to where that had happened.]  So then everyone came in.  

We had to leave behind everything that we had cultivated, and we have been here ever since.

---------

Unyama camp feels as if it is on a different planet than the sleek high-rise office building in the Hague where, just two weeks previously, I had been interviewing Luis Moreno-Ocampo.

Mr. Ocampo, an engaging, lightly-bearded Argentinian started off our hour-long interview by musing a little on his own past. As a public prosecutor he had at a young age decided aggressively to pursue criminal cases against leading organizers of the "Dirty War" that his country's military had waged against suspected leftist opponents in the 1970s.

He commented,

The working of a criminal justice system assumes a social consensus.  In an established political system, criminals are everywhere recognized as marginal people.  But that wasn't present in Argentina at that time I was doing that.  There wasn't a consensus.  Many people there still saw the junta as protecting the interests of society.  Including my mother, who was in the same church as General Videla...

Justice is not just for the victims!  I had to work hard with my mother to convince her.  But then, after two weeks of the trial there, my mother said I had been right: what they had done were indeed crimes.  That trial delegitimized the use of violence by the army in that way and underscored a basic principle of the rule of law.

Later, he noted this:

The challenge the ICC faces in its work is different from if you were sitiing in Boston or Stockholm.  There, the role of a court is to 'confirm' laws, but for us, here, it is to 'establish' laws.  And international relations have to be based on law-- including the 'duty to punish'.

He assured me that in Uganda, in addition to investigating the acts of the LRA leaders, he also had investigations underway into allegations of criminally atrocious behavior by people in the Ugandan People's defense Force (UPDF, i.e., the army).  "But it was on the basis of the much greater gravity of the offenses committed by the LRA leaders that I prosecuted them first."  

He explained that in choosing his cases, he had been guided by the two criteria of the gravity of the alleged crimes, and "complementarity", that is, whether the national jurisdictions in questions looked ready and willing to prosecute them themselves.  (The two ad-hoc UN tribunals established in the 1990s for Rwanda and former Yugoslavia were given "primacy" of jurisdiction over any desire the relevant national authorities might have had to prosecute; but in the ICC's statute, the ICC's role is defined as being "complementary to" that of national jurisdictions.)

Ocampo explained that it was on the basis of the principle of "gravity" that, over the year following his April 2003 appointment as chief prosecutor, he decided that he would launch the ICC's first actual judicial investigations into the situations in Uganda and DRC.  (Both of them are ICC member states.  The court cannot launch any investigations into "situations" within the territory of non-member states, nor any "situations" that occurred before the ICC Statute came into effect in 2002.)  He told me that in both these cases, he invited the governments to submit their respective situations to him for action, which Museveni did after a meeting the two men had in London in 2004..

He said,

In the DRC, the worst situation that occurred after 2002 was in Ituri propvince... In Uganda, nearly everyone agrees that the LRA was creating the worst situation...  With respect to the UPDF, we will still have to see whether their actions reach up to the 'gravity' threshhold.

He said he had considerable evidence "based on intercepts" that showed that Kony was discussing how to manipulate the peace process to gain advantage from it.

I asked him whether he was not concerned that perhaps, given the ability of national governments to control the ICC's access to national terrain, evidence, and witnesses (as has happened, mindeed, between ICTR and Rwanda), there wasn't a real danger that the net effect of the court's work might not be to strengthen the hand of abusive governments at the expense of non-governmental movements and actors.  He did not answer this question directly, but said, "Our goal is to end the worst crimes.  So that in ten years we can help more people in the world to have an improved situation."  (I note that asking about effects is different from asking about intent.)

I asked how, given the plethora of different kinds of information at many different levels that he would need to understand about the situations in the many farflung countries his office would be dealing with, he knew what kind of a conceptual framework he should build to best understand each situation.

He said,

We have 160 people working here, from 40 different countries.  I have sent 20 missions to Uganda.  I have talked to the Paramount Chief of the Scholi and so many other people there...

We have a particular goal, which is to prevent future crimes.  We have very good information from many, many sources-- the best in the world!  We don't care about idelogy.  We are just looking at the facts.

These kinds of massive crimes have no owners.  It is not just an Acholi crime or a Ugandan crime; but it's an international challenge...

The ICC is a bit different from the ad-hoc courts.  They were just a way to punish people according to the rules in their statutes.  But our role is much bigger:  It's to build something over the longterm.

-----

I have to confess that Ocampo was not able to allay my fears that the effect of the creation of the ICC might be to strengthen the hands of (even abusive) government vis-a-vis their non-governmental political opponents or other non-governmental actors.  Certainly, the evidence so far of the effect of his own work on Uganda and DRC would seem to point in this direction.  In the DRC, it was the Kabila government that had captured Thomas Lubanga Diyilo, the head of the Union des Patriotes Congolais, and handed him over to the ICC for trial.  And in Uganda, it has been only the LRA's leaders who have had indictements and arrest warrants issued against them...

This is really not surprising, given that it is national governments that totally control the ICC's access to the "scenes of the suspected crimes", and to all the witnesses and evidence therein.  And we have certainly already seen, with ICTR, the degree to which the national government in rwanda has been prepared to condition ICTR's continued access to witnesses and evidence on the ICTR undertaking not to indict  suspected perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity there who have been on the pro-government side.  (Indeed, while I was The Hague in July, I received further, solid-seeming confirmation from well-placed persons there that it had indeed been the pressure of the Rwandan government, with the extremely strong support of Washington, that had forced  former ICTR chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte to resign from that position... The Americans-- who have been much bigger supporters of ICTR than they ever have, obvioysly, of the ICC-- had reportedly confronted Del Ponte with a straightforward request that she promise not to prosecute any pro-Kigali individuals.  She refused to do this, and the Security Council  did not renew her mandate for ICTR.)

I do have one related comment to make, as well, and that concerns this criterion of "gravity" by which Ocampo and his colleagues set such great store.  It is true that many of the acts of which the LRA leaders have been credibly accused-- which include cannibalism, the abduction of children, the widespread mutilation of civilians, the sexual enslavement of captive girls and women, the forced impressment of young boys into the fighting forces and their initiation into acts of horrendous atrocity-- are such as to be extremely shocking to anyone who learns of them.  The slow death of civilians in IDP camps/strategic hamlets is not nearly as "spectacular" and for that reason may not seem as shocking.  (What, I wonder, does this say about the prurience of our own sensibilities?)  And it is probably true that the body of international atrocities law is not as well adapted to prosecuting those aspects of, say, Uganda's forced villageization process that have killed scores of thousands of Ugandans, as they are prosecuting acts by the LRA that probably actually resulted in far smaller numbers of deaths and a far smaller negative effect onthe allover floursihing of Ugandans than has the villageization program.

In this regard, as a US citizen, I have to note the somewhat similar "double standard" that is commonly applied regarding acts of violence that have been committed within US-occupied Iraq.  There has been considerable media attention (not to mention media prurience) directed at the "spectacular" actions of jihadists who have undertaken (and videotaped) beheadings of captives and other grisly acts, but far less to the effects of occupation-related policies that have caused a widespread collapse of public health and public security, resulting in scores of thousands of entirely avoidable deaths of Iraqi civilians.

Well, be that as it may, too.  I do just make a plea here, though, for a forthright interrogation of the concept of "gravity".  What, actually, are we talking about here, Mr. Ocampo?  If we are talking about deaths and other severe constraints on human flourishing, then should we not look at those comprehensively, rather than looking simply at acts of "spectacular" violence?

-----

Okay, I admit I'm an ICC skeptic; and the discussions and other reseach I was able to conduct over this summer have made me into even more of one than I was before.  (Though of course I recognize the the intensity of the idealism with which nearly everyone concerned has gone into the ICC venture..  However, good intentions alone are not enough.  One also has always to be attentive to the need to check the moral quality of one's actions by looking at their effects, as well.)

Inside Uganda, meanwhile (as I wrote about in this August 24 column in the CSM), Gulu LC-5 District Council chair Norbert Mao has been working with allies in the national legislature to try to get the main points of key traditional conflict-resolution mechanisms used by the Acholis codified and incorporated into national law.

I wrote there:

Mao, a graduate of Yale Law School who was recently elected chair of the majority-Acholi Gulu District Council, expressed a nuanced view of the ICC's efforts: "As a lawyer, I know the ICC has its role.... And in general, that's an important role. All societies need to have an accountability system.... The essence of the court is to ensure accountability. But we have accountability systems in northern Uganda, too - our traditional systems."

Mr. Mao explained that the Acholi system of conflict resolution, called mat oput or "drinking the bitter root," requires perpetrators to acknowledge their crimes, show remorse for them, and ask the community for forgiveness. Western-style criminal proceedings require none of these things, though a perpetrator who shows remorse can sometimes win a lighter sentence.

Now, Mao, Ogenga-Latigo, and their allies are working fast to have the main points of mat oput codified and incorporated into Ugandan law. (Other countries that have incorporated traditional systems into national law in this way include New Zealand and Rwanda.) Mao told me he hopes this will enable Uganda to tell the ICC that if the LRA leaders undergo mat oput, then they have been fully dealt with under Ugandan law, and therefore the ICC should withdraw its indictments. Uganda's peace campaigners have also recently won the right, as recognized victims of Kony's crimes, to be represented in a "pretrial" hearing here at the ICC: They plan to use that hearing to argue strongly, as victims, that the indictments be dropped.

It strikes me this is a very constructive and creative approach to the dilemma that the peacemakers, the Ugandan government, and the ICC all now face.

-------------

More from me on this soon, I hope.  I do just want to get the above material posted for public readership onto the blog before too much more time passes.

In the meantime, I just want to note two other points:

1. This very useful resource, a paper from Zachary Lomo, the former director of the Refugee Law Project in Kampala.  It's a slightly modified version of a text he had printed in the Sunday Monitor on August 20.  It's titled, Why the International Criminal Court must withdraw Indictments against the Top LRA Leaders: A Legal Perspective .
2. The importance of the provisions that the ICC's Treaty made for taking into account the perspectives and interests of the victims of the crimes being tried...  "Representatives" of victims recently won the right to take part even in pre-trial proceedings in The Hague, and it seems this might actually provide a way for Uganda's civil-society peacemakers to have serious input into whether the case should actually proceed.
   
   

---------------------------------------------------------

Notes

1.  In The Hague, prosecutor Ocampo and ICC judge Navanethem Pillay granted me lengthy interviews (as was ICTY judge Kevin Parker.)  In Kampala I interviewed Dr. Morris Ogenga-Latigo, the (ethnic-Acholi) leader of the parliamentary opposition, Moses Draku of the national Amnesty Commission, Moses Chrispus Okello of the research department at the refugee Law Project, Ruth Ochieng of ISIS, and others.  Among those I interviewed in Gulu, in northern Uganda, were Andrew Olweny, the chair of the NGO Forum; James Otto, the director of HUman Rights Forum; Anglican Bishop Nelson Onono-Onweng; Ojara Martin Mapenduzi, the Speaker of the Gulu District Council, and Norbert Mao, the Copuncil's Chairperson;  Betty Tinu of Women's Voice for Peace; Lieut. Chris Mugeezi, the public-relations officer for the army's northern command; and a mixed-gender group of camp leaders from the Unyama IDP camp.  In mid-June 2006,  I had interviewed Francis K. Butagira, the Ugandan ambassador to the UN, in New York.  The interviews in New York and Kampala were planned and conducted with my colleague and friend Coralie Bryant.  Those in  Gulu were planned and conducted with great help from local research associate Arthur Owor.  I am very grateful to all who helped my project by giving me their time and expertise. ( Return to main text )