Fierce controversy has erupted over the International Criminal Court (ICC) announcement of a possible probe into war crimes committed by rebels of Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in the course of the country’s 18-year civil war.
The rebels are accused of widespread and systematic abuses against civilians in northern Uganda, including rape, murder, mutilation and child abduction. Last year 8 500 children — some as young as eight — were abducted by the LRA and forcibly recruited as fighters, porters or sex slaves, according to the United Nations.
On January 29 ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo announced that ”the court has determined that there is a sufficient basis to start planning [an] investigation” into the LRA.
The announcement followed a request by Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni in December.
Should the court go ahead with the investigation, the LRA’s High Command could make history as the first to be tried by the ICC’s permanent tribunal.
But local peace groups and MPs representing the country’s northern regions have condemned Ocampo’s announcement, warning that it will destroy any chance of a peaceful settlement to Uganda’s conflict.
The Acholi Religious Leaders’ Peace Initiative (ARLPI) — a group pushing for dialogue between the government and the LRA, and one of the few to have made contact with the rebels’ reclusive leaders — say the probe will make it impossible for the rebel commanders to come out of the bush.
Father Carlos Rodriguez, a chief ARLPI negotiator, said: ”The issuing of such international arrest [warrants] would practically close, once and for all, the path to peaceful negotiation as a means to end this long war, crushing whatever little progress has been made during these years.”
In an impassioned statement, Rodriguez listed several examples of peace deals that have only been possible because crimes against humanity were overlooked in order to get warring factions to the negotiating table.
”Why is it that such a high-ranking war criminal as Radovan Karadzic [of Bosnia] has never been arrested even though his whereabouts are well known?” he asked. ”Because nobody from the international community wants to put Bosnia’s fragile peace process at stake.”
The ARLPI’s list of perpetrators who were granted immunity included the factions in Burundi’s conflict, Liberia’s rebels and members of the Sudanese ruling party.
The Ugandan government says there is no need for peaceful negotiation because the army is on the verge of crushing the insurgency.
Ministry of Defence spokesperson Major Shaban Bantariza said that in recent weeks several of the LRA’s most senior henchman have been killed in scuffles near the Sudanese border.
But critics point out that the army has been saying this for years. They argue further that the unique nature of the LRA insurgency makes it very difficult to stamp out.
Led by mystic recluse Joseph Kony, the LRA are unlike any other rebel group. They have no administrative organs, control no territory and seem to have no political programme beyond a vague avowal that they are seeking to topple the government and rule Uganda according to the biblical Ten Commandments. This has led them to be regarded more as a perverse cult than a serious rebel movement.
In addition, they live a nomadic existence, wandering through northern Uganda’s thick scrubland, sporadically attacking villages and trading centres or ambushing vehicles, before disappearing over the border into the vast mountainous areas of southern Sudan.
The real challenge of the ICC, say critics, will therefore be to track down the LRA leaders. For its part, the ICC says it acknowledges the daunting task involved in this and has called on donors and the international community to help Uganda in the hunt for its most wanted.
Meanwhile, the human rights watchdog, Amnesty International, has welcomed the ICC’s comments, but the organisation has warned that ”any court investigation of crimes against humanity in northern Uganda must be part of a comprehensive plan to end impunity for all such crimes, regardless of which side committed them and of the level of the perpetrator”.
But Rodriguez — who has lived in northern Uganda for nearly 19 years — rejected the Amnesty report. ”I would invite Amnesty International to come to northern Uganda and see how hopeless the situation up here is,” he told the Mail & Guardian.
”It’s very easy to talk about the danger of impunity for war crimes from behind a desk in London.
”If you speak to anyone living here, what they want is for this war to end — they’re not interested in prosecutions,” he said.