Blog Posts in International Criminal Court
Sudan Is Still Up to No Good
.jpeg "Sudanese President Bashir")
This post originally appeared today on Foreign Policy.
The Lord's Resistance Army has come to Darfur, Sudan, and that is not good news for anyone. The Lord's Resistance Army is a vicious militia led by self-proclaimed messiah Joseph Kony, and though he does not appear to be with the contingent that has moved into Darfur, Kony is widely and rightly regarded as one of the most heinous war criminals still on the loose in the entire world.
The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has long operated as a hybrid between a cult and a rebel army. Kony and the LRA originally sprang up in northern Uganda and waged a brutal campaign trying to overthrow that country's government. Millions of Ugandans fled the fighting, and the LRA engaged in virtually every depravity known in warfare. The LRA's ranks have been swelled with kidnapped child soldiers, girls are regularly treated as sex slaves, and innocent civilians are maimed and killed in a fashion too brutal to describe.
In recent years, Kony and his forces have fallen on harder times, though their brutality has not diminished. Dislodged from northern Uganda, Kony and his troops first fled into northeastern Congo and
then the Central African Republic. However, the Ugandan army -- with quiet assistance from the United States -- has remained in dogged pursuit of Kony and his forces. The LRA is a relatively small force these days, probably numbering less than 1,000 hard-core fighters who remain loyal to Kony, but it is still causing mayhem and suffering well disproportionate to its size. Kony and his men have killed around 2,000 civilians in the last year and driven another 450,000 from their homes. Although the Ugandan offensive against Kony has suffered some significant missteps along the way, it has put increasing pressure on the LRA.
Just this week, the Enough Project learned from multiple, credible sources in the field that elements of the LRA had crossed into Darfur. These forces appear to be seeking safe haven under the protection of the Sudanese military, and Sudan's notorious president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, has been a longtime LRA patron, so this does not come as a surprise. Clearly, Kony and his deputies believe that Sudan is one of the few places left where the Ugandan army will not pursue them, and they are likely increasingly desperate.
The even larger story is what all of this says about Sudan and Bashir at a time when U.S. diplomacy has been geared to striking a new tone in the relationship. Although Bashir has been eager to portray himself as willing to repair relations with the world after last year's International Criminal Court indictment, and the United States in particular, giving safe haven to the LRA is yet another slap at Darfuris, at Washington, and at fundamental human decency. The evidence clearly suggests that advance LRA scouts coordinated with Sudanese armed forces well in advance of the LRA's arrival in Darfur, and it seems implausible that local Sudanese armed forces commanders would welcome the group in Darfur without seeking approval from Khartoum, including Bashir. There are also suggestions that the LRA has received direct logistical support from the Sudanese army since arriving in Darfur.
Click here to continue reading.
Photo: Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir
Technorati Tags: 5 Best Stories You Might Have Missed This Week
Here at Enough, we often swap emails with interesting articles and feature stories that we come across in our favorite publications and on our favorite websites. We wanted to share some of these stories with you as part of our effort to keep you up to date on what you need to know in the world of anti-genocide and crimes against humanity work.
The Kimbanguist Symphony Orchestra and Choir in Congo’s capital of Kinshasa has been frequently featured in the media and in photo essays. Now they’re about to debut at the Berlin Film Festival in the documentary “Kinshasa Symphony” by Claus Wischmann and Martin Baer. From the looks of the trailer, it’s going to be a heartwarming story. (Hat tip: Africa Is A Country)
To mark the start of the 2010 TED conference this week, the social media blog Mashable featured five standout TED talks from years past. At Enough we constantly look for new ways to shorten the space between the people on the ground in the conflict zones where we work and the U.S. advocates who are dedicated to keeping stories in front of influentials. Writer and professor Clay Shirky’s talk about how social media can make history by empowering citizen journalists is especially relevant – one can easily imagine how the same tools used to report instantly about the 2008 earthquake in China, for instance, could prove powerful during Sudan’s upcoming elections.
Public Radio International ran this short piece by Katy Clark on how the challenges in Haiti have caused aid organizations to necessarily redirect attention away from other crisis zones, at least temporarily. Particularly in tough economic times, the give and take is inevitable, but that doesn’t make it any less unfortunate for places like Somalia.
In this Letter from Congo, the Washington Post’s Stephanie McCrummen describes an unmistakable feature of any eastern Congo cityscape: the wooden, manpowered chukudu scooter that “hauls vegetables in the good times and fleeing people in the bad.
On a related note (though I’m fudging the date because this is funny and timely, given the ICC’s recent prominence in the news), this clip from the Christian Science Monitor’s Scott Baldauf describes a new trend in Kenyan matatu décor. Whose face now adorns the back windows of minivan taxis, a place previously reserved for Barack Obama, American hip hop stars, and statements praising God? Here’s a hint: He’s everyone’s favorite ICC prosecutor.
Congo: A Death Toll Rivaling The Holocaust
With an estimated death toll of six million, the Holocaust is widely viewed as the singularly most devastating period in modern history. The word holocaust, derived from the Greek words meaning “burnt whole,” is now used almost exclusively to describe the state-sponsored massacre of European Jews. In the aftermath, countries came together to create the United Nations and craft international treaties intended to build a more cohesive international community that would be better prepared to respond in the future to horrors like they had just witnessed in Nazi Germany.
Yet despite the increased interconnectedness of the world and the international provisions in place to respond to humanitarian crises, the conflict in eastern Congo rages on even today without an effective international response –- surpassing the Holocaust in number of years and now, even in number of lives lost.
In 2007, the International Rescue Committee, or IRC, released the results of a pivotal study, which found that 5.4 million people had died in eastern Congo since 1998. They also found that the death toll was mounting at a rate of about 45,000 people per month. But those figures are now nearly three years old. In a New York Times op-ed this week, Nick Kristof’s calculation caught my attention: “That would leave the total today, after a dozen years, at 6.9 million.”
Think about that … 6.9 million. It’s hard to fathom.
Click here to continue reading.
This post is part of a new series that will appear every Thursday on Change.org's Stop Genocide blog.
Photo: Dusk at Mugunga IDP camp, North Kivu (Enough/Laura Heaton)
Notorious Congo War Criminal Making News
It seems the pressure may be rising against a Congo warlord known as The Terminator who is a regular at eastern Congo’s most posh establishments.
Wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, Bosco Ntaganda was given a command position in the Congolese army when his rebel group, the CNDP, agreed to fight alongside the Congolese government as integrated units, rather than against it. The integration came about after the Congolese and Rwandan governments struck a quiet deal that landed the charismatic CNDP leader, Laurent Nkunda, under house arrest in Rwanda. (As an upcoming Enough strategy paper will explain, the integration has been anything but smooth.) Perhaps one of the most alarming developments to emerge from this deal-making is that it left the United Nations peacekeeping force essentially in cahoots with international war criminals.
True, the U.N. mission monitors the rosters of the Congolese army units it supports to ensure that its resources aren’t directly funneled to people accused of committing atrocities, but as a recent piece in the Guardian examines, the association between some of Congo’s most unsavory characters and the U.N. certainly conveys a distressing message in a part of the world where impunity is blamed for facilitating, or even encouraging, violence. Describing Bosco as a “casual sportsman in this oasis of luxury amid the poverty of Goma,” the Guardian piece offers this indictment:
"[Bosco] is the personification of what critics say is a ‘pact with the devil’. While the eyes of the world are distracted by wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere, many believe the thickly forested hills of eastern Congo are witnessing another shameful chapter in UN peacekeeping that ranks alongside the impotent displays in Srebrenica and Rwanda."
In his most recent op-ed from Bukavu, South Kivu today, Nick Kristof also identifies apprehending Bosco as one of the key steps necessary for changing the calculations of would-be killers and rapists in Congo. (He also gave a shout-out to the Enough-backed conflict minerals legislation currently gaining momentum in Congress, which is appreciated.)
The more we see the names of obscure Congolese wanted war criminals in the mainstream media the better, especially when they seem to flaunt their liberty, giving leaders in the region no excuse for letting them walk free.
Photo: Bosco Ntaganda
War Crimes Charges Against Darfuri Rebel Dropped
Another significant ruling regarding war crimes committed in Darfur was handed down by the International Criminal Court this week, on the heels of the court’s decision last week to reopen the possibility of charging Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir with genocide.
International judges decided unanimously on Monday to dismiss charges against Bahar Idriss Abu Garda, a Darfur rebel leader charged with war crimes for his alleged involvement in a 2007 attack that killed 12 African Union peacekeepers in North Darfur. According to the ICC judges, the charge that Abu Garda was linked to the attack was unsubstantiated.
The Abu Garda case represented two firsts for the international court—it was the first Darfur case to progress to the point of confirming charges and the first instance in which an individual would have been held accountable for attacking peacekeepers, a war crime under international law. Of the four people wanted for crimes in Darfur, Abu Garda is the only defendant delivered to The Hague – and he willingly brought himself there last May. The case was momentous, viewed as a symbolic step toward accountability and justice for Darfur. Yet the Prosecution appeared to have dropped the ball at this early stage, failing to provide adequate evidence to substantiate the three charges for war crimes it felt Abu Garda had committed.
According to (legally-trained) blogger Bec Hamilton’s summary of the ICC decision, the court was convinced that the 2007 attack was a crime, but remained unconvinced that Abu Garda played a part in it. The judges found that the prosecution team, led by Luis Moreno-Ocampo, did not provide enough evidence demonstrating Abu Garda had either planned the attack, issued orders for the attack, or was directly involved in the attack.
Bec also made an astute point regarding the political ramifications of the ICC decision:
As a public relations matter this is a disastrous decision for the Court vis a vis the Sudanese government. Until today this case – the only one of the Darfur cases to date that has gone to the confirmation of charges stage – could be used by ICC advocates as the counter-argument to Khartoum’s propaganda about the ICC being a tool of western imperialism focused on attacking the Sudanese government. A case against a rebel showed even-handedness on the part of the Prosecution.
Whether justice will be done for the 12 peacekeepers is now in the hands of the Prosecution, who can present further evidence to the court. For the families of the peacekeepers and for the broader goal of holding people responsible for crimes in Darfur, let’s hope the prosecutors actually have a case.
Photo: Darfur rebel leader Bahar Idriss Abu Garda at the ICC
