ICC under Fire in Africa

Twenty-two years of horrific war, and two painfully slow years of negotiations, setbacks, caveats, and compromises have come to this: the Ugandan government and the rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) stand on the brink of peace, hindered by one last condition—the removal of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrants. The LRA’s leader, Joseph Kony, along with two other commanders, has refused to appear in Juba, Sudan to sign a final peace agreement, citing fear of extradition to the ICC.¹

For its part, the Ugandan government has argued that since it originally referred the civil war to the Court, it has the right to withdraw the case. In a visit to London, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni said that the LRA rebels should be tried in Uganda’s own court system with traditional forms of justice that are “more compensatory” than those in the West.² Under mato oput , the guilty parties must ask for forgiveness and offer compensation to victims. After a traditional ceremony of reconciliation, guilty parties are then welcomed back into the community.³

From the other side, international human rights organizations point out that Uganda’s court systems lack the credibility, procedures, and impartiality necessary to adjudicate international war crimes. Kony and the other LRA leaders have been accused of murder, rape, recruiting child soldiers, and attacking civilians.⁴ No tenable peace is possible without true justice, Human Rights Watch has said.⁵ Others have also argued that Uganda’s government wants to eschew ICC involvement to avoid persecution for its own crimes.⁶

However, Uganda’s arguments about the ICC as a barrier to peace are not new in the African context. Regarding the conflict in Darfur, for example, some have argued that only African systems of justice will promote a restoration of peace, rather than a continuation of revenge. “We must engage traditional methods known best to Africans to solve the [Darfur] problem,” said Litha Musyimi-Oganga, an official at the African Union Commission.⁷

While the ICC has been faulted for lacking practical mechanisms for ensuring justice, these arguments offer a more theoretical attack, disputing the very foundations on which the Court stands. All of the ICC’s major cases to date have related to countries in Africa. So it is particularly significant if several African countries see the ICC’s manner of operation and jurisdiction as inapplicable, or—even worse—as exacerbating conflict instead of resolving it. The premise of the Court, as well as of other international organizations, rests on the idea that all countries can agree upon certain standards of justice and cooperation to resolve humanity’s greatest calamities. The ICC’s operations in Uganda, as well as Darfur, provide a test case for whether that premise will prove to be true.