In December 2003, President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda referred the situation concerning the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. With the cooperation of Ugandan authorities and international institutions, President Museveni was determined that locating, arresting, and bringing to justice the LRA leadership responsible for crimes against humanity in Northern Uganda would ensure future stability. In the Prosecutor v. Joseph Kony, Vincent Otti, Okot Odhiambo and Dominic Ongwen case, a warrant of arrest was issued for Joseph Kony, the alleged commander-in-Chief of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), on twelve counts of crimes against humanity (murder, enslavement, sexual enslavement, rape, inhumane acts of inflicting serious bodily injury and suffering) and twenty-one counts of war crimes (murder, cruel treatment of civilians, intentionally directing an attack against a civilian population, pillaging, inducing rape, and forced enlistment of children).
Following the referral by President Museveni, legal measures were executed when the Chief Prosecutor of the ICC, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, agreed to open an investigation in Northern Uganda. For nearly twenty years now, the LRA has continued to violently commit crimes against humanity and war crimes. The documentary Peace vs Justice, directed by Klaartje Quirijns in 2012, follows the roles of the ICC trial and local peacekeeping efforts in putting an end to Kony’s destructive army. Quirijns critically points out the disconnect of the ICC prosecutors in The Hague to the local Ugandans wanting peace and for their children to return home. Before President Museveni referred the case and applied for Kony’s arrest warrant, local Ugandans hoped to facilitate peace treaties between the government and the LRA with the absence of the ICC investigation and trial. As suggested by Quirijns, there is a miscommunication from both the international criminal court officials and locals on the desired conception of justice.
Of the people in Northern Uganda fighting and struggling against the LRA for nearly twenty years, Betty Bigombe, one of the film’s main characters, has been involved in efforts to negotiate peace agreements between Kony and the LRA. In 2003, President Museveni decided to end the conflict militarily despite Bigombe’s belief of reaching a “critical juncture” in the peace talks. The conflict’s escalated violence and military pressure pushed Museveni to request the ICC to intervene and indict Kony. Peace vs Justice considers the fact that the peace negotiations were jeopardized by the Court’s indictments. Sam Kolo, Kony’s right-hand man and top commander, tells Quirijns how that “the announcement of the indictments made Kony even more aggressive, more vicious, feel hunted not just by the Ugandan government, but now by the whole world. Kony started to kill even more.” Excluding the few who were indicted by the ICC, Ugandan authorities enacted amnesty law to members of the LRA, victims abducted and brutalized and violently forced to be a LRA soldier, in order to reintegrate these individuals into Ugandan society.
The rejoining of former perpetrators back in a civilian life with victims is a central theme in Peace vs Justice. Perhaps the ICC and other international institutions misunderstand this Ugandan culture dynamic. “We are brought up in an individualistic society,” concluded by Quirijns, “If you do something wrong, we put you in a corner, and if you have done something terrible, we put you in a jail cell…To understand a bit of Ugandan culture you have to understand that people see themselves in terms of a whole community, and if somebody does something terrible, you have to forgive, because you want to restore relationships. You want to bring people back into the fold, to reintegrate them into society”.
This film by no means discredits the efforts of the ICC, it does however raise critical questions that the wider international community ought to be asking itself in terms of international law, cultural differences, prevention of conflicts, war crimes and human rights violations through military or peacekeeping efforts.
Read also: What happened to KONY 2012?
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