[kalamu]

New peace initiative for northern Uganda highlights divisions over the International Criminal Courts attempt to arrest rebel leader Joseph Kony.

By Janet Anderson in The Hague (AR No. 67, 16-Jun-06)

A few clicks on the website of the international police organisation Interpol, and you find three pictures of Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony, the latest one taken from a rare video only a few weeks old. His face has not changed a lot from the first black and white image to the most current one, in which Kony wears a green uniform with red epaulettes and a jaunty beret on his head.

A new agreement with Interpol to post images of Kony and four of his senior commanders on the web is the latest sign of the International Criminal Court, ICC, prosecutors resolve to see leaders of the Lord's Resistance Army, LRA, brought to The Hague to face justice.

The international arrest warrants issued last October against Kony and his four associates were the first the four-year-old court had brought.

According to the prosecution, the LRA leaders "established a pattern of brutalisation of civilians by acts including murder, abduction, sexual enslavement, mutilation, as well as mass burnings of houses and looting of camp settlements". They are alleged to have forcibly recruited civilians, including children, to serve as combatants, porters and sex slaves and "to take part in attacks against the Ugandan army (UPDF) and civilian communities".

LRA forces are believed to have abducted some 25,000 children to become fighters or sex slaves.

Kony faces 33 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

For human rights groups which have long tracked the misery caused by LRA activity in northern Uganda where nearly two million people have been displaced from their homes and are reliant on food handouts the more Kony is isolated, the better.

"They go from being individuals associated with evil acts to becoming indicted war criminals" said Richard Dicker, director of Human Rights Watch's International Justice Programme. "This isolates and undercuts their support."

Prominent rights groups including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and others are fully supportive of ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo's efforts to put Kony and the others on trial and help bring an end to the cycle of violence in northern Uganda which has claimed countless thousands of lives in the past 20 years.

But there are other voices calling for Kony to be given one last chance.

In the video footage filmed on May 2, the LRA chief - seen for the first time in many years - launched a bid to negotiate a peace deal. Also appearing on the tape shot near the border between southwestern Sudan and the north-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC, was Riek Machar, the vice-president of southern Sudans autonomous government, who offered to broker talks between the Ugandan government and the rebels.

In the video, Kony said, "The LRA is ready to talk peace and end the war in a good way, not by force. We are fighting for peace and I am not a terrorist."

The Kony case presents the ICC with one of its toughest challenges to date, as it must weigh the merits of seeking accountability for chronic human rights abuses against the broader, and somewhat different, goal of ending the conflict that has given rise to these abuses.

The dilemma goes to the heart of the court's own rules, which suggest that the chief prosecutor can decide not to initiate a prosecution "in the interest of justice".

How far, then, should the ICC proceed on the LRA case if justice is going to get in the way of peace?

American lawyer Jonathan Edelstein, an expert on transitional justice issues, recently wrote, "Prosecuting five [LRA] militia commanders, despite their atrocities, is trivial in comparison to ending a war that affects millions of people, and the ICC should follow the lead of the peacemakers rather than trying to override their efforts."

Northern Ugandan religious leaders and peace negotiator Betty Bigombe, a politician and former international diplomat, have been calling for the ICC to back off in order to give local peace initiatives, based on traditional reconciliation methods, a chance to end the war. The religious leaders, including local Roman Catholic Archbishop John Baptist Odama, allege that the ICC's decision to get involved in northern Uganda's tragedy has undermined their own efforts to build the rebels' confidence in peace talks.

What is new about the current effort to make peace in northern Uganda is the involvement of the government of southern Sudan. Diplomats in the region say that now that the southern Sudanese have their own government - part of the recent peace deal to end the 22-year long war in that country - there is a "completely new element in this process, which might successfully push [the Ugandan authorities] into peace talks".

Over the years, the LRA have been successfully pushed out of their camps in northern Uganda, although they continue to mount raids there, and now maintain bases in the vast wildernesses of southern Sudan.

Some of the rebel force has crossed over into the war-torn Ituri region in the north-east of DRC. In Ituri, and the Kivu and Katanga regions further south, the Congolese army backed by a United Nations peacekeeping mission, is harrying a variety of militia groups, including the LRA, in advance of elections in July. But with vast areas of rainforest to hide in, success has been limited so far.

From the outset, the ICC prosecution team has always known that it must rely on national authorities to execute the arrest warrants it issues. Under the 1998 Rome statute which governs the courts rules, the ICC has no police force of its own.

"Arresting Kony and the LRA leaders is the biggest challenge for the Rome statute," said Moreno Ocampo.

Human Rights Watch's Dicker agreed, saying, "Cooperation by states with the ICC in everything from access to documents and evidence to ultimately the arrest of the accused is potentially the Achilles heel [of the Rome statute]."

In a statement to the United Nations Security Council in New York on June 14 on the situation in Sudan 's Darfur region - the site of another ICC war crimes investigation Moreno Ocampo stressed that cooperation by the Sudanese state is "essential to complete the investigation".

The same applies to all ICC investigations. And, unlike the temporary UN-backed tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, which do not have police forces, either, and have faced problems in tracking and detaining indictees, the ICC has no Security Council backing to provide even the threat of sanctions against uncooperative states.