Uganda: ICC faces widespread criticism
By Julian Amutuhaire, news correspondent for KFM (Monitor Group).
Kampala, Uganda, July 18, 2008 -- As the International Criminal Court celebrates ten years since it was instituted, serious doubts are being raised in East Africa about its competence to bring to book all the individuals it has indicted or to indeed effect the fight against impunity.
The ICC has been especially active in Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo and now Sudan. The recent request by the ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo to the pre-trial chamber, to issue a warrant of arrest for Sudanese president Omar Hassan Ahmad Al Bashir has however raised fresh debate, and more so criticism of the Court on what role it is actually playing in the fight against impunity.
The prosecutor says there are reasonable grounds to believe that President Al Bashir bears criminal responsibility for genocide and war crimes committed in Darfur in the past five years. The application which lists ten charges alleges that Al Bashir masterminded and implemented a plan to destroy in substantial part, the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa groups, on account of their ethnicity.
The request for a warrant of arrest against the Sudanese leader has led many people to question whose interests the Court is serving. Aggrey Awori a defense and security analyst in Kampala says the International Court should not act as the policing agent for the internal affairs of states: “Nobody has the right to dictate on the affairs of another state and we don’t want to use the ICC as a police man to decide who should be arrested, who should be prosecuted and under what law. Even though I subscribe to the Rome Statute, I am not very keen on the role the ICC is playing especially in Africa.”
Awori says there has to be a limit on what the ICC should do if its role is to be appreciated. This concern is worsened by doubts over the Court’s ability to effect its arrest warrants. The Court has to rely on state parties and this sometimes delays the situation. An example of this is the Ugandan situation where arrest warrants were issued against the Lords Resistance Army rebel leader Joseph Kony and his top command in October 2005 but are yet to be effected.
Dr Chris Dolan, the Head of the Refugee Law project at Makerere University says that the Court has lost most of its credibility and taking such a step only makes the situation worse.
“They don’t have any capacity to actually pick Bashir up and deal with him directly and I think they are increasingly losing credibility. They lost an enormous amount of credibility with the Northern Uganda and the Lubanga case, and there is a lot of skepticism on their capacity to really deliver on the whole question of impunity”.
Dr Dolan argues that the recent order for the release of the Congolese militiaman Thomas Lubanga complicates the whole question of whether or not the prosecutor and the Court in general, really have the capacity to deliver.
The question of why the ICC seems to be active only in Africa and not elsewhere in the world is also central to this debate. Ofwono Opondo is the spokesperson of the ruling National Resistance Movement Party in Uganda and he says the Court seems to exercise its mandate only in regard to the poor nations. “How come that the biggest country in the world refused to accede to this Court and even when their soldiers are behaving openly with impunity, they are not being tried? The real point here is not about being a super power but the point should be to end impunity by whomsoever and that is the line the International Court should be following”.
The African continent has some of the longest running conflicts in the world and millions of lives have been lost. Though there is recognition of the need to fight impunity, the ICC seems to face a huge challenge of not only delivering in terms of having its warrants of arrest effected or trials commence, but also in overcoming the seemingly widespread negative image. How the Sudan situation develops, how the Thomas Lubanga case ends or even more how Uganda’s LRA issues will develop, all form part of the bigger picture of how the ICC gets perceived or appreciated in the region.
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