Court action brings impasse in war
By Shashank Bengali
McClatchy Newspapers
GULU, Uganda - An unusual feeling washed over the hills of northern Uganda last month. It was hope. For the first time since the start of a terrifying insurgency 20 years ago, peace talks between rebels and the government were making progress.
"We have been suffering for so long. We need this," said a withered Anna Alwoch, 65, who had watched the rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army kill her husband in the first days of the war before shoving a gun in her chest and threatening to rape her. Instead, they sliced off her upper lip.
Now, however, the talks have broken down and hope has given way to anger - not just at the cultlike LRA, architects of one of Africa's gravest humanitarian crises, but also, and more surprisingly, at the International
Criminal Court, based 4,000 miles away in the Hague, Netherlands.
The court has issued arrest warrants for Joseph Kony, the LRA's messianic leader, and his top deputies. Kony, a self-styled spirit medium, and his commanders forced thousands of children into their army and, at the point of a gun or blade of a machete, unleashed them on their own people, forcing them to torch villages, chop off limbs and kill all who resisted.
If ever the label war criminal applied, say prosecutors, it's in this case. But the warrants have created an impasse. Uganda has offered the rebels amnesty if they put down their weapons, but Kony has said he will not come in from the bush so long as the threat of a war-crimes trial hangs over his head.
He failed to show last month at a designated rebel assembly point as required under a truce with the government. The truce expired two weeks ago, and on Wednesday, Uganda resumed military operations against
rebels still hiding in the north, dealing another setback to the peace process.
Despite the ongoing negotiations, the court's prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, said recently that he would not lift the warrants, warning that if he did, "the crimes will start again."
Whether the talks can be resurrected seems more than ever to hinge on the actions of the fledgling international court, whose quest for justice is increasingly at odds with the war-weary people of northern Uganda, who would rather have peace.
"If the court doesn't withdraw its case, the LRA will continue to terrorize us," said Julius Odong, a tribal leader in the beleaguered town of Gulu, where hundreds of thousands of people who have fled their villages to escape rebel attacks now live in dank huts in overcrowded government camps.
What is now Africa's longest-running conflict began as an insurrection by the Acholi ethnic group in 1986, when the rival southern rebel
leader Yoweri Museveni seized power in a coup. Kony, who says he's possessed with mystical powers, drew Acholi military men into the bush and indoctrinated them, telling them they were bulletproof, and sent them into the villages to recruit fighters.
The campaign has decimated the Acholi people, who account for the vast majority of the war's tens of thousands of casualties.
Acholis are desperate to return to their villages, where they can farm such crops as cassava and beans rather than subsist on food rations. About 1.6 million people are packed into the government camps, overwhelmed by hunger and disease, which aid agencies say kill 900 people weekly.
The Acholis blame the southern-dominated government for letting the conflict fester, but they also see it as a homegrown problem with a homegrown solution.
In the Acholi culture, murder is not dealt with by execution or imprisonment, but by an elaborate reconciliation ceremony
known as mato oput. Literally, it means sharing a bitter drink derived from a local tree. The ceremony requires the guilty person to repent, seek forgiveness and pay restitution.
To many Acholis, it's a sensible way out of a war that's pitted children against children - and, occasionally, against their parents - and scarred a generation of girls with rape. Thousands of abductees and some top commanders have been welcomed back through traditional ceremonies.
Even former abductees say that if Kony came home, repented for his actions, and paid compensation to his victims, they would forgive him.
"I would welcome him," said Patrick Okelo, 29, who was abducted at gunpoint and spent five years with the LRA before escaping while on a reconnaissance mission.
"How we see it, evil cannot be paid back with evil."
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