While the Middle East conflict is receiving focal attention from the media, NGOs and various governments, the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, Lebanon’s prominent militant group, has overshadowed important developments taking place in the global south.
We cannot overlook the steps being taken by another militant group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) to seek a truce with the Ugandan government. After a twenty year war waged against the government, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), Joseph Kony, has suddenly resurfaced in the southern Sudanese city of Juba. To everyone’s great shock, the notorious rebel leader finally appears willing to negotiate peace talks with Uganda.
However, since Kony’s “coming out of the bush,” the International Criminal Court in The Hague has been more than ready to pounce on the guerilla leader for his “bloody havoc” unleashed on the Acholi population of northern Uganda. Over the last two decades the LRA has abducted at least 30,000 thousand children, left 1.8 million displaced or living in camps, in which 3,500 have died because of the violence or a preventable illness.
Furthermore given Kony’s taste for young fighters, the Acholi children of Uganda have been forced to walk up to 2 to 3 hours a night to shelters in Gulu, Kitgum or Pader to escape the clutches of Kony’s recruiters. According to Star reporter John Goddard, various reports estimates that 80% of LRA members are abducted children.
Sadly, Kony’s wrath of barbaric guerilla fighting has also had perverse social implications for those children recruited as LRA members. Once these children return home-if they are able to escape the rebels-they are treated as outcasts for serving in Kony’s army, even though it was against their will.
Children recruited by Kony were forced to pillage their villages and murder their own families; as a result their community shuns them, and before they are accepted they must go through a cleansing process to remove the demons Kony has planted in them.
Yet despite efforts by the ICC to prosecute Joseph Kony and four of his lieutenants, the Ugandan government stands in firm opposition to the International Criminal Court. Instead, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni is keen to offer Kony and his followers amnesty in exchange for their committing themselves to the peace talks presently being held by the Sudanese government.
As a result, the Ugandan government has come under fire by the ICC, which firmly believes that the best course of action is to prosecute the rebel leader for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Furthermore, ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo says that the government has a “legal obligation to act on the arrest warrants issued by the court” and therefore will not yield to Museveni’s pleas to abandon the warrants. For justice to be served the ICC believes that formal charges against the LRA leader must be carried through. They are not persuaded that offering Kony amnesty or even pursuing a traditional tribal based justice could compensate for the war of terror he instigated in the early 1990s against his own people.
Therefore it will be interesting to see whether the Ugandan government or the ICC will yield in the battle to bring Kony down. Either way, with the cries for amnesty on one side and prosecution on the other, Kony is still on the edge of a double-edged sword. Even if he received amnesty he would be at the mercy of the families from which he plundered two million people to build the infamous LRA. Regardless of this present offer of amnesty, there can be no disagreement that Joseph Kony’s attempts to wipe out the Acholi population in Northern Uganda will indefinitely lead to future endeavors from both sides to annihilate him.
