Hunting Kony

Will the ICC’s first indictment inspire détente between the Bush administration and the world court?

By Mark Leon Goldberg
Web Exclusive: 10.07.05


Joseph Kony is a lot of things to a lot of people. To his followers in the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), he is God-like, with mystical powers that render him immortal. To the president of Uganda, he is a murderous gadfly who has been terrorizing the population of the northern provinces for nearly two decades. To the kidnapped children that constitute the rank and file of his army, he is a serial rapist and murderer. And to the U.S. State Department, he is the leader of a terrorist group.

Kony’s newest designation, however, is likely to provide the most lasting epitaph for which history will remember him: the world’s first fugitive-at-large from the International Criminal Court (ICC). At the same time, the indictment will draw attention to the Bush administration’s troublesome policy toward the court, and perhaps force the President to release the executive branch from its prohibitions against cooperating with the court. <snip>

Once unsealed, that indictment is likely to detail Kony’s role in a rebellion that has devastated the civilian population of northern Uganda for well over a decade. And though the ICC is legally permitted only to prosecute crimes that have occurred since 2002, prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo will have plenty of material to work with. The LRA is notorious for its gunpoint conscription of children as soldiers and sex slaves; those who refuse to serve in those roles are often mutilated in front of their families. And to this day, thousands of children, known as the “night commuters,” travel from their rural homes to safer confines each evening to avoid abduction by the LRA.

For these reasons, and for the fact that Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, voluntarily ceded national jurisdiction over these crimes to the ICC, Kony is the ideal first target of an indictment. The politically savvy Ocampo, meanwhile, may have had the court’s main detractors in the Bush administration in mind with this indictment: Museveni is an American ally, and the LRA consistently appears in State Department reports on foreign terrorist organizations. <snip>

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=10392