War Crimes Prosecution Watch

Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC)

Official Website of the Extraordinary Chambers
Official Website of the Khmer Rouge Trial Task Force
Official Website of the United Nations Assistance to the Khmer Rouge Trials (UNAKRT)

CAMBODIA: Khmer Rouge Tribunal staff to appeal salaries within months
Radio Australia
Presenter/Interviewer: Rob Sharp
Speakers: Dr Helen Jarvis, Chief of Public Affairs with the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia
June 27, 2007

There's been a breakthrough in a salary dispute that threatened to disrupt the trial of former Khmer Rouge leaders. Some tribunal staff were worried by potential plans to cut staff salaries, to ensure a 56 million US dollar budget would last three years the process is expected to take.

JARVIS: We are just in the process actually of releasing a statement by four parties that have been involved, that is of course the Extraordinary Chambers ourselves. The United Nations Development Program, UNDP, the United Nations headquarters which is involved through the Department of Economic and Social Affairs, and the fourth organisation is the European Community. And this has been an explanation of a project forward meeting held last Friday.

SHARP: There was concern last Friday of the 56 million dollar budget for the three year process, has that issue been resolved?

JARVIS: The problem of the overall budget has been one that we've been aware of for some time. Of course we're aware that there is a shortfall of approximately four million on each side, both the Cambodian side and the UN side, and that has been the case since the pledging in March of 2005. However we are relatively optimistic that that will be met. We haven't engaged in a second appeal because we are waiting to get the process really underway, and we didn't think it was appropriate to be asking for more funds when we're still in the early stages. We've now gone through to have the internal rules approved and the investigating process is getting underway. So it'll be within a few months that we will do a consolidated revaluation of what we are likely to need and make a second appeal.

SHARP: In the meantime will staff face pay cuts at all?

JARVIS: I don't believe so, I think that actually two issues have been contemplated here. There's been an ongoing issue about the shortfall in the overall budget, and in fact some revisions of expectations that will mean that we are lucky to actually ask for more funds beyond the original 56 that was requested. However that has been as I say an ongoing situation, and at the same time there has been some comment about reviewing or examining relativities of staff salaries between the UN side and the Cambodian side and looking actually at the absolute salaries being paid. But I don't see those two really as linked, they just happen to be going on at the same time.

SHARP: There was a comment last Friday from one judge who said the impending salary crisis could cause a walkout by local staff. Do you believe that's been averted now?

JARVIS: Well I think in any institution if you did suggest to people that they cut, their salary was going to be cut by 45, 50 per cent you would expect to have a reaction, and I don't think that our institution is different in that regard. The Cambodian government agreed with the United Nations in 2004 that the salary scale for the Cambodian professional staff, the national professional staff, which actually amount to about 48 people, would be set at 50 per cent of the UN rate. There has been some discussion about precisely what the 50 per cent was 50 per cent of; i.e. is it a net rate, a gross rate, does it include allowances etc. And so there's been some discussion about it. But the principle of the 50 per cent was a well established one and has been our operating procedure for the last year since we setup the court. If I can just expand on that a little bit, at the time of the negotiations there were different points of view put forward. Some people argued that the national and international staff should get the same salary, that after all they had the same responsibilities, they had the same tasks and the same obligations and they should receive the same remuneration, as is the case in for instance Sierra Leone where national and international are getting the same rate at hybrid court. Other people argued that since the Cambodian government had wanted the Extraordinary Chambers to be in the courts of Cambodia that the Cambodian staff should be paid as normal national government officials, and the internationals would come in on the UN rate. I think there are different considerations being looked at about possibilities of adjustment, but I don't see it as an impending crisis. I think that it can be worked through.

SHARP: So is it fair to say Helen Jarvis that all agencies and bodies concerned in this salary dispute have agreed to work towards a resolution?

JARVIS: Yes I think that's indeed a good way of putting it.

Cambodian ruling party: Khmer Rouge tribunal no place for politics
Deutsche Presse-Agentur / Monsters and Critics
June 28, 2007

Phnom Penh - The president of the ruling Cambodian People's Party (CPP), Chea Sim, used the party's anniversary celebrations Thursday to warn that the upcoming trials of former Khmer Rouge leaders were no place to play politics.

Speaking at party headquarters during the CPP's 56th anniversary celebrations, Chea Sim said his party was solidly behind the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) and the hearings were a place to find justice for all Cambodians above all else.

'The CPP reiterates it continues to support the ECCC. We sincerely hope the tribunal is conducted smoothly and successfully to bring peace, stability and justice to the Cambodian people,' he told thousands of CPP faithful.

'The conduct of this tribunal should not be exploited by any political entity which would violate the true principals of the tribunal and deeply disrespect the souls of the victims.'

Critics have accused the CPP of stalling the hearings, which are expected to try a handful of surviving former Khmer Rouge leaders on charges of genocide and human rights abuses.

The CPP has vehemently denied the allegations, saying those critics have anti-government agendas and lack a deeper understanding of a complicated civil war.

The CPP marks June 28, 1951 as its birth date, when it carried the word 'revolutionary' in its name, and some members subsequently joined the struggle for independence from French colonial rule.

Some prominent current CPP cadre later joined the Khmer Rouge, but many of them came from provinces close to Vietnam which formed the movement's more moderate Bophea faction, and defected after the paranoid and rabidly anti-Vietnamese Khmer Rouge leadership turned upon its own and began bloody purges of their members.

Many, including Prime Minister Hun Sen, fled to Vietnam and formed the nucleus of the forces which returned with Vietnamese backing to overthrow the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) regime in 1979.

The CPP has shrugged off the Khmer Rouge past of some of its members, pointing out that Hun Sen requested the United Nations help set up the 56-million-dollar joint UN-Cambodia tribunal which it eventually agreed to in 2003.

Up to 2 million Cambodians are believed to have died during the 1975 to 1979 DK regime. Former Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot died without ever facing justice in 1998.

Guilty Keep Vigil after Gold Rush in Killing Fields
The Scotsman
By Seth Mydans
July 1, 2007

THE killing fields of Cambodia, containing the graves of thousands of victims of the Khmer Rouge from the 1970s, are being ripped open by impoverished villagers scavenging for jewellery.

Researchers documenting the atrocities have found that at one site alone hundreds of graves have been dug up. Bones have been scattered through woodland by locals looking for trinkets to pay for basics such as rice and cooking oil.

"Everyone was running up there to dig for gold, so I went too," said Srey Net, 50, describing what seems to have been a communal frenzy that seized the poor and isolated village of Sre Leav. "If they can dig for gold, why can't I?"

"People said, 'This goose has no owner,' " said Ouk Souk, 60, a farmer. Few valuables were in the graves, but villagers took whatever they could find.

It was the first such raid the researchers had recorded in the thousands of burial grounds they have documented around the country. Altogether 1.7 million people died during the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror between 1975 to 1979, from starvation, overwork and disease as well as torture and execution.

The invasion of what has been almost sacred ground suggests that past traumas are starting to fade even as Cambodia prepares to begin a long-delayed trial of some Khmer Rouge leaders, said Youk Chhang, a leading expert on the period.

"I think it has become a memory, rather than a physical thing any longer," he said, speaking of the pain of the past. "There will be no more tears. There are no more feelings to express. Only a flash of memory when you see a piece of bone."

For younger Cambodians, who know remarkably little about the Khmer Rouge period, he said, "It's just a dead person."

Youk Chhang heads the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, which has researched the killing fields and amassed a huge archive on the Khmer Rouge years. Two of his investigators said there could be as many as 9,000 bodies buried in the woods behind Sre Leav, 100 miles south of Phnom Penh.

Although the pain of the past may have faded, the bones and the ghosts of Khmer Rouge victims still terrify many rural people. After the assault on the burial ground, this little village seemed filled with remorse and dread.

The digging has stopped and several people said they had been awakened at night by screams from the graves.

"People heard voices calling out, 'Help me! Help me!'" said Svay Saroeun, 50, a deputy village chief. "Maybe they are angry at the villagers for digging up their graves. Or maybe they were tortured to death, and now they are being tortured again by people who are disturbing their sleep."

Srey Noeun, 47, a farmer with four small children, said she could not sleep for three nights after digging two small gold earrings out of a grave.

"I'm afraid that the owner will take revenge on me because she died with nothing but her earrings and now I have taken them," she said. "She'll say, 'Please give them back. They are all I had.'"

Srey Noeun said she sold the earrings as quickly as she could and bought things that she really needed: four pounds of pork, a sack of rice, oil for cooking and for oil lamps, salt, pepper, seasoning and milk powder for her youngest child.

"We never have enough rice," she said. "Normally we can't afford to buy pork."

The buried treasure seemed paltry after nearly a week of digging: one gold necklace and 27 small gold earrings. But it represented a fortune to those who live without electricity or running water, far from the nearest clinic, school or paved road.

The luckiest villager was Pen Chia, 27, who recovered the necklace and sold it to buy a cow. Most people found nothing but shattered skulls, bits of bone that looked like broken sticks and scraps of mouldy clothing.

"I dug all day without eating," said Pron Sythoeun, 36, a farmer. "I dug for four days. And I got nothing."

He has gone back to poke through the scraps with a stick, but few other villagers have returned except to light incense and pray for forgiveness from the restless souls.

The killing field sits empty now in the pouring rain, cratered with shallow pits and mounds of freshly turned red mud, silent under the trees except for the lowing of thin white cattle in a nearby field.

Some villagers said they had not known it was there, although its existence had not been a secret. It was beside them through the decades, like the suppressed traumas of the past, a blank spot in their minds.

They rediscovered it by chance, when Vietnamese soldiers came by searching for the remains of their own missing men. The Vietnamese Army drove the Khmer Rouge from power in 1979, then occupied Cambodia for a decade.

Helping the soldiers dig, Pon Khlaut, a farmer, saw the glint of an earring in a pit. When he showed it to his neighbours, they abandoned their homes and fields and rushed to the woods to dig.

Among them was Srey Net, who knew the graveyard well. As a teenager, she said, she had been enlisted to bury the bodies of people who had died in labour gangs building one of the huge irrigation dikes that were a particular folly of the Khmer Rouge.

Nearly 20,000 killing fields, holding anywhere from a few bodies to hundreds, served as burial grounds for Khmer Rouge victims as well as execution sites.

Like many of the victims, Srey Net said, the people here died from accidents, exhaustion and starvation as well as fevers, malaria and an epidemic of diarrhoea. Many of them were sent to a small, crude clinic nearby from which few emerged alive.

"Whenever a patient died, they would ring a gong or blow a whistle," she said. "Even in the middle of the night, I had to run up there to help carry away the bodies."

Last week she was among the graves again, hacking at the ground with a hoe, unearthing what may have been some of the same bodies she had buried years ago. And then, finding no gold, she reverted to her former role, retrieving and re-burying some of the bones.
"I felt pity for them, that's why I collected the bones," she said. "They were scattered all over the place."

Srey Noeun, the farmer who sold two earrings to buy food, also had a connection with the bodies in the graves. Like many of them, she had been a member of a work brigade here, but unlike them she had survived.

"I went to see what was happening but I didn't have a hoe," she said of the raid on the burial ground. "I said to someone, 'Give me your hoe, I want to dig too.'"

The first thing she found was clothing, then bones, and then gold.

"I dug downwards to the feet, and then I started upwards," she said. "I found the teeth and the skull. I moved them down around the feet and I cleared the ground around them with my hands. I saw the earrings, first on the left and then on the right."

She said they were exactly like the small gold rings she had worn in her ears as a girl until they were taken from her when she was forced to join a work brigade.

Srey Noeun said she had no idea whether she had ever met the woman whose grave she raided, and she said she did not know why the Khmer Rouge had let the woman keep her earrings.

Death and delay thwarts the quest for justice

Cambodian leader Hun Sen has pledged a quick start to genocide trials for former Khmer Rouge leaders.

After repeated failures over the past six months, Cambodian and foreign judges announced the rules for the tribunal on Wednesday, paving the way for it to begin investigating the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders over the deaths of 1.7 million during their 1975-79 communist rule.

However, observers said efforts to prosecute the remaining Khmer Rouge leaders face further hurdles.

"The hardest part has yet to come, and that is who and how many [suspects] should be or should not be" indicted, said Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, an independent group collecting evidence of the Khmer Rouge atrocities.

There is also a growing concern that ageing defendants could die before the trials begin.
"Cambodia can embrace ... a bright future only after this matter has been settled, the trials have been held and punishment will be given," Hun Sen said last month.

He himself was a junior Khmer Rouge member who defected from the group before the regime was toppled from power in 1979.

The top Khmer Rouge leader, Pol Pot died in 1998. Ta Mok, the Khmer Rouge army chief, died last July while in detention pending trial by the special tribunal. He was believed to be 80.

The only potential defendant now in custody is Kaing Khek Iev, also known as Duch, who headed the notorious S-21 torture centre in the capital, Phnom Penh.

Nuon Chea, the movement's chief strategist; Ieng Sary, the former foreign minister; and Khieu Samphan, the former head of state - live freely in Cambodia but are in declining health.

Cambodia and the United Nations created the genocide tribunal last year under an agreement they reached in 2003. The 17 Cambodian and 12 foreign judges and prosecutors have spent the past six months in sometimes rancorous disagreement on guidelines. The tribunal is an unprecedented hybrid. It will operate under the Cambodian judicial system, which is often criticised as weak and corrupt. Decisions require support from a majority of the Cambodian judges, backed by at least one UN-appointed judge.

Neither the Cambodian nor the foreign judicial officials have given details about their cases or revealed names and the number of potential suspects.

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Central African Republic

Official Website of the International Criminal Court
ICC Public Documents - Cases: Central African Republic

Security Council urges opposing Central African groups to hold dialogue
UN News Service
July 3, 2007

The Security Council today called on authorities in the Central African Republic (CAR) to hold a dialogue with the country’s opposition forces and civil society groups amid mounting concern at the continuing violence and instability in the impoverished country.

Council members, who heard a briefing from Lamine Cissé, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s Special Representative and the head of the UN Peacebuilding Support Office in the country (BONUCA), also said they remain willing to consider deploying a multi-dimensional UN mission to the northeast of the CAR and to neighbouring Chad.

In a statement to the press, Ambassador Wang Guangya of China, which holds the Council’s rotating presidency this month, said the 15-member panel was encouraging dialogue between the Government and others to try to consolidate peace and stability in the country.

“They encouraged the Government to continue its discussions with rebel groups in order to restore security to the whole territory, and called on these groups to act in accordance with the constitutional and legal framework by giving up any armed activity,” he said.

The security situation has been worst in recent months in the northwest and northeast, where fighting has forced an estimated 200,000 people to become internally displaced and thousands of others to flee to Chad or Cameroon as refugees.

In his most recent report on the work of BONUCA, the Secretary-General called the situation in the country extremely precarious, citing deteriorating humanitarian conditions, repeated violations of human rights, a culture of impunity, a lack of dialogue and tolerance between opposing groups, and persistent poverty and corruption.

Today’s statement called on Central African authorities to tackle impunity and expressed serious concern at the human rights situation and reports that Government forces have used disproportionate force in their fight against rebels.

The statement condemned the human rights and international humanitarian law violations by both sides in the conflict, and noted the continuing activities of armed bandits as well.
But it voiced appreciation for the efforts of the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa, which has deployed a multinational force in the CAR, as well as to the African Union and the European Union for maintaining their political and financial support.

The CAR is one of the poorest countries in the world, and the Council statement said the Government and its international partners must intensify their efforts to fight poverty and promote sustainable economic development.

Court Urged to Probe Officials
Institute for War and Peace Reporting
By Katy Glassborow
July 4, 2007

As it begins investigating the CAR conflict, the ICC is facing calls to adopt a more even-handed approach.

Human rights groups are urging Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, ICC, to do a better job of probing government officials as he embarks on his fourth investigation, in the Central African Republic, CAR.

After criticism for not seeming to look into the actions of government ministers who referred situations in their countries to the ICC - namely, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC - the prosecutor should probe senior officials as well as rebels in CAR to combat a perception that the court only investigates crimes committed by the latter, activists say.

If Moreno-Ocampo does not look at the role of governments which refer their situations to the court, “his arguments need to be convincing”, Geraldine Mattioli from Human Rights Watch, HRW, told IWPR. “Investigations are not complete or satisfactory if they do not looking into those who bear the greatest responsibility,” she said.

This is tricky for the ICC because it’s being asked to probe conflicts in which ministers and troops have played a substantial role. Indeed, on July 3, the UN Security Council expressed concern at reports that government forces in CAR have used disproportionate force to fight rebels.

Prosecutors looking into crimes committed in Uganda and the DRC seem to have focused on those by rebel groups in both countries, with arrest warrants issued for one member of the Union des Patriotes Congolais, UPC, in DRC and five leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army, LRA, in Uganda.

Prosecutors have been criticised by human rights groups for seeming to ignore the part government officials played in crimes against civilians.

CAR’s president François Bozize, a former army chief, referred the situation in his country to the ICC in December 2004, but he is inextricably linked with the violence the ICC is investigating, having led a failed coup against then-president Ange-Felix Patassé in 2002.

Bozize finally won power in 2003 after a protracted and bloody struggle, which involved civilians in and around the capital Bangui being killed and raped, with a pattern of widespread sexual violence, perpetrated by armed men, a central feature of the conflict.

This makes ICC staff awkward houseguests of the CAR government, reliant on its political will and logistical support for access to documents, unrestricted travel and a degree of security, while at the same time mandated to sort through all its dirty laundry, and hang it out to dry.

Although the Moreno-Ocampo has said that the focus of the initial investigation - which began in May - is on violence immediately following the 2002 failed coup, human rights violations persist with many civilians still subject to atrocities.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, cited the deteriorating situation in CAR’s north as the world’s most neglected crisis, with an estimated 200,000 people internally displaced and thousands of others forced to flee to Chad or Cameroon.

Tensions are compounded by government instability and a spillover of violence on its northern border from the Darfur region of Sudan and Chad.

Human rights groups say that ICC prosecutors must have an eye on those responsible for violence taking place today as well as that in the aftermath of the abortive coup.

“Prosecutors must investigate individuals in the current government who continue to commit atrocities with impunity,” said Godfrey Byaruhanga from Amnesty International, AI.

Human rights groups say that for the ICC to re-establish credibility as an impartial world court, prosecutors must look into the actions of the governments which refer their situations, regardless of the fact that their cooperation is needed to facilitate investigations.

Moreno-Ocampo says the CAR investigation will not target any particular suspect at this stage and will be guided solely by the evidence that emerges, with prosecutors pledging to investigate up the chain of command on all sides of the conflict.

Prosecutors investigating conflicts in Uganda, Darfur and the DRC have been criticised for indicting relatively middle-ranking rebel leaders and government “policy implementers”, instead of those who ultimately orchestrated violence.

Florent Geel from the International Federation for Human Rights, FIDH, said in DRC, the ICC gives the impression that maintaining a stable political climate was more important than rocking the boat by accusing key political figures of grave war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Ensuring political stability seems to have been such an important consideration that targeting the politicians and militias which human rights groups believe the most responsible, including ex-vice president Jean-Pierra Bemba and President Joseph Kabila, appears not to have been countenanced.

In February 2006, the relatively middle-ranking rebel leader Thomas Lubanga became the only Congolese to be charged by the ICC, for conscripting children to fight in the military wing of the UPC in Ituri, the far northeast region of the DRC.

The UPC is a Hema ethnic militia and Lubanga faces charges of kidnapping children and using them in frontline actions against the Lendu, the Hema's ethnic rivals, UN peacekeepers and the Congolese national army.

Human rights groups have urged the ICC to look into the suspected crimes of other rebel groups in the country, as well as those orchestrated by government officials. The court recently announced that a second arrest warrant will be released in the coming weeks, but which of the aforementioned will feature in it is unclear.

According to Geel, some victims groups in DRC feel the ICC has so far been manipulated by the government and do not see the court as credible, so will be interested to see if prosecutors go after another mid-ranking rebel or a weighty minister in the new indictment.

As in DRC, the insurgency in northern Uganda, sparked by the LRA, was referred by the government.

Five indictments were issued for the leaders of the LRA in July 2005, and now international and local human rights groups, including AI, are pushing for the ICC to look into alleged abuses by Uganda’s own military - the Uganda People’s Defence Force, UPDF - during the conflict.

“If the UPDF is under ICC investigation, this has not been made clear to the Ugandan government,” said Byaruhanga.

At the same time, Kampala’s enthusiasm for the court has waned, seemingly due to its failure to bring those it indicted to justice.

Some observers suggest that government disillusionment with the ICC may have prompted President Yoweri Museveni to enter peace talks with the LRA - hosted by the government of south Sudan in Juba - in which there have been discussions about alternative justice mechanisms and even offers of amnesties.

Other commentators are of the view that Museveni’s apparent change of heart towards the ICC stems from concerns that the court might soon begin to investigate Ugandan government and military officials. Striking a peace deal with the LRA would keep ministers and commanders away from the beady eyes of the ICC, and also placate some communities in the north who argue for peace to have precedence over justice.

Byaruha suggested that Bozize would not have referred his country to the ICC if he felt he could be investigated and held responsible for his actions during the coup attempt. “[The government] was unlikely to submit a referral including crimes committed by all parties to the conflict,” he said.

Beatrice le Frapper Du Hellen, who heads the ICC’s Jurisdiction, Complementarity and Cooperation Division, JCCD, which secures government cooperation, told IWPR that from the outset, authorities are made aware of the ICC’s independence and impartiality.

When talking to governments that refer their countries to the ICC, Du Hellen says she makes sure they understand that prosecutors will determine the focus of the investigation, and will not be swayed by the referral of the state.

“Authorities know we have no intention to lead a one-sided investigation,” said Du Hellen.

However, she admitted that that the most difficult part of any investigation is determining who bears most responsibility.

Despite the fact that prosecutors have already identified witnesses in CAR to prove crimes like organised and systematic mass rape took place after the failed coup, it is difficult to identify those who gave the orders for these crimes, say analysts.

And more of a challenge still if those individuals now hold positions of power in the CAR government.

During the ICC investigation into crimes in Darfur, prosecutors were forced to find witnesses in 17 countries outside Sudan because Khartoum does not recognise the ICC’s jurisdiction, and refuses to cooperate or provide any logistical support to prosecutors. The situation in Darfur was referred to the ICC not by Khartoum but the Security Council.

This investigation has led to two arrest warrants being issued - one for Janjaweed militia leader Ali Kushayb an another for Ahmad Harun, a former interior minister, who is now minister of state for humanitarian affairs in Darfur.

Du Hellen said that while prosecutors will lead the CAR investigation with government assistance, they “can do it without if necessary”, and that alleged crimes by government forces will also be probed.

Just how cooperative the CAR government will be remains to be seen. The omens are not good. Since Bozize’s government is struggling to run the country - with basic services in a state of collapse - it’s unclear how it will realistically provide logistical support for the ICC or access to documents and records, says Joel Charney from human rights group Refugees International.

Toby Lanzer, the UN humanitarian and development coordinator in CAR, told IWPR that “some stumbling blocks may arise” as the ICC investigation expands.

As head of state, Bozize has responsibility for crimes committed by CAR armed forces and presidential security units, known as the Presidential Guard, but Lanzer says this has only recently been made clear to the president.

“People [in CAR] are used to impunity as there is no tradition of the rule of law,” said Charney.

UN agencies have spent time with Bozize and senior ministers explaining that they are responsible for the actions of the Presidential Guard who are alleged to have torture and killed innocent civilians.

“Lines of accountability get smudged,” admitted Lanzer, who maintained, however, that the authorities are interested in clearing up crimes of the past and establishing the rule of law, to get away from an “all encompassing climate of impunity that has reigned in this country for far too long”.

But whether Bozize understood that referring CAR to the ICC could mean he is investigated for crimes committed before he became president, and ones that continue to be perpetrated under his presidency, remains a fairly critical unanswered question.

"It does not matter that the Bozize government referred the situation to the ICC. If anything, the ICC must demand and expect a greater level of cooperation from the government. The government must demonstrate that it was motivated by justice and not using the ICC to 'persecute' its opponents," said Byaruhanga

"The ICC has so far failed to demonstrate that being in power is not a basis for enjoying impunity. This has been the case in DRC and Uganda, with regard to suspects in positions of power."

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Democratic Republic of the Congo (ICC)

Official Website of the International Criminal Court
ICC Public Documents - Situation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

A Painful Way to Die
New York Times
June 25, 2007

If you think you face tough choices, imagine you were living here in eastern Congo.

“If women go to the fields, they’re raped,” said Shabain Katuija, a local man. “If they don’t go to the fields, they starve.”

So why don’t men go to the fields instead? Olivier Sbasoro, a villager here, explained:

“They rape the women, but it’s worse for the men, because they kill them or kidnap them to make them slaves.”

On this “win a trip” journey through central Africa with a teacher and a student, we’re visiting the forgotten war inside Congo. The death toll has already reached four million, making this the most lethal conflict since World War II.

The warfare has also caused a vast and potentially rich land to sink into hunger and poverty. Roads have returned to jungle, so as the rest of the world has gotten smaller, Congo has become bigger. When foreigners drove into a village that had been cut off by the insecurity, the local people hadn’t seen a vehicle for decades — and marveled at what they called the “walking house.”

After 10 years of warfare in Congo, much of the country is finally enjoying real progress, especially since U.N.-sponsored elections last year. But here in eastern Congo, war is ratcheting up again.

Grim shantytowns have been set up for some of the 150,000 people who have been driven from their homes by fighting since January. At one of these camps, I asked a chief if I could talk to a woman who had been raped recently. He introduced me to Angella Mapendo, whose husband had been killed and who was pregnant as a result of rape by soldiers.

When I had finished hearing Angella’s story, I looked up — and there was a growing line of other women who had been raped, all waiting to tell me their stories.

The tension is thick around Jomba, where a priest was executed recently for showing compassion and leadership. When we drove into Jomba, local people crowded around us to describe kidnappings, rape and murder by soldiers of various loyalties.

Peasants in some villages are now sleeping out in the bush every night, for fear that soldiers will raid their houses. At a local elementary school, I asked the children in one class how many had lost their fathers. Too many hands went up for me to count. (Many of the rapes and killings are by soldiers loyal to Laurent Nkunda. He’s the warlord whose mountain lair I wrote about a week ago.)

You can see videos of these sights, and read the terrific blogs of Leana Wen and Will Okun, the student and teacher accompanying me, at nytimes.com/twofortheroad. The U.N. World Food Program and a tiny number of aid groups are struggling to keep people alive. The effort is led by groups of heroic Catholic nuns and priests, supported by the aid group Caritas.

This war staggers on in part because the suffering here hasn’t registered on the international conscience, and because it has been allowed to fester and continue. Barack Obama and Sam Brownback are among the few prominent American politicians who have focused on the war here.

There’s no simple solution to the conflict, but we can lean on Rwanda to stop supporting its proxy force in eastern Congo, and also to work harder to repatriate Hutus who have destabilized Congo since they fled here after the genocide in 1994. We can push a peace process. We can support the U.N. peacekeepers. We can help with the reform and training of Congo’s security forces. And a six-hour visit by Condi Rice would help put the crisis on the map.

Of the many people I’ve met here, one I can’t get out of my mind is Cecilie Nyirahabinana, a young woman with a shrinking family. A few years ago, fighting led to famine and her two oldest children died. Her youngest, Anita, was still a baby and survived on Cecilie’s breast milk.

Then a couple of months ago, soldiers shot her husband dead. Since then, Cecilie has had nothing to feed Anita but green leaves.

So Anita is now skeletal and barely able to move, having slowly starved for months. Aya Schneerson, who runs the World Food Program office in the area, explained what Anita is going through: “These kids are in constant pain,” she said. “It’s a very painful way to die.”

And the way things are going, hundreds of thousands more will die that way.

Congo Court Clears Foreign Miners of War Crimes
Voice of America
by Joe Bavier
June 28, 2007

A military court in Democratic Republic of Congo has acquitted three former employees of Australian mining company Anvil Mining Limited of complicity in war crimes by government soldiers in 2004. Judges said the charges against the miners and nine Congolese soldiers were unfounded. Joe Bavier is in the capital, Kinshasa, and has more for VOA.

Canadian Pierre Mercier and South Africans Peter Van Niekerk and Cedric Kirsten had been accused of willfully offering logistical assistance to Congolese soldiers during a short-lived armed uprising in mineral-rich Katanga province.

A U.N. human rights investigation said civilians were massacred in the town of Kilwa, near the southeastern border with Zambia, when government forces launched a counter-attack to retake the town after it had been seized by a group of 10 ill-equipped rebels in October 2004.

The Anvil company runs the nearby Dikulushi silver and copper mine and the company's trucks and planes were used by the army during the operation.

Anvil said its vehicles were requisitioned by the military and it had no choice but to hand them over.

Van Niekerk, former security director at Dikulushi, and Mercier, Anvil's country manager at the time of the uprising, both returned to Congo to stand trial. Kirsten, believed to have been out of the country during the uprising, was judged in absentia.

All nine Congolese soldiers also on trial before the military tribunal were acquitted of war crimes. But two officers received life in prison for the killing of civilians; two other soldiers received shorter sentences for lesser crimes.

Anvil CEO Bill Turner said in a statement that he was pleased the court had cleared the men, who the company has always maintained acted appropriately at the time.

Congo is still emerging from a 1998-2003 war in which rebel groups and foreign armies battled for control over the vast central African nation's abundant natural resources.

An estimated four million people perished during the conflict, mainly from hunger and disease. And parts of the country continue to suffer outbreaks of violence, despite a U.N.-backed peace process and polls last year that elected President Joseph Kabila as Congo's first democratically chosen leader in four decades.

Unlike neighboring Rwanda, which launched a tribunal in Arusha, Tanzania, to judge those responsible for the country's 1994 genocide, Congo has made little effort to shed light on the dark events of its recent history.

Many had hoped the trial of the miners and soldiers, which received logistical support from Congo's U.N. peacekeeping mission, would help put an end to the climate of impunity that still reigns in the country.

Human rights campaigners decried the replacement of the court's military prosecutor in February, claiming they feared the move was a sign of political meddling. And victims' supporters said they were disappointed by the trial's outcome.

Shortly after reading the verdict human rights lawyer George Katiamba, who represented the victims and their families during the six-month trial, said he hoped the case could be brought before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

UN's Top Rights Official Concerned at Acquittals in Military Trial
UN News Service
July 4, 2007

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights today voiced concern at the recent decision by a military court in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to acquit all defendants of killings, torture and other abuses that occurred during an operation by the country's armed forces.

"I am concerned at the court's conclusions that the events in Kilwa were the accidental results of fighting, despite the presence at the trial of substantial eye-witness testimony and material evidence pointing to the commission of serious and deliberate human rights violations," said Louise Arbour of the verdict reached in late June in the DRC's Katanga Province.

"I am pleased that an appellate instance will have the opportunity to revisit these findings," she said, urging the appeals court to "fully and fairly weigh all the evidence before it reaches the appropriate conclusions that justice and the rights of the victims demand.

The High Commissioner also encouraged all competent authorities in the DRC to use all available legal means to bring justice to the victims of Kilwa.

In 2004, members of the country's armed forces (FARDC) regained control of Kilwa from a rebel group which had briefly occupied it.

In investigating the events, human rights officers of the UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) documented incidents of summary executions, torture, illegal detention and looting by the FARDC forces and concluded that little and sporadic fighting took place. Human rights non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have also investigated the events and reached similar conclusions.

In a statement released in Geneva, the High Commissioner criticized the military court's assumption of jurisdiction over civilians in this case. "It is inappropriate and contrary to the DRC's international obligations for military courts to try civilians. While military personnel can in principle be charged by court martial, civilians may not - they should be tried before fair and independent civilian courts."

The High Commissioner called on the Congolese Parliament to adopt as a matter of priority the bill implementing the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which would provide the civilian courts with clear jurisdiction for international crimes.

She recalled that during her visit to the country in May, the authorities had provided assurances of their commitment to the fight against impunity. "The victims of serious human rights violations demand concrete signs of such commitment, in the form of truth and justice," she declared. "That is only their right."

Peace 'in jeopardy' in DR Congo
BBC News
July 7, 2007

The gains of the Democratic Republic of Congo's peace process are at serious risk, the International Crisis Group has warned in a report.

"The national army is still the country's worst human rights abuser, while another crisis is looming in the east," the think tank said. ,/p>

President Joseph Kabila's election a year ago helped unify the country and bring some security, it said.

But governing institutions remain weak, abusive or non-existent.

Last year's historic elections were supposed to mark the end of years of conflict and mismanagement in DR Congo.

The ICG said Mr Kabila's government should make good on promises to respect opposition rights and stop using repressive violence in the west of country, where support for the opposition was strongest.

Amongst its other recommendations were:

Losing presidential candidate Jean-Pierre Bemba's security be guaranteed so he can return from the exile
Parliament, courts and media be free to serve as checks against "a worrying authoritarian drift"
A peace initiative for the Kivu regions in the east
The findings and recommendations of the mining contracts review must be made public and illegal contracts cancelled.

"If the new government does not live up its own promises to build a different [DR] Congo, it is likely to continue being perceived more as a nuisance than a legitimate authority," ICG's Francois Grignon said.

"Without clear signs of improvement before year's end, donor support will start shifting to other post-conflict theatres, and [DR] Congo could lose the peace-building gains of the past five years."

A 2002 peace deal officially ended a conflict dubbed "Africa's first world war" after it drew in the armies and rebel groups from at least other eight other countries.

The mineral-rich country the size of western Europe has hardly any roads or railways.

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Darfur, Sudan (ICC)

Official Website of the International Criminal Court
ICC Public Documents - Situation in Darfur, Sudan

Sudan: UN Steps Up Efforts to Deploy Heavy Support Package to Darfur
AllAfrica.com via UN News Service (New York)
June 27, 2007

A senior United Nations peacekeeping official said today that the world body is stepping up its preparations for the heavy support package to the war-ravaged Darfur region of Sudan, while efforts are under way to establish a hybrid UN-African Union force.

"We have a lot of work ahead of us," Hédi Annabi, Assistant Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations, said to reporters after briefing the Security Council.

The current focus is on expediting the deployment of the heavy support package, which is the second leg of the three-phase programme to support and enhance the under-resourced AU Mission in Darfur (AMIS), he said.

"Most, if not all" the offers necessary have been received, he noted, and the next step will be for potential contributors to visit Darfur to assess the situation to determine equipment needs.
Regarding the hybrid operation, the last phase of the programme, Mr. Annabi welcomed the Sudanese Government's unconditional support of a joint AU-UN peacekeeping force in Darfur following talks with a Council delegation earlier this month.

He added that the 15-member body will next adopt a resolution regarding the establishment of such a force, after which a budget must be prepared.

A large troop contributors' meeting will be held this Friday to discuss the "shape and form of this hybrid operation," the official said.

Mr. Annabi said that despite the challenges the new hybrid force - which will report to both the UN and the AU - could face, the two organizations are "committed to working together to coordinate their work so that the operation can work as smoothly as possible."

G8: Few Concrete Steps Proposed for Darfur
InterPress News Agency
By Michael Deibert
June 27, 2007

PARIS, Jun 27 (IPS) - This week's summit in Paris on the crisis in Sudan's Darfur region broke up with few concrete steps towards a rapid solution, analysts say.

This was despite public agreement among participants that more must done to stem a conflict that has claimed an estimated 200,000 lives, mainly civilians, since 2003.

The Jun. 25 conference, held at the bequest of France's new President Nicolas Sarkozy and his foreign minister Bernard Kouchner, brought together the Group of Eight industrialised nations (the United States, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and Japan) as well as China, which buys more than half of Sudan's oil exports.

Sudan itself was not invited to the conference, and member states of the African Union, the body of 53 African states formed in 2001 with the ostensible aim of integrating the region's currency and its defence forces, as well as promoting human rights, also did not attend.

But officials of the 22-nation Arab League, the United Nations and the European Union attended the conference.

"With the Sarkozy administration, Darfur was clearly going to be an area where France would upgrade its activities, and it's an area of common ground between Sarkozy and the foreign minister," Alex Vines, head of the Africa programme at Chatham House, a London think tank specialising in foreign policy and international affairs, told IPS.

Foreign minister Kouchner was previously best known as co-founder of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning charity group Medecins Sans Frontieres.

The conference concluded with the European Union pledging to spend 42 million dollars in addition to its current commitments to provide relief assistance to Darfur in coming months, with host France offering to contribute 13.5 million dollars to help finance any peacekeeping force.

"There are limits to how far this particular meeting in Paris can go but it is an important stepping stone to get a more coherent policy," said Vines.

Though initially the crisis centred around the Sudanese government's response to two non-Arab rebel groups, the Justice and Equality Movement and the larger Sudan Liberation Movement, which were waging war against the central government for its alleged victimisation of non-Arab residents in Darfur, the chaos engulfing Darfur has since grown in intensity and scope.

Sudanese military and government-aligned Janjaweed militia forces are accused of carrying out war crimes against the civilian population in the region, while the rebel groups themselves have splintered and re-formed with dizzying speed and in an ever-shifting array of alliances.

Various peace agreements between the sides lie in tatters. During recent months, the fighting has also spilled over Sudan's borders into neighbouring Chad and the Central African Republic. In March 2007, Janjaweed forces crossing into Chad were said to have killed up to 400 people in villages in that country's border region with Sudan.

Though the government of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashiral agreed to a November 2006 United Nations plan to strengthen an African Union force present in Darfur, it was accused of dragging its feet over implementation.

Earlier this month, under intense international pressure, the al-Bashiral government agreed to a combined United Nations and African Union peacekeeping force of more than 20,000 troops and civilian police, but observers doubt that the government in Khartoum will keep its word.

"We would hope that the Khartoum government would accept an international force in Darfur and that they stop bombing runs there," says Diagne Chanel, vice-president of Urgence Darfour, a group comprising more than 120 French civil rights, human rights and civil society organisations. "But we don't trust the Khartoum government because in the past they have always accepted peace agreements, while at the same time choosing war."

United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters before the conference that "the international community has not as of yet discharged its responsibilities very effectively." Addressing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in September 2004 after a visit to Sudan, then U.S. secretary of State Colin Powell declared that "genocide has been committed" in Darfur, and denounced what he said was a "consistent and widespread" pattern of atrocities against civilians there.

The United States and Britain have previously demanded that international sanctions be introduced against the Sudanese regime if it fails to open its doors to UN troops. The punitive steps would include the possibility of a no-fly zone over Darfur to prevent Sudanese military aircraft from attacking civilian targets.

Earlier this month, French military planes commenced airlifting food and relief supplies to refugee camps in eastern Chad housing the tens of thousands of Sudanese civilians that have fled there since October.

With the crisis having been labelled genocide, there would appear to be broad international cover for the UN to act.

Article One of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide states that parties adhering to the convention must "undertake to prevent and to punish" genocide "whether committed in time of peace or in time of war."

Article Five of the same convention states that signatories must "undertake to enact, in accordance with their respective Constitutions, the necessary legislation to give effect to the provisions of the present Convention, and, in particular, to provide effective penalties for persons guilty of genocide."

Meanwhile, the situation on the ground in Darfur continues to deteriorate, according to those who work there.

"The need now is greater than ever, there are more people displaced from their homes, there are more people dependant on the aid agencies," Alun McDonald, spokesperson for the relief agency Oxfam told IPS in a telephone interview from his base in Khartoum.

"And our ability to actually get to these people is worse now than it's been over the entire conflict. We're holding on at the moment, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to stay, our staff is being attacked every day."

Sudan welcomes new African Union peacekeeping chief for Darfur
International Herald Tribune
July 3, 2007

KHARTOUM, Sudan: The Sudanese defense minister welcomed on Tuesday the new force commander for the African Union mission to Darfur and said Khartoum was "ready to cooperate with all parties" to achieve piece in the violence-wracked western Sudan region.
Gen. Martin Agwai, from Nigeria, arrived in Sudan a day earlier to replace another Nigerian at the head of the current 7,000-strong AU mission that began to deploy in Darfur in June 2004.

The under-equipped and understaffed force has been struggling to bring a measure of peace back to the region, where over 200,000 people have died and 2,5 million fled from their homes since 2003, when local rebels took up arms against Khartoum.

Sudan's government denies accusations it retaliated by unleashing allied militias known as the janjaweed, but has refused to extradite a Cabinet minister and a suspected janjaweed chief wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes.

Sudan also resisted for months a Security Council plan for U.N. peacekeepers to replace the overwhelmed AU mission, before accepting in June a compromise deal for a "hybrid force" to deploy.

Defense minister Gen. Abdel Rahim Mohammad Hussein vowed Tuesday that his government would cooperate with the new AU force commander, who is also due to be in charge of UN troops once they arrive.

"Our government is ready to cooperate with all parties to achieve peace in Darfur," Hussein was quoted as telling Agwai by Sudan's official news agency.

However, the minister "stressed the role of African troops (in Darfur), because their understanding of the issue," SUNA said.

Prior to his appointment in Darfur, Agwai was chief of defense staff for the Nigerian armed forces.

He has also served as deputy force commander for the United Nations mission to Sierra Leone, and deputy military adviser at the department of peacekeeping operations at the U.N.'s headquarters in New York.

China Takes Credit for Sudan Allowing UN Peacekeepers
Voice of America News
By Daniel Schearf
July 5, 2007

China's special representative on Darfur says the Chinese government's dialogue with Sudan was key to Khartoum agreeing to allow United Nations peacekeepers into the conflict-ridden Darfur region. As Daniel Schearf reports from Beijing, China has become more active in trying to resolve the Darfur conflict after facing criticism for putting economic concerns above human rights.

China's special envoy on Darfur Liu Guijin said Thursday that Sudan's agreement last month to allow U.N. peacekeepers into Darfur "could not be separated" from the Chinese government's efforts on the issue.

"From the highest leader in China to relevant foreign ministry officials, we have always used our method of using our words and made use of every opportunity and channel in every aspect of work, especially with the Sudanese government," said Liu.

Khartoum for months dragged its feet on a U.N. plan to allow thousands of peacekeepers into Darfur to relieve overwhelmed African Union forces. Last month it finally signed approval for a hybrid force of AU and U.N. troops.

Liu visited Sudan and other African nations last month. He says the deployment will begin, at the earliest, at the end of this year, pending Khartoum's agreement on a date.

China has resisted sanctions against the African nation despite accusations Khartoum has supported militias responsible for mass killings and rape in Darfur that Washington has called "genocide."

President Bush has taken a "wait and see" attitude to Sudan's agreement to the U.N. deployment.

Liu says western nations should stop doubting Sudan's intentions and be more welcoming of the steps forward.

He compares Khartoum to a naughty child who needs to be rewarded for good behavior.
"It's just like a child. If you judge him to be a bad child, when he does something good you should give him a little encouragement and say some nice things," said Liu.

Human rights organizations say China, which buys two-thirds of Sudan's oil exports and sells arms to Khartoum, is more interested in money than in human rights, an accusation Beijing denies.

Liu says China was doing its best to ensure weapons sold to Khartoum did not end up in the wrong hands.

He says attempts to politicize Beijing's hosting of the 2008 Olympics by linking it to the Darfur situation could only be due to ignorance of China's efforts to resolve the conflict or from people maintaining a "Cold War" ideology.

More than 200,000 people have been killed and two million made homeless since 2003 when rebels and government forces began fighting in Darfur.

SUDAN: UN Says Ailing Environment a Key “Stress Factor”
InterPress News Agency
By Brian D. Pellot
July 6, 2007

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 6 (IPS) - A report by the U.N. Environment Programme assessing Sudan's environmental degradation, scheduled for a national launch in Khartoum on Jul. 8, has spurred debate for linking decades of conflict in the war-torn region to broader problems like climate change.

"Competition over oil and gas reserves, Nile waters and timber, as well as land use issues related to agricultural land, are important causative factors in the instigation and perpetuation of conflict in Sudan," the report says.

"Long-term peace in [Northern Darfur] will not be possible unless these underlying and closely linked environmental and livelihood issues are resolved."

Since the conflict in Sudan's Darfur region dramatically escalated in February 2003, when members of the region's ethnic African tribes took up arms against what they saw as decades of neglect and discrimination by the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum, the Darfurian people have been subject to government-sponsored displacement, rape and murder.

The violence orchestrated by the Sudanese government and perpetrated by its Janjaweed militias has claimed at least 400,000 lives, displaced 2.5 million people and left more than 3.5 million men, women and children struggling to survive amid violence and starvation, according to the U.N.

"There have been some people who thought that the report was simplistic in terms of linking climate change with conflict," Nick Nuttall, spokesperson for the executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP), told IPS. "Others say that it is absolutely necessary and a window onto a wider world."

The report says that flooding, deforestation, overgrazing due to explosive livestock growth and a marked decline in rainfall as a result of regional climate change have been "a significant stress factor" in Sudan's largely pastoral society.

UNEP's assessment offers the Government of National Unity, the Government of Southern Sudan and the international community dozens of recommendations to alleviate environmental degradation, but whether its recommendations are financially feasible and will have the potential to create sustainable results remains uncertain.

Amnesty International's representative at the U.N., Renzo Pomi, told IPS, "It's hard to talk about building a country like Sudan with conflicts going on. My impression is that the process will be very slow moving."

According to the assessment, the total cost of all recommendations, which are to be financed primarily by the Government of National Unity and the Government of Southern Sudan, is estimated at 120 million dollars over five years. This estimate, however, does not include several costly recommendations that were not factored into the bottom line.

Two recommendations in the report call for the Government of National Unity and the Government of Southern Sudan to "increase investment in environmental health-related infrastructure and services." The report goes on to state, "the investment required to attain even a basic level of service is anticipated to be in excess of USD 1 billion over a period of more than a decade" for each of the south and the north.

This additional estimate upwards of 2 billion dollars from two recommendations alone could effectively render the 120 million dollars and anticipated one to five-year corrective action timeframe cited in the assessment obsolete.

Andrew Morton, project manager of the report, explained to IPS his agency's decision to not include these recommendations, among others, in the 120-million-dollar estimate, stating, "I don't consider these to be environmental expenditures. They are what is needed to build the country."

Several other UNEP recommendations and stipulations are never fully developed or addressed in the report. One recommendation calling for Sudan to pursue expensive carbon sequestration technologies is estimated at just 300,000 dollars, and one to shut down Sudan's illegal ivory carving and trading industry is anticipated to be cost-free.

Both recommendations account for introduction alone, but do not include implementation, enforcement or an outlook toward sustainable development.

The assessment notes that, "Many governance recommendations will result in laws, policies and plans that will have a major economic impact. This follow-on cost is not included in the estimate."

Reforming an entire country will likely not be an inexpensive or quick process. "The report is designed to be alive and relevant for many years," Morton told IPS.

UNEP plans to maintain a central role in establishing the report's recommendations through at least 2009, if adequate funds are available. "We are close to securing significant funding," Morton told IPS, but he would not name potential bilateral sources.

Some outside experts worry that the deteriorating political situation may not allow for long-term sustainable development at this point.

"The great fear that I'm seeing is of a renewed war in the south," Sudan expert Eric Reeves told IPS. "There are good reasons to believe that war will resume, and if it does, it will be unfathomably destructive."

Sam Bell, advocacy director for the Genocide Intervention Network, told IPS, "We're advocating for a renewed peace process that brings together all of the disparate rebel factions. We can't solve this without a real peace process."

Such a process would likely rely on strengthened relations between the fledgling Government of National Unity and the Government of Southern Sudan.

The report states that the "wholehearted support" of more than 10 U.N. agencies, the Government of National Unity and the Government of Southern Sudan is "required for the implementation of many recommendations."

"You'll unlikely get 100 percent buy in right away," Morton said. "The whole idea is to show, through small successes, the benefits [of these recommendations]."

Benefits could be limited if international assistance, cited in the report as a force that "should play a strong role in the fields of climate change and disaster reduction," are as difficult to come by as some predict.

"The priority [in Sudan] is humanitarian assistance and stopping the conflict," Pomi told IPS. "I don't know how willing the donor community will be to give much money to Sudan to implement a long-term environmental project."

"You can't begin to address economic issues unless you look first at the political regime," Reeves warned IPS.

Fellow Sudan expert Alex De Waal expressed similar views in a column for the Social Science Research Council stating, "The most important culprit for violence in Darfur is government."

Both Reeves and De Waal have criticised recent U.N. actions that link environmental degradation to past and present African conflicts, most notably Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's June op-ed in The Washington Post in which he stated, "Amid the diverse social and political causes, the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change."

"Every Sudan expert has nothing but contempt for that piece and for Ban Ki-moon's comments," Reeves told IPS. "There is absolutely no indication in the op-ed that he begins to understand that political realities are essential."

[back to contents]

Uganda (ICC)

Official Website of the International Criminal Court
ICC Public Documents - Situation in Uganda

Uganda's boy soldier turned rebel chief is a victim, not a criminal, says his family
The Independent
By Lucy Hannan
June 27, 2007

Dominic Ongwen might be the youngest person ever charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

As one of four commanders in the Ugandan rebel movement the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), Ongwen is wanted in The Hague for "murder, abduction, sexual enslavement, mutilation, as well as mass burning of houses and looting". He is also charged with forcibly recruiting children as "fighters, porters and sex slaves".

The date of birth on Ongwen's arrest warrant is recorded as "unknown". But to his family, tracked down this week in Olwal, in the Gulu district of northern Uganda, he is remembered as a 10-year-old, one of thousands of children abducted in the 20-year conflict between the LRA and Uganda's government. He was taken from near his home in 1986. "He is a lost child," said Akot Madelena, Ongwen's aunt, who looked after him when his mother died.

His guardian, Madelena, who is heavily pregnant with her seventh child, believes there should be amnesty for child rebels. "If he needs punishment, let them give it at home, I am ready to look after him."

The eldest son, Ongwen was in effect a child farmer, responsible for three younger brothers. He rose early to work that morning in 1986. At 11am he started the 4km walk home, before it became too hot to work. "We were coming from digging and a group of men with guns took Dominic," said his cousin Kilama Christoper, now 28. "They took him because he was the biggest."

Terrified, Dominic did not resist or beg.

The LRA's fighting force is made up primarily of child soldiers, many forced into gruesome killing rituals to cut them off from their communities. Humanitarian agencies say 20,000 children have been abducted or killed in the war, and nearly two million people displaced. Ongwen was indicted by the ICC in July 2005, along with four others, including Joseph Kony, the LRA's head. But his circumstances present "a fundamental dilemma", an ICC source in Uganda acknowledges, as he is a "veteran child soldier". The ICC does not prosecute minors; but Ongwen was an adult at the time of the charges.

Andre Laperriere, of the ICC Trust Fund for Victims, in northern Uganda, said child soldiers and abductees are "among the most victimised". He said thousands of children in northern Uganda had "completely lost their childhood... forced into terrible acts during the war".

Peace talks with the government are precarious because the LRA insists no settlement can be made until ICC charges are lifted and an alternative justice system is agreed.

Many civil and political leaders in Uganda also see the ICC warrants as an obstacle and say that local justice is preferable. The opposition leader Morris Oyengo-Latigo, said: "Most of the so-called fighters are victims, who were abducted, subjugated to mental torture and transformed into a fighting force. And the challenge is, when does somebody become responsible?"

Under the traditional justice of mato oput, the community forgives crimes of the past and reconcile.

A few kilometres from Olwal, in Pagak Camp, people hold another traditional ceremony to cleanse the camp of "evil spirits". This is the site of one of the worst massacres of the war. In May 2004, 50 women, some with babies, were made to lie in the grass and bludgeoned to death by the LRA.

"We can forgive but not forget," said one Pagak resident. "The LRA leaders must be punished."

LRA talks reach agreement on accountability
IRIN
June 30, 2007

JUBA - Peace talks between the Ugandan government and the rebel Lord's Resistance Army inched closer to success on 29 June with a late-night agreement on the principles for handling accountability and reconciliation for crimes committed during the conflict in northern Uganda.

The agreement, which deals with the third item on the talks' five-point agenda, will incorporate both the formal legal system and traditional mechanisms to achieve accountability and reconciliation for crimes committed by both sides during the two-decade-long conflict.

Mato Oput is an elaborate reconciliation ceremony of the Acholi people of northern Uganda, who are among the communities worst affected by the war. Similar reconciliation ceremonies are held by ethnic communities across the region affected by the conflict, and all processes will be incorporated into the accountability and reconciliation agreement.

"This agenda item was make or break for these talks, and I'm happy we have come out on the positive side," Captain Barigye Ba-Hoku, the Ugandan delegation spokesman, told IRIN. "We discovered that neither the usual legal system nor the traditional system were sufficient to achieve accountability for crimes on such a large scale."

Barigye acknowledged that despite having reached agreement, the International Criminal Court's outstanding arrest warrants remained a stumbling block to the talks.

"We know the ICC's main problem is the issue of impunity; we hope that once all agenda items are signed we will be able to go to them and present an argument that our agreement ensures that the commission of crimes in the conflict does not go unpunished," he added. "Each person who committed a crime will be held individually accountable and will be punished accordingly."

The agreement also provides for reparations, in the form of rehabilitation, restitution, compensation, guarantees of non-recurrence, apologies, memorials and commemorations. It also takes into account the 'special needs' of women, girls and children.

Discussions on the subject have taken the better part of one month; the signing was presided over by lead mediator for the talks and Vice President of the Government of Southern Sudan Riek Machar. S. P. Kagoda signed on behalf of the Ugandan government, while Martin Ojul, signed on behalf of the LRA delegation.

In order for agenda item three to be wrapped up, however, both parties need to agree on the mechanisms of its implementation. The parties agreed to return to their constituencies for consultations and will return on 29 July to finalise discussions.

"This is just the first part; we now have to thrash out the modalities of how these principles will work in practice," the LRA's Justin Labeja told IRIN.

Since August 2006, talks have been underway in Juba, capital of Southern Sudan, to end over 20 years of hostilities that have devastated northern Uganda and displaced more than one million of the region's residents.

The five-point agenda:

- Cessation of hostilities and LRA assembly at designated points in Sudan

- Comprehensive solutions to the conflict; tackling the root causes of the conflict

- Accountability and reconciliation

- Ceasefire agreement

- Demobilisation, disarmament, reintegration

Uganda, rebels agree local justice for war crimes
Reuters
By Tim Cocks
July 2, 2007

KAMPALA - Uganda has agreed to handle war crimes committed by northern rebels internally, moving closer to protecting insurgent leaders from international arrest warrants they say will prevent them from signing a final peace deal.

In an accord signed over the weekend by Uganda's government and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), Kampala stops short of promising to shelter rebel leaders from war crimes indictments issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

But the agreement -- the third in a five-stage deal to end one of Africa's longest wars -- says Uganda has "national laws capable of addressing the human rights violations during the conflict", according to a copy seen by Reuters on Monday.

The ICC has issued warrants for LRA leader Joseph Kony, his deputy commander Vincent Otti, and two other senior rebels for mass murder, mutilation and using child soldiers in the 20-year war, which has been on hold since a truce last August.

But Otti said the rebels would move no further towards a final peace deal until the ICC is called off.

"Now we've signed this, we want to see progress on the government side with the ICC. The government now should go to the ICC and get them to withdraw the warrants," Otti told Reuters by satellite phone from his Congolese jungle hideout.

"We shall go for national reconciliation only after the indictments have been withdrawn. We shall see about penalties and national courts later."

The Ugandan government has argued the LRA's only hope of avoiding the ICC warrants was to sign a deal, undergo national tribunals for crimes, and then approach the international court's judges.

"ALTERNATIVE JUSTICE"

The weekend agreement is vague on punishment and the government only promises to "address conscientiously the question of the ICC arrest warrants relating to the leaders of the LRA".

ICC officials were not immediately available for comment.

The deal outlines "alternative justice mechanisms" to promote reconciliation and traditional justice processes.

Traditional leaders from Kony's Acholi tribe, who have borne the brunt of the conflict, want the LRA undergo a "Mato Oput" reconciliation ritual, where victims effectively forgive a murderer after he admits his crime and pays compensation.

Human rights groups reject that, saying a credible process must dish out harsher penalties.

The new agreement hints that punishments for grave crimes, many of which carry the death sentence in Uganda, will be softer or suspended for the sake of national reconciliation.

"Formal courts and tribunals established by law shall ... introduce a regime of alternative penalties (to) ... replace existing penalties," it said.

In neighbouring Rwanda, traditional "gacaca" courts trying people suspected of involvement in the 1994 genocide have been criticised for being slow and biased.

Uganda says setting up special courts for rebels
Reuters
By Tim Cocks
July 4, 2007

KAMPALA - Uganda said on Wednesday it will set up a special tribunal to deal with war crimes allegedly committed by northern rebels during a 20-year conflict, but that it would not handle charges of abuse by the Ugandan army.

The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) guerrillas immediately rejected the move as a breach of a deal signed on Saturday that aims to end a war that has killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted nearly 2 million more.

Internal Affairs Minister Ruhakana Rugunda, who has led Ugandan government negotiators at nearly a year of peace talks in neighbouring southern Sudan, told journalists both parties would have to agree on the details of penalties for crimes.

"It would be premature for us to give specifics. Sentences, courts, etc, will only be arrived at after consultations by ourselves and the LRA," he said.

At the weekend, the LRA and the government signed phase three of a five-stage peace deal.

Phase three deals with accountability for war crimes and promises to use a national process, implicitly rejecting calls to hand over the rebels' top commanders to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague.

LRA leader Joseph Kony and three others are wanted for crimes including murder and using child soldiers, but say they will never make peace unless the ICC drops the charges.

"What we are working for is that all these people should be handled in Uganda," Rugunda said.

DECEIT?

But he said only LRA fighters will face tribunals, because the national army, the Uganda People's Defence Forces (UPDF), already has existing courts marshal for punishing soldiers.

Rugunda said the military courts had dealt harshly with many wayward troops in the past, but LRA representatives rejected the creation of special tribunals for the rebels.

"This is deceit," the head of the LRA delegation at the peace talks, Martin Ojul, told Reuters. "Accountability has to apply to both parties, as in our agreement. Is that justice if only one side is held accountable?"

Phase three does not say whether government troops will face justice but a clause in an earlier draft saying "accountability shall apply to both state and non-state actors," was removed.

Analysts said the LRA were maybe too soft in negotiations.

"There is incriminating evidence on both parties. The terms of the agreement suggest the LRA delegation was wrong-footed," said Tim Allen of the London School of Economics, an expert on Uganda's conflict.

Leaders from Kony's Acholi tribe want the LRA to undergo a "Mato Oput" reconciliation ritual, where victims forgive a murderer after he admits his crime and pays compensation. Rights groups reject that.

"Penalties need to fit the gravity of the crimes," said Richard Dicker of Human Rights Watch. "We're not talking about pickpocketing, we're talking about mass murder, rape, mutilation."

Rugunda said the tribunal would blend "existing formal justice, which is punitive, and the traditional cultural mechanisms which promote reconciliation," but added that amnesties would be possible.

LRA Rejects Plea to Free Captives
Institute for War and Peace Reporting
By Samuel Okiror Egadu
July 4, 2007

Rebels dismiss government appeal for the release of people held against their will.

Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, LRA, insurgents have said they will only release thousands of captured women and children after a final peace agreement with the government.

The government has appealed to the LRA high command based in its main Garamba National Park forest base, in the northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC, to free people who are being held against their will.

But in a satellite telephone interview with IWPR, the LRA’s second-in-command Vincent Otti said the captives would only be allowed to emerge from bush hideouts alongside rebel soldiers once the fighting is officially over.

Uganda's president Yoweri Museveni referred the country's 21-year civil war in the north to the International Criminal Court in December 2003. In July 2005, the ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo issued arrest warrants for five senior LRA figures - its leader Joseph Kony and top commanders Otti, Raska Lukwiya, Okot Odhiambo and Dominic Ongwen. Lukwiya died in combat last year. The LRA leaders are accused of abduction, sexual enslavement, mutilation and the killing of civilians.

“We are not going to release anybody,” Otti told IWPR. “For what purpose would the rest of us be left behind? We are all going to come out together after the signing of the peace agreement. We are currently talking peace.

“Why should we release the children? Have they been in prison? The children we have here [in the bush] are our own children. They were born in the bush.”

Reacting to Otti’s remarks, the deputy leader of the government delegation at the peace talks, Henry Okello Oryem, who is also he minister for international relations, said, “It’s the wish and the prayer of the government of Uganda for the LRA to release all children, women and any other persons in captivity against their will.”

Speaking to IWPR from Juba, the South Sudan capital where the peace negotiations are taking place, he added, “The LRA should release these children so that they go back to school and the women so they can be reintegrated with their families.”

A recent report documenting violence in the two decades-long conflict in northern Uganda said that as many as 38,000 children and 37,000 adults have been abducted and forced to join the rebels. The report, entitled Abduction: the Lord's Resistance Army and Forced Conscription in Northern Uganda, was compiled by researchers from the University of California Berkeley's Human Rights Centre and Tulane University's Centre for International Development.

“More work is needed to identify the number of people who have gone missing in northern Uganda and to investigate their whereabouts," said the report. "Cross-cultural studies have shown that most families wish to know the fate of their missing relatives and, if they have died, to receive their remains.”

Uganda’s human rights commissioner Veronica Bichetero Eragu met Otti in an undisclosed location on June 22 in a bid to secure the release of women and children still held captive by the LRA.

“The objective was: how do we handle these people when the time comes for them to go home?” said Bichetero Eragu. “We need to prepare them for life after the final ceasefire. How do they melt back into society? Some might need to go back to school, while others might need vocational education.

“He (Otti) encouraged me to make a follow-up. So the door is open for further discussion and consultation.”

Otti, in his conversation by satellite phone with IWPR, said children who have been abducted by the rebels are now adolescents or older, and some have become fathers. “We don’t have children here. Those whom we abducted are no longer children. They are now grown-ups,” he said.

The Berkeley-Tulane Universites report noted that the majority of former abductees who escape and are admitted to government and non-government organisation reception centres in northern Uganda are between ten and 18 years old. Female escapees tend to be older, between 19 to 3. They stayed longer with the LRA than males, serving as long-term sexual partners and fearing to risk escape for the sake of their children.

“Women forced to serve as ‘wives’ are likely to be kept in encampments and villages located a distance from combat zones, offering less opportunity to escape, surrender or be captured by [Ugandan] army troops,” said the report.

Otti said the rebels will continue with the Juba peace talks, but say there can be no final peace deal until the arrest warrants against LRA leaders are withdrawn. “The indictments in The Hague are the major obstacle to the peace process. We shall continue with the talks as we wait for ICC to drop the charges,” said Otti.

Talks between the two sides began in July 2006, raising hopes for an end to a civil war that has displaced nearly two million people and resulted in an estimated 100,000 deaths.

ANALYSIS-Uganda rebel deal leaves questions over justice
Reuters
By Tim Cocks
Jul 5, 2007

GULU, Uganda - It is not often that families of murder victims petition the courts to forgive their killers.

But in Uganda, almost an entire tribe whose relatives were slaughtered and children kidnapped by Lord's Resistance Army rebels are lobbying for them not to be tried before an international tribunal.

Fugitive LRA leader Joseph Kony and three deputies are wanted by The Hague-based International Criminal Court on charges including mass killing, mutilation and using child soldiers. But in northern Uganda, few want them jailed.

"They should forgive Kony," said Walter Akena, a 28-year-old resident of one of Uganda's refugee settlements, as grubby children with swollen bellies and torn T-shirts gathered round.

"We want to end this mayhem. Forgiveness starts a new life, bringing people together," he says, adding that he feels no anger towards the rebels who killed two of his brothers.

On Saturday, the government and LRA signed phase three of a five-stage deal at talks in south Sudan aiming to end a 20-year war that killed tens of thousands of people and uprooted 1.7 million, creating one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

The LRA routinely hacked off the lips and ears of victims, butchered thousands and kidnapped children to use as fighters, porters and sex slaves.

Nearly the entire population of northern Uganda -- almost all the Acholi tribe -- was forced to take refuge in squalid camps where many complained of abuse at the hands of Ugandan soldiers.

Analysts say only an agreement that allows the LRA to avoid jail and save face will coax them out of their forest hideouts and end the nightmare of war.

"DELUSIONAL"

The phase three document handles accountability for war crimes, but is vague on penalties. "Uganda has institutions under national laws capable of addressing human rights violations," it says, implying a rejection of the world court.

For the LRA, that means the government, which requested the ICC indictments in 2005, must get them scrapped.

"The challenge is for the government to go to the ICC and show we don't need them," LRA deputy commander Vincent Otti, an indictee, told Reuters by phone from his Congolese hideout.

But analysts say only the ICC's pre-trial judges can remove the indictments and cannot do so on political grounds.

"The ICC indictments can't be wished away," says Phil Clark, a research fellow at the Ulster University's Transitional Justice Institute. "All parties need to operate on this understanding -- anything else is delusional."

The government says it will set up a tribunal for rebel crimes, with possible amnesties, but has infuriated the LRA by saying the Ugandan army, which has also been accused of abuses, will not face these processes.

"Justice that is one-sided won't stick," says Ron Atkinson, an expert on northern Uganda at South Carolina University. "The government does not ... have a serious intention ... for both sides to face justice."

Both sides agree there are softer alternatives to jail.

Leaders of Kony's Acholi tribe suggest reconciliation rituals during which a murderer faces relatives of the victim and admits his crime.

In "Mato Oput", both drink a bitter brew made from a tree root mixed with sheep's blood. Compensation is sometimes paid.

"ARROGANT"

U.S.-based Human Rights Watch says such rituals are unacceptable, because credible justice must dish out punishments to fit crimes. Proponents disagree.

"Justice is in the mind," says Norbert Mao, lawyer and chairman of Gulu district, at the heart of the conflict. "Once people believe something has been done which puts the abomination behind them, it allows reconciliation."

Mao thinks those insisting on retribution have missed the point. "The purpose is to prevent revenge. It is arrogant to dismiss traditional justice as an excuse for impunity."

Critics say that approach is insulting to northerners who have borne the brunt of the conflict.

"The local justice approach seems to infantilise the north, implying it is not ready for modern governance," says Tim Allen, expert on Uganda's conflict at the London School of Economics.

Officials admit any sentences for LRA found guilty of crimes would have to be reduced from those in national law, which include death. Amnesties would be offered, which would not please ICC judges.

Foreign Affairs Minister Oryem Okello says amnesties for grave crimes were used in Northern Ireland, South Africa and neighbouring Rwanda, where traditional "gacaca" courts have levelled lesser punishments for the country's 1994 genocide.

Traditional justice, say the Acholi, will be enough.

"We slaughter goats, we eat together, we are reconciled," says Morris Okello, 28, whose parents were killed by rebels.

[back to contents]

International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)

Official Website of the ICTY

Del Ponte: No EU-Serbia pact before Mladic arrest
Reuters
By Mark John
June 26, 2007

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union should not grant closer ties to Serbia until former Bosnian Serb military commander Ratko Mladic is arrested, United Nations war crimes prosecutor Carla del Ponte said on Tuesday.

Del Ponte hailed signs the new Serb government is ready to cooperate with her tribunal in bringing to justice the top war crimes indictee in the Balkans and urged the 27-member bloc not to soften its stance after years of fruitless pressure.

"There should be no signing of the SAA (Stabilisation and Association Agreement) before Ratko Mladic is arrested and full cooperation established," del Ponte, who is due to end her term in mid-September, told a hearing of the European Parliament.

Mladic is charged with genocide over the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims.

The EU froze talks last year on an SAA -- a first rung on the ladder to membership of the bloc -- and accused Belgrade of dragging its heels in the hunt for indicted war criminals.
It restarted the talks this month after the arrest of Bosnian Serb general Zdravko Tolimir, a close Mladic aide, but made the conclusion of an accord dependent on full cooperation. It left open whether Mladic's arrest was a precondition.

Some European capitals argue the EU should grant Serbia closer ties to bolster the position of pro-EU moderates, and as a form of compensation for losing Kosovo, the breakaway Serb province for which a U.N. plan envisages independence.

Del Ponte said the new coalition government in Serbia had understood the importance of handing over the last four fugitives sought by the Hague war crimes court and appeared to have the political will to arrest Mladic.

"It should be work done by the end of this year," she told the committee, noting the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was under international pressure to complete all trials on its books by next year.

"At the moment things are going well."

Del Ponte said Mladic was believed to be in Serbia, but that the whereabouts of former Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, also indicted for genocide, were unknown.
"He has disappeared off my screen," she acknowledged, adding she had no information to back up rumors he was in Russia or had visited Russia.

With a few weeks to go until the end of her term, del Ponte renewed complaints the Hague tribunal had not received sufficient international backing to get through its caseload and had run up against political interference in its work.

She said the international presence in Kosovo, which has been administered by the United Nations since 1999, had impeded the tribunal's work there, citing "favoritism" which "became a serious obstacle to the process of justice".

NATO, EU force raid house of Karadzic's wife
Reuters
June 29, 2007
By Zeljko Debelnogic

PALE, Bosnia June 29 (Reuters) - NATO and European Union soldiers on Friday raided the house of the wife of Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic, looking for traces of him and the network supporting him.

Karadzic, Bosnian Serb leader in the 1992-95 war in which some 100,000 people were killed and who is wanted on charges of genocide by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, has been on the run for 10 years.

"We are looking for items of interest to ICTY and for information about Karadzic's support network," NATO spokesman Derek Chappell told Reuters by telephone.

ICTY's Chief Prosecutor Carla del Ponte told the European Parliament on Tuesday she had no idea where Karadzic was hiding though he had to be somewhere in the Balkans.

Chappell said the operation was led by the EU peacekeeping force (EUFOR) with extra back-up from the Bosnian Serb police.

A Reuters cameraman said some 30 EUFOR and NATO vehicles blocked entrances to Karadzic's house in Pale, in the mountains east of Sarajevo, while Italian paramilitary carabinieri conducted the search.

NATO and EUFOR have raided houses of the Karadzic family on several occasions and even detained his son in 2005, but they have failed to find one of the world's most wanted man.

He and his military commander and fellow fugitive Ratko Mladic have both been indicted twice for genocide by the ICTY.

There have been no credible reported sightings of Karadzic for several years.

The two fugitives were charged over the 43-month siege of Sarajevo and the July 1995 massacre of up to 8,000 Muslims in the eastern U.N. "safe area" of Srebrenica.

Two more ethnic Serbs, one from Bosnia and one from Croatia, are also sought by the ICTY to stand war crimes trials.

Del Ponte: Gotovina Was Located by a Phone Call
BIRN
July 4, 2007

Brussels _ The Croatian authorities were able to locate the fugitive general, Ante Gotovina, after he made a phone call to his wife, Carla Del Ponte, the Chief Prosecutor for the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague, confirmed.

"It was a telephone conversation from Gotovina to his wife,” Del Ponte said. Del Ponte was speaking at a debate organized by the Brussels-based think tank, the European Policy Center.

The telephone conversation helped Croatia’s authorities to trace the general’s precise location, which was considered a pure stroke of luck. “They [the Croat authorities] were able to intercept the conversation. They knew it was him… [because] he spoke also about me”, Del Ponte added.

Croatia’s EU accession talks were put on ice on March 17, 2005, after the Zagreb authorities failed to meet a deadline to arrest and transfer the indicted general to The Hague.

Later that year, on October 3 in Luxemburg, Del Ponte announced that Croatia was “fully cooperating” and the talks resumed. Gotovina was arrested in Spain in December of the same year.

The Chief Prosecutor said the Gotovina case offered proof of the success of the policy of conditionality applied by the European Union.

She explained that it had been very complicated to convince the authorities to act over Gotovina because he was widely considered a war hero in Croatia for his role during the war of independence in the 1990s.

How the mighty are falling
The Economist
July 5, 2007

The beginning of the end of impunity for the world's once all-powerful thugs

AS THE world's first permanent war-crimes court celebrates its fifth birthday this week, the mood is upbeat: formal investigations are under way in four countries; it has issued eight arrest warrants; it is about to gain its 105th member, Japan; its first trial begins in the autumn, and America, once hostile, now sounds decidedly more friendly. Indeed, the administration recently said it would, if asked, consider assisting the court's work on Darfur.

So far, the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is allowed to investigate atrocities perpetrated since its founding in July 2002, has no big scalps to display. Its eight accused comprise five leaders of the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda, a janjaweed leader in Darfur, a Sudanese government minister and a Congolese warlord. But it has at least one ex-president, Ange-Félix Patassé of the Central African Republic, in its sights, and more may be targeted soon.

So these are uncomfortable times for tyrants, past or present. They used to be able to escape justice through brutality at home, or if that failed, fleeing abroad. Now justice's arms are looking longer and more muscular. This week Charles Taylor, a notorious Liberian ex-president and warlord, appeared at Sierra Leone's Special Court, transferred to The Hague, on 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Justice may also be catching up with Hissène Habré, Chad's former president. After living in exile in Senegal for the past 17 years, he is now facing trial before a special war-crimes court set up by the Senegalese government earlier this year on the orders of the African Union. It was only after Belgium had threatened to try Mr Habré under its “universal jurisdiction” law that African leaders decided to abandon their tradition of mutual protection and vote for his prosecution by one of their own.

In Iraq, Saddam Hussein's cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majid, better-kno
wn as “Chemical Ali” for killing tens of thousands of Iraqi Kurds with poison gas, was last month sentenced to death by an American-sponsored court along with two other henchmen. Mr Hussein himself and two close allies have been executed. More expect the same fate as the trials continue.

Like Chile's Augusto Pinochet and Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic, the leader of Cambodia's Khmers Rouges, Pol Pot, managed to escape justice by dying. But his surviving underlings may not be so lucky. Last month the final obstacle to the long-promised genocide trials of an expected dozen or so Khmer Rouge leaders was removed when agreement was reached on the rules of procedure for the special “hybrid” international tribunal, set up by the UN and the Cambodian government.

In Lebanon, where attempts to create a special court to try the assassins of Rafik Hariri, the country's former prime minister, have been going on for more than a year, the Security Council has at last decided to take the bull by the horns, voting to set up a tribunal “of international character” without the approval of Lebanon's deadlocked parliament. Lebanon is already holding eight suspects, including four Syrian generals. Syria, and its Lebanese protégés, Hizbullah, have denounced the decision.

Extradition adds another dimension, giving national justice systems a global reach. Two Argentine judges want Spain to send Isabel Perón, the country's former president, home to face a war-crimes trial. Peru is pressing Chile to agree the extradition of its former president, Alberto Fujimori, on human-rights and corruption charges.

It is easy to pooh-pooh international courts. After the creation of the world's first international war-crimes tribunals in Nuremberg and Tokyo at the end of the second world war, it took nearly half a century before another one was established—the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), set up by the UN in The Hague in 1993. But since then, progress has been impressive. Of the 161 people the ICTY has indicted, only four are still on the run; 59 have been convicted.

The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, set up the following year, has done rather less well. Of the 70 or so indicted, 18 are still at large, including Félicien Kabuga, a multi-millionaire and alleged bankroller of the 1994 genocide. But among the 28 so far convicted are Rwanda's former prime minister, Jean Kambanda, and seven of his ministers.

The ICTY's fugitives include, of course, two of its most wanted suspects—Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader, and his top general, Ratko Mladic. But since last month's arrest of Zdravko Tolimir, Mr Mladic's top aide, hopes have again been raised of the general's possible imminent arrest. Indeed, Carla Del Ponte, the court's chief prosecutor, came back from a visit to Serbia last month saying that Belgrade had told her that “they will give me Mladic”.

Few of these once-powerful gentlemen (and one lady) ever dreamed that they would—or could—be held to account for their past crimes. But times have changed. As Libya's president, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, said anxiously when his former protégé, Liberia's Mr Taylor, was handed over to Sierra Leone's Special Court last year after three years on the run: “This means that every head of state could meet a similar fate. It sets a serious precedent.” Fingers crossed.

Judges refuse to delay war crimes trial of Bosnian Muslim general to Sarajevo
International Herald Tribune
July 5, 2007

THE HAGUE, Netherlands: U.N. judges on Thursday refused to delay the trial of a former Bosnian army commander, after prosecutors asked for the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal case to be halted and transferred to Sarajevo.

Earlier in the day, prosecutors filed an urgent motion saying they wanted the trial of retired Gen. Rasim Delic on charges of murder, rape and cruel treatment moved because tribunal judges have limited the number of witnesses they can call.

"It is very serious," said prosecution spokeswoman Olga Kavran. "A week before trial the judges ruled on our witness list that was submitted eight or nine months ago."

Prosecutors originally wanted to call 91 witnesses but trimmed their list to 75. Judges have now said they can call no more than 55.

Tribunal judges did not immediately react directly to the motion to transfer the case, but in a brief written ruling refused to delay the start of Delic's trial in The Hague, which is due to start Monday, saying prosecutors have enough time and witnesses to prove their case.

"It would not be in the interests of justice to suspend the trial at the present stage of the case," the judges' ruling said.

Judges and prosecutors at the tribunal are coming under increasing pressure from the United Nations, which foots the multimillion dollar court bill, to finish their work quickly. The court is due to shut down in 2010.

Delic is one of the highest-ranking Bosnian Muslims to appear at the tribunal, which has indicted more than 160 suspects, the vast majority of them Serbs.

The former head of the Muslim-dominated Bosnian Army is charged with failing to prevent Bosnian troops and Islamic fighters known as mujahadeen from gunning down 24 Croat prisoners in June 1993.

Prosecutors say he also failed to punish mujahadeen fighters who in July 1995 captured a group of Bosnian Serb soldiers and beheaded two of them.

Delic's indictment said the remaining prisoners were eventually taken to a detention facility called Kamenica Camp, where another Bosnian Serb soldier was decapitated by the mujahadeen fighters who then forced the remaining prisoners to kiss the head. It said the head was later hung on a hook in the room where the prisoners were kept.

The Mujahadeen also are accused of raping three Bosnian Serb women and murdering other Serb prisoners in September 1995.

Prosecutors say Delic was warned the Mujahadeen "had a propensity to commit crimes, and particularly crimes against captured enemy combatants and civilians" but failed to take any action against them.

Delic surrendered to the court after he was indicted in 2005. He deni