Lessons From the Mandate of the International Criminal Court in the Hague

 Dominic Ongwen,  Photo ICC-CPI /via REUTERS

"Abductees were beaten for walking too slowly. One abductee was forced to kill another abductee with a club and forced to inspect corpses. Another abductee was forced to watch someone being killed. Some mothers were forced to abandon their children on the side of the road; one child was left on a rubbish pit."

"Civilians were shot, burned and beaten to death. Children were thrown into burning houses, some were put in a polythene bag and beaten to death."

Presiding Judge Schmittm International Criminal Court ruling against LRA ex-commander Dominic Ongwan

 

"[The Court] took the unprecedented step of reading out the names of a number of individual victims [of Ongwen's and the LRA's crimes]."

"While this case is important, redress must extend to the thousands of victims of the LRA's abductions, killings and mutilations, who still have not seen justice for the harms they have suffered."

Seif Magango, Amnesty's deputy director, East Africa, the Horn and Great Lakes

 

"I was abducted like Ongwen too, but he was a commander in the LRA, so he should be given the maximum sentence, considering what they did to me and lots of children from this region. The ruling today has touched me very much."

"When I was taken in 1996, I was two months' pregnant. We walked for hours between the border with Uganda and Sudan. Along the way, the rebels asked if any of us had an issue that meant we couldn't continue on the journey. I put my hand up."

"The commander asked the young soldiers to beat us with sticks. They said they would have to kill one of us that day, to discourage the young ones from trying to escape. They beat me all over the stomach and chest."

Former abductee

Thursday's ruling in The Hague was watched live by people in Gulu - not far from the Lukodi refugee camp   AFP

ICC Trial Chamber IX, composed of Judge Bertram Schmitt, Presiding Judge, Judge Péter Kovács and Judge Raul Cano Pangalangan, analysed the evidence submitted and discussed before it at trial and found, beyond any reasonable doubt, that Mr Ongwen is guilty of the following crimes:

1. attacks against the civilian population as such, murder, attempted murder, torture, enslavement, outrages upon personal dignity, pillaging, destruction of property and persecution; committed in the context of the four specified attacks on the Internally Displaced Persons camps ("IDP camps") Pajule (10 October 2003), Odek (29 April 2004), Lukodi (on or about 19 May 2004) and Abok (8 June 2004);

2. sexual and gender based crimes, namely, forced marriage, torture, rape, sexual slavery, enslavement, forced pregnancy and outrages upon personal dignity he committed against seven women (whose names and individual stories are specified in the judgment) who were abducted and placed into his household;

3. A number of further sexual and gender based crimes he committed against girls and women within the Sinia brigade, namely forced marriage, torture, rape, sexual slavery and enslavement; and

4. The crime of conscripting children under the age of 15 into the Sinia brigade and using them to participate actively in hostilities.

Kidnapped around the age of 14, convicted Lord's Resistance Army ex-commander Dominic Ongwen, grew to adulthood from his teen years entirely immersed in a child-and-human-rights-abusive environment whose purpose was to extract any possible measure of empathy and compassion from child abductees and to ensure they were entirely committed to the Lord's Resistance Army values and culture whose foundation was that of cruelty, anti-humanism and murder for profit in their reign of terror in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic and South Sudan.

 

When he is eventually sentenced, it will likely be for the maximum punishment for his crimes totalling thirty years' incarceration. The death penalty is not an option for sentencing with the International Criminal Court in the Hague. This man, now 40 years of age, was exposed as a child to the dehumanization of the terrorist group that saw fit to traumatize children they abducted, submitting them to a 're-education' in the realities of brutality and utter lack of empathy. He was ripped apart from his family and soon learned what was expected of him if he was to survive his initial captivity.

 

Subjected to death or mutilation by refusing the orders to harm others, he learned to commit acts of depraved brutality without compunction. The LRA promoted those children who proved themselves capable of the most violent behaviour and total compliance with orders to commit atrocities; the choice given them to either comply or face death themselves; survival meant becoming a working part of a LRA unit. Rising in the ranks of the LRA Dominic Ongwen perpetrated the same conscienceless brutality on children he abducted as was done to him.

It was not unusual for abducted children trained to survive by responding with alacrity to brutal orders, to have to prove their loyalty to the LRA by committing murder on demand, even murdering members of their own family. They were subjected to gang rape, used as human shields, placed front and centre in combat situations. LRA leader Joseph Kony led children to believe in his magical powers, his capacity to read minds, convincing them he knew their every thought and if those thoughts included escape, he would know.

Iranian child 'martyr'

The Lord's Resistance Army is in no way exceptional in its use of children in war situations. The Islamic Republic of Iran infamously sent tens of thousands of Iranian children to their deaths using their bodies to absorb the detonation of mines laid by the Iraq military during the Iran-Iraq war, so that the Iranian military could then flood the cleared minefields to attack their enemy. The children were assured they would go straight to Paradise, each of them wearing a 'key' to unlock the portals of Paradise.

 

Palestinian youths march during a military style exercise run by Hamas during a scouting summer camp next to the border between Egypt and Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Adel Hana/AP

 Palestinian boy in the Gaza Strip.

Abid Katib/Getty Images

Hamas, the rulers of Gaza, operate training camps in military exercises for Palestinian children in Gaza. The children are taught how to handle weapons, and how to produce elementary incendiary devices . They are taught from an early age that Israelis and Jews are their enemies and that the object of military training is to enable them to kill Jews and destroy Israel whose heritage land Palestinians claim as their own. This obvious child abuse is well known, yet Hamas, as a terrorist group whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel and whose incitements to violence against Jews is well known, appears to be of no interest to the International Criminal Court as a potential for prosecution in a court of justice.

The Yemeni Houthis, clients of the Islamic Republic of Iran, considered by many countries to be a terrorist group, which has unseated the duly elected government in Yemen and seized a good part of its territory, also trains young boys for fighting, accustoming them to the use of firearms, and preparing them to take their place on the battlefield, using them as front-line shields just as their sponsors, the Iranian Republic did with their vulnerable young.

 

Kahlan, a 12-year-old former child soldier, demonstrates how to use a weapon, at a camp for displaced persons where he took shelter with his family, in Marib, Yemen in this July 27, 2018 photo.

Yet with all of this, on Friday the International Criminal Court in the Hague announced that it was prepared to launch a war crimes investigation against Israel. In a majority ruling following a six-year review by the chief prosecutor, the ICC judges made the announcement that "The Court’s territorial jurisdiction in the Situation in Palestine... extends to the territories occupied by Israel since 1967, namely Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem." 

 

Bearing in mind that the 'occupation' is in reality a military situation forced upon Israel for self-protection by the violently hostile actions of the Fatah and Hamas Palestinian groups intent on destroying Israel. These, however, are irritating facts the ICC has no use for.

 

Presiding Judge Robert Fremr in the courtroom at the ICC (International Criminal Court) in the Hague, the Netherlands, 2018    (photo credit: BAS CZERWINSKI/POOL VIA REUTERS)