Arrest warrants issued for Ugandan rebels
The International Criminal Court has issued its first arrest warrants, for five members of Uganda’s notoriously cruel Lord’s Resistance Army.
The International Criminal Court, the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal, was founded in 2002 and had said for some time it was investigating the LRA, infamous for abducting more than 30,000 children, forcing them to become fighters, porters or concubines. The group has killed thousands of civilians and forced more than a million to flee their homes.
“I know they’ve issued arrest warrants for five people and these notifications went out last week,” William Lacy Swing, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s special representative for Congo, told a news conference.
UN and Ugandan officials announced last month that a leading LRA deputy, Vincent Otti, had fled a base in southern Sudan with a band of fighters and crossed into Congo, where he was seeking political asylum. Swing said they had settled into the border town of Aba.
Congo’s President Joseph Kabila was sending some 2,000 troops to the region and that the UN mission had airlifted about 1,000 of its own troops to Aba, Swing said.
If the arrest warrants have in fact been issued, it’s likely that Otti nd the rebels’ leader, Joseph Kony, would be among those named.
Officials in The Hague, Netherlands, where the court is based, could not confirm the arrest warrants. It’s possible the warrants were sealed, which means they wouldn’t be announced until the arrests are actually made.
“I am aware of the statement. I cannot comment at this time,” said Yves Sorokobi, spokesman for Chief ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo.
Yet word had swirled that the court’s first warrants were coming. Such a move could strike a serious blow against the Lord’s Resistance Army, which is made up of the remnants of a northern rebellion that began after President Yoweri Museveni, a southerner, took power in 1986.
“It is a very historic development,” said Richard Dicker, director of the International Justice Program at New York-based Human Rights Watch. “Victims have been suffering at the hands of the LRA for near than 20 years in northern Uganda.”
Yet he said that he hoped Moreno-Ocampo would also investigate the Ugandan army, which is also accused of abuses against civilians during its war with the rebels.
“It’s not as simple a situation as the LRA being the only force out there that needs to be brought to justice,” he said.
Swing said somewhere between 100 and 400 LRA rebels had crossed into Congo. He said a delegation from the UN peacekeeping mission in Congo had gone to warn them that they must either disarm or face forcible eviction. Another delegation went to the Ugandan capital Kampala to discuss the problem.
“We all agree – Congo, MONUC and Uganda – that it is unacceptable that these people remain there, and they will be obliged to go back where they came from,” Swing said, referring to the UN peacekeeping mission by its French acronym.
