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...opened an investigation in response to the referral in July 2004, and in October 2005 the ICC unsealed arrest warrants, its historic first warrants in its historic first case, charging five of the top commanders of the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (ERA) with war crimes and crimes against humanity. (1) For two decades, Uganda north of the Nile has been ravaged by a brutal civil war between the LRA and the Ugandan government, so any possibility of productive change is to be warmly welcomed. The sanguine predictions proffered by the Ugandan government and by the ICC's supporters, however, are called into question by doubts about the court's ability to achieve peace or justice in Uganda, doubts stemming from the specific way the ICC has pursued the Ugandan case, and because of more inherent problems with the ICC as a legal institution.
This article analyzes the political effects and the consequences for peace and justice of the ICC's intervention into northern Uganda, drawing from this analysis disturbing implications about ICC interventions generally. In order to better comprehend the nature of those consequences, I have divided them into two categories: first, those resulting from the political instrumentalization of the ICC by the Ugandan government; and second, those resulting from the discourse and practice of the ICC as a body purporting to enforce international law.
Following section one, which provides a brief background to the conflict, section two examines the ICC's political instrumentalization. First, I argue that the Ugandan government cynically referred the ongoing conflict to the ICC, expecting to restrict the ICC's prosecution to the rebels in order to obtain international support for its militarization and to entrench, not resolve, the war. Second, I argue that the ICC, in accepting the referral and prosecuting only the LRA, in effect chose to pursue a politically pragmatic case, despite that doing so contravened its own mandate and the interests of peace, justice, and the rule of law. Thus, the ICC has allowed itself to be politically instrumentalized by the Ugandan government to the detriment of its own legitimacy.
Section three considers the political effects of the ICC intervention that stem not from the ICC's politicization but from the discourse and practice of the ICC as an agent of global law enforcement. It reveals the deleterious effects that ICC intervention can have on the capacity for autonomous political organization and action among the civilian victims of violence, arguing that ICC intervention tends to lead to a depoliticization of those victims by promoting among them a political dependency mediated by international law. This depoliticization hinders the realization of justice for those subject to violence. Section four, the conclusion, asks if and how the negative consequences of the ICC's involvement in Uganda might be mitigated in future interventions.
WAR AND INTERNATIONAL CRIMES IN NORTHERN UGANDA
Civil war, though it has waxed and waned in intensity, has been an enduring aspect of life for Uganda's Acholi for twenty years. Rebel groups, some with significant popular support, have operated in the Acholi subregion of northern Uganda ever since Yoweri Museveni, at the head of the National Resistance Army (NRA), seized power from a principally Acholi government in 1986. (2) The LRA emerged as the most potent rebel force in the early 1990s, at a point when the support enjoyed by other rebel organizations among the Acholi peasantry had diminished, a casualty of the rebels' military failures and the government's brutal counterinsurgency. In that atmosphere, the LRA interpreted the reduced popular support to indicate that the Acholi had come to support the government, and the rebels turned their violence upon suspected government collaborators and supporters. Since then, the LRA has become infamous for massacres, maimings, and the forced recruitment of thousands of Acholi, many of them children. Significant LRA violence has taken place within the temporal jurisdiction of the ICC--that is, since July 1, 2002; for example, the arrest warrant issued for Joseph Kony, the leader of the LRA since its inception, charges him with thirty-three counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity since that date. (3)
The Ugandan government's counterinsurgency has also been brutal toward Acholi, as the NRA and its successor, the Uganda People's Defense Force (UPDF), have focused their use of force on destroying suspected rebel support among civilians. (4) Government violence peaked during Operation North in 1991, when the NRA carried out a number of massacres and other atrocities. (5) Another period of intense government violence occurred in the Gulu district in September 1996, when the government instituted its policy of forced displacement and drove hundreds of thousands of Acholi peasants out of their villages into camps through a campaign of murder, intimidation, and the bombing and burning of entire villages. (6) After the formation of the camps, the UPDF announced that anyone found outside of the camps would be considered a rebel and killed. While the government euphemistically calls the camps "protected villages," they are most accurately identified as internment or concentration camps, given their origins in forced displacement and the continued government violence used to keep civilians from leaving. The total population of these camps stood at a few hundred thousand by the end of 1996, but by the time of the ICC's intervention it had grown to almost a million, encompassing nearly the entire rural population of the Acholi subregion. (7)
If one puts aside for the moment the government's mass internment of the Acholi peasantry, then the level of overt government violence against civilians that has occurred since the end of Operation North in 1992 is low compared to that of the LRA--although murder, rape, the enlistment of children, arbitrary arrest, and torture by the UPDF or government militias do regularly occur. (8) The devastating consequences of the government policy of forced displacement are too dire to ignore, however, and many scholars and activists have argued that displacement clearly represents a war crime or crime against humanity. Indeed, the government has failed to provide adequate relief aid to the camps, leading to a massive humanitarian crisis with excess mortality levels of approximately 1,000 per week. (9) Moreover, the camps have been tragically unprotected; for example, in 2003, one camp of over 50,000 people was being protected by 45 irregular militia, while another camp of 15,000 was being protected by only 12. Accusations that government soldiers fail to protect the camps and refuse to respond to LRA incursions, and thus have turned them into easy targets for the LRA, are heard regularly from camp inhabitants. This continuing internment of over a million people without military necessity and without adequate protection and aid constitutes a grave violation of the laws of war and certainly falls within the ICC's temporal jurisdiction. (10) Olara Otunnu, the former UN Undersecretary-General and Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, himself a Ugandan, has argued forcefully that, given that internment is an explicit government policy that targets the Acholi as a group and has led to tens, or even hundreds, of thousands of deaths and to the slow destruction of an entire ethnic group, it in fact amounts to genocide. (11) Thus, there is a clear record of international crimes perpetrated by both the rebels and the government forces in northern Uganda, many within the ICC's temporal mandate.
In dominant international portrayals of the conflict, however, government violence has been downplayed, if not entirely ignored. This "official discourse" limits its focus to the LRA's brutality, in particular its violence against children. (12) In most accounts the rebel group is, in a word, "bizarre," and LRA violence...
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