Joseph Kony, leader of the LRA, surrounded by his officers. Photograph: Reuters/STR
The peace talks between the Ugandan government and the Lord's Resistance Army aimed at ending the LRA's twenty-year campaign of terror in Northern Uganda are in jeopardy. The LRA leader, Joseph Kony is now reported to have fled to the Central African Republic and is refusing to sign the peace deal unless the International Criminal Court in the Hague withdraws its warrant for his arrest.
President Museveni has agreed to try the LRA leadership in Ugandan courts rather than hand them over to The Hague, in an attempt to get the peace deal finalised before the end of March. The offer - seen in some quarters as a plain amnesty - led to accusations that Museveni had never intended to have Kony and the other LRA leaders tried by the ICC, and had cynically exploited it just to get Kony to negotiate.
Can peace for the people of northern Uganda be won at the same time as securing justice for the LRA's victims?
The ICC was set up to internationalise human rights abuses. Once the ICC was involved, a rape or mutilation in a Ugandan village was an offence against not just local and national, but international law.
The case of the LRA is its first big test. Set up in 2002, the ICC is specifically charged with holding to account all those accused of gross abuse of human rights or genocide. Too late for the tribunals in Sierra Leone or Rwanda (which are bringing war criminals to justice under separate arrangements), the issue of warrants against the LRA was controversial from the start, for in a move that seemed to threaten the impartiality of any court proceedings, President Museveni was sitting beside ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo when he announced that warrants had been issued for the arrest of the LRA's top leaders in October 2005.
But the threat of arrest and trial - and the power of the ICC to require other governments, like Sudan, to stop supporting the LRA - has brought Kony and his movement into real negotiations for the first time. Until the last week, a deal seemed imminent.
The deal included the use of traditional justice as a way of reconciling the fighters with the people of the villages they had attacked. The main leaders, President Museveni proposed, would face trial - but not in the Hague. Nor would they be arrested, as the ICC warrant required. Instead they would be tried in a specially constituted division of Uganda's high court.
Museveni blames the UN for failing to arrest Kony when he was in neighbouring Congo (but others point out he rejected a Belgian offer of help). He says he has been let down by the international community, for it would never be possible for him both to secure peace and arrest the LRA leaders once they had voluntarily entered Uganda.
There are other arguments in his favour. Supporters of keeping the ICC out argue it is more fitting to try a Ugandan war criminal in Uganda. It is also technically acceptable, since the ICC operates on what's called the 'complementarity principle' - local courts are an alternative to The Hague if they offer the same standard of justice.
Some critics of the ICC assert that it is a form of neo-colonialism, an attempt to impose a system designed for western society on the very different circumstances of Africa. They say that the whole idea of punitive justice, the principle that underlies the ICC, is misguided (and some add that a life sentence in a European jail would be a cushy option for an LRA fighter).
Richard Dowden, director of the London-based Royal Africa Society, points out that many of the continent's most brutal wars have been ended by deals that have incorporated warring factions into the democratic process through amnesties and the conciliatory processes of traditional justice.
Civil wars in Mozambique and Angola and most famously apartheid in South Africa have all been ended without holding the perpetrators of genocide or war crimes to account (except in a very few exceptional cases in South Africa).
Dowden says the ICC aims to hand down justice in Sudan, "as if it was Surrey". He criticises the war crimes tribunal in Rwanda which over more than a decade has secured just 28 convictions at the cost of $1 billion. For the LRA's victims, he believes, an ICC trial thousands of miles away in The Hague would mean nothing. Worse, it would leave the government, whose troops also sometimes behaved in a brutal and arbitrary fashion, unpunished. The ICC, he says, looks like nothing more than a salve for the Western conscience.
But the ethnologist Tim Allen, based at the London School of Economics, who has studied traditional justice among the Acholi - the largest of the northern Ugandan tribes - argues that it is largely the invention of British colonial civil servants in the early 20th century and its popularity now is based partly on the willingness of NGOs to fund compensation payments and partly on the status it gives to those at the top of the tribal structure. In some circumstances, Allen found tribal justice being used to persecute weaker members of the community, especially women.
He also questions the viability within Uganda of a system of piecemeal legal arrangements. Northern Uganda, he says, already suffers from a perception in Kampala that it is a uniquely backwards and uncivilised region - and Kampala suffers because northern Uganda feels discriminated against.
The ICC's defenders - leading jurists like South Africa's Richard Goldstone, and Geoffrey Robertson in Britain - are watching the situation in Uganda closely. So far, they believe the ICC has done more good than harm, bringing the LRA to the point of a settlement and raising the possibility of a strengthening of Uganda's judicial processes to win The Hague's acceptance of a local trial for the LRA leaders.
But the international law expert Manisuli Ssenyonjo, a Ugandan teaching at Brunel University, is more sceptical. Until the charges the Ugandan state intends to bring against the LRA leadership are known, the fear must be that they will not address the human rights abuses for which the ICC wants them tried, while the traditional justice offered to lesser perpetrators is not justice at all, but a shield against it - and a violation of the victim's right to see the perpetrator punished. The whole system of amnesty, he warns, 'promotes a culture of impunity where violence is the norm' - the very thing the ICC was intended to overcome.
Do you think the LRA should be tried in the international arena or by Uganda courts? Would a trial at the ICC 'let off' Kony and his followers? What else would help bring peace to northern Uganda?
