ICC to hear charges against elusive Ugandan warlord
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has opened a war crime hearing in absentia against Joseph Kony, the elusive Ugandan warlord, reports France24 via AFP on September the 9th.
Whilst the ICC continues to investigate war crimes committed by Israeli and Russian militant groups, the court has opened a hearing into the Ugandan rebel chief Joseph Kony.
Kony was the head of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a group responsible for the killings of 100,000 people and the kidnapping of 60,000 children throughout their insurgency against the Ugandan government.
The ICC is looking to charge Kony with 39 accounts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, rape, torture, enslavement and sexual slavery. All of which are alleged to have taken place across northern Uganda throughout July 2002 to December 2005.
Kony was the very first war criminal to be indicted by the ICC in 2005, a year before his last known appearance in 2006. The trial is being held in absentia as 2 decades of efforts to locate Kony have proved fruitless.
According to a panel of experts from the United Nations, Kony is expected to have fled his hiding place in Sudan – due to the on-going civil war – and is now hiding in the Central African Republic. However, it is unknown if Kony is even still alive.
Due to ICC statutes, the hearing will not become a trial as trials cannot be held in absentia.  This has led Kony’s defence team to describe the hearing as “enormous expense of time, money and effort for no benefit at all”.
But prosecutors have said the result of the trial may make a trial quicker if Kony is ever found and brought to the Hague.
The LRA were an inhumanely brutal militant group – Everlyn Ayo, who survived LRA attacks upon her school when she was just 5 years old, has described what she had to endure:
“The rebels raided the school, killed and cooked our teachers in big drums and we were forced to eat their remains,” Ayo told reporters.
Ayo, as a young girl, had to become a “night commuter”, one of the thousands of children who used the cover of night to find shelters free from the horrors of the LRA.
Ayo continued: “Many times, on our return to the village, we would find blood-soaked bodies. Seeing all that blood as a child traumatised my eyes”
“For many years now, I do not see well. All I see is blood.”
Ayo – now 39 – plans to listen to the hearing upon her radio in the city of Gulu.
France24 via AFP, Maghrebi.org
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