Monitor: Kony Will Be Arrested, Says ICC

The ICC has renewed its attempts to capture LRA leader Joseph Kony.

A visit from an ICC official to Uganda brings fresh news of the court's intentions regarding the Uganda case:

"A warrant is an order of the chamber of the ICC. And this order has to be enforced, that is all," said Ms Arbia of what the ICC told the LRA delegation.

Will Ugandan troops bring Kony in alive?

Will Kony be eliminated in a firefight with LRA forces?

Is President Yoweri Museveni counting on a dead Kony, another war under his belt, en route to a 5th presidential term?

Will the international community pressure for the release of women and children in LRA captivity?

How can Kony peacefully surrender to the ICC? What mechanisms are in place for the arrest of Kony?

Will President Museveni also face the ICC's heat, as the Congo investigation gains momentum?

A UN Security Council document names several NRM officials, including Museveni's brother Major General Salim Saleh, Brigadier General James Kazini and other army officials, including Colonels Tikamanyire, Otafire and Mugenyi.

As this story unfolds the answers will reveal themselves. Until then one musn't forget the innocent captives and victims who will never experience any justice; as well as those who are in limbo, waiting to rebuild.

---

LRA Leader Joseph Kony Will Be Arrested, Says ICC

By Simon Kasyate The Monitor (Kampala)

The newly-appointed International Criminal Court registrar Ms Silvana Arbia has said the reclusive leader of the rebel LRA Joseph Kony will be arrested at all costs.

Ms Silvana Arbia, speaking on her first visit to Uganda last week said; "...the execution of this (Kony) warrant of arrest is expected."

This is the latest high profile pronouncement on the status of the indictments against Kony and some of his commanders by the ICC.

Speaking to Daily Monitor at the ICC field office in Kololo, a Kampala suburb last week, Ms Silvana Arbia said the 'warrants of arrest were served to the concerned states for their enforcement' an obligation they must fulfill. She described her firm stance as "the very simple and unique position taken by the ICC."

The ICC made the same position to an LRA delegation that visited its headquarters in The Hague in May 2008.

"A warrant is an order of the chamber of the ICC. And this order has to be enforced, that is all," said Ms Arbia of what the ICC told the LRA delegation.

Asked if the ICC would reconsider its position if the government of Uganda gave it assurance of an alternative judicial system that would not allow for impunity of the LRA leaders, the registrar replied in the negative.

Ms Arbia also refused to take any blame from the argument that LRA's reluctance to sign the final pact of a comprehensive peace agreement last April was because of the pending ICC warrants of arrest.

http://allafrica.com/stories/200805300004.html

Read more...

Jean-Pierre Bemba Arrested; His Major Sponsor was US-Backed Dictator Museveni

Trouble for Bemba's Sponsor Yoweri Museveni?
"Bemba's arrest could also spell trouble for his former sponsor, Uganda's U.S.-backed dictator, Yoweri K. Museveni. The ICC has also been investigating alleged crimes against humanity committed in Congo, by Uganda forces and its allied militias, according to The Wall Street Journal. The alleged crimes were committed when Uganda had occupied eastern Congo.

Uganda has allegedly armed and financed the Congo militias, much in the same manner in which Liberia, under Charles Taylor, once sponsored insurgents that committed war crimes in Sierra Leone. Taylor was later indicted and after he had been removed from office, arrested and taken to a special war crimes court set up in the Hague where he is currently being tried.

Uganda Abets Genocide of 6 Million Congolese
As many as 6 million Congolese are reported to have died as a result of the conflict sparked by the invasion, including by Uganda.

Allegedly, Uganda sponsored several militias including Bemba's Mouvement de Libération du Congo (MLC), when it then occupied eastern Congo.

Human Rights Watch in a 2003 report, "Ituri: Covered In Blood," identified at least 10 militias it said were Uganda-backed. These insurgent organizations were accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes.

International Court of Justice Fines Uganda $10 Billion
In 2005, Uganda was found liable by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for plundering Congo's resources and its army and allied forces of committing crimes against civilians, including massacres, mutilations, mass rapes and burning people alive.

The court agreed that Uganda should pay compensation, and the DRC government asked for $10 billion.

Kabila Refers Uganda to ICC
Meanwhile, on March 3, 2004, the Congo government under President Joseph Kabila, had referred crimes against humanity allegations against Uganda and its allied militias to the ICC; the court confirmed this to The Black Star News on July 27, 2007. The ICC then initiated an investigation of the alleged crimes, according to a front page news report in The Wall Street Journal on June 6, 2006.

Uganda Asks Annan to Block ICC Investigation
The seriousness with which the Uganda government took the ICC matter is clear from The Wall Street Journal. According to the Journal report: "President Museveni of Uganda asked U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to block the Congo investigation, according to one person
familiar with the matter. Mr. Annan replied that he had no power to interfere with the court, this person said. A Ugandan government spokesman, Robert Kabushenga, declines to comment on the matter."

Read the Full Article at Black Star News.com

Read more...

Jan Egeland Book Raises Doubts About Uganda Commitment To Peace Talks

By Milton Allimadi
May 10, 2008

Months after the Uganda government and the Lord’s Resistance Army launched peace talks in Juba to end the country’s 22-years civil war, President Yoweri Museveni told a top United Nations official that there could only be a “military solution” to the conflict, according to a new book.

The book also accuses the United Nations of failing the people of Acholi in Uganda’s war-torn regions. Some UN officials who had been in Uganda for years had done nothing, and others had not even bothered to visit Acholi region even as the humanitarian catastrophe unfolded.

In “A Billion Lives: An Eye Witness Report From The Frontlines Of Humanity,” (Simon & Schuster, 2008), Jan Egeland, the former United Nations Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, describes a November 2006 meeting during which Museveni berated him for going into the bush to meet with Joseph Kony and other LRA leaders.

The book covers Egeland’s trips to many of the world’s trouble spots, including Iraq, the Darfur region, DRC, Lebanon, Gaza, Colombia, Northern Israel, and Uganda, when he headed the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) for three and a half years. The book’s chapter dealing with Uganda is titled “Uganda’s Twenty Thousand Kidnapped Children.”

“You were just wasting your time in the bush with them. I told you so,” Museveni says, when the two met, according to Egeland’s book.

“No, I think it was useful to meet them,” Egeland writes of his own response. “It was good for peace and therefore to your benefit,” Egeland adds, referring to his meeting earlier that day with Kony, his deputy Vincent Otti, and other LRA commanders, in their hideouts near the border with the Sudan and Central African Republic. (pg. 211)

“No, those talks were not to our benefit,” Museveni responds, according to Egeland’s book. “Let me be categorical--there will only be a military solution to this problem.”

The exchange occurred November 12, 2006, fully four months after the Juba Peace Talks had been launched, with Riek Machar, vice president of Southern Sudan, as the mediator. What’s more, Ruhakana Rugunda, Uganda’s minister of internal affairs and the government’s chief negotiator at the peace talks, was sitting in on that meeting, Egeland writes, as were other top officials, including Sam Kutesa, the foreign affairs minister. Egeland says these top government officials were basically docile observers during his heated discussion with Museveni.

“Museveni seems pleased with the tough and direct exchange,” Egeland writes. “He clearly enjoys the verbal jousting. Within his own government nobody dares to argue with him. Not once in three hours do any of his ministers interrupt.” (pg. 213) The meeting occurred in an office in Uganda’s Parliament buildings. “But,” Egeland continues, referring to his exchange with Museveni, “we have, for the first time, an absence of fighting and terror due to the peace process.”

“No, that is only due to the efforts of our army!” Museveni responds, according to Egeland’s book. Egeland writes that he was able to wrest concessions from Museveni, although the credibility of Egeland‘s conclusion, considering the source making the “concession,” is anybody’s guess.

“The president even agrees to withdraw the Ugandan army from two bases close to the eastern assembly point; the army is currently blocking access for LRA fighters who should gather there according to the cease-fire agreement,” Egeland writes, which in itself is a remarkable revelation, and confirms the assertions that the LRA had made at the time that it was the Uganda government that was actually blocking access to the designated confinement camps for the rebels.

Egeland adds, of their discussion: “During the last two hours of our meeting he is only angry once, when I bring up our growing concern with widespread violence in the eastern Karamoja area, where civilians are being killed in battles between cattle rustlers, [ethnic] militias, and army units. ‘Do not lecture me on how to disarm illegal armed groups and cattle rustlers. On that I am an expert,’ he says forcefully.” (pg. 213)

Egeland also provides his overall assessment of Museveni. He recalls having a three-hour talk under a tree in Museveni’s cattle farm and how Museveni told him to take his helicopter “to see the skulls of the tens of thousands among his own people who died in the 1970s to ‘get perspective’ on my criticism of the government’s policies in northern Uganda.” (pg. 212).

“He is an impressive leader,” Egeland notes, “but he had become increasingly authoritarian and has so far failed in northern Uganda, where the Acholi people feel alienated and where neither civilian nor military authorities have managed to avoid some twenty years of horrors. The LRA has not been the only bloody rebellion in the north.” “We agree that the talks must produce tangible agreements that can lead to disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of the LRA and that a true process of reconciliation must follow the peace process,” Egeland adds, in his book.

“Museveni, who had asked the ICC to indict the LRA leaders, was of the opinion that he could stop the international judicial process if a good agreement to end the war was reached. I try to tell him, as the chief ICC prosecutor had asked me to stress, that the decision was no longer in the hands of the Ugandans.”

This is also an interesting point. The Uganda government has long been aware that it’s not in a position to have the International Criminal Court’s indictments removed against the LRA’s top leaders, Kony, Vincent Otti, Okot Odhiambo, Raska Lukwiya, and Dominic Ongwen; yet the Museveni government continues to dangle this illusory “carrot” over which it has no control, as inducement to the LRA to sign a peace pact. (Incidentally, Otti, Odhiambo, Ongwen, and Lukwiya are all, rather too conveniently, reported to have been killed. In 2006 the ICC said a DNA test confirmed a body identified as Ongwen's wasn't. Separately, in 2006, The Wall Street Journal also reported that Uganda's army was being investigated by the ICC on alleged war crimes committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo).

Egeland reveals that his focus on northern Uganda’s tragedy increased after his first visit there in 2003. “What I saw around the towns of Kitgum and Gulu was an outrage,” he writes. “Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children lived in appalling conditions in overcrowded, filthy camps. With the exception of the UN World Food Progamme and a handful of courageous Ugandan and international nongovernmental organizations, humanitarian workers were absent in the midst of the misery. The contrast with the empty refugee camps and well-stocked warehouses that I had just visited in Iraq and on its borders was stark.” (pg. 201).

“Why had no one in the international community woken up to the carnage of northern Uganda?” Egeland adds, and delivers a searing indictment on the conspiracy of silence that has enabled to unfold, what Olara Otunnu, the former UN Undersecretary General in charge of children in war zones once called the “silent genocide” in Acholi. “Where had I been while in charge of the Norwegian Red Cross and during many years of humanitarian, human rights, and peace work? It was incomprehensible. The capital, Kampala, was bursting with UN and other aid officials since Uganda was one of the darlings of Western governments and development agencies. Few, it appeared, had looked far beyond the horizon at the outrage being visited on the children of the north.” (pg. 202)

“The next morning I asked my UN colleagues to meet me on the veranda of our guest house,” Egeland continues. “I was angry and still reeling from the desperately sad scenes of the day before. Some of those I was addressing had worked in Uganda for months, even years, but had never bothered to make the daylong journey north. ’I hope you all agree we cannot continue like this,’ I told a group of nodding heads. ’We have failed utterly here. You and your organizations have to step up the action dramatically and I will do all I can to wake up donors and headquarters.’ They were rightly embarrassed.” (pg. 203)

Egeland describes his disappointment in not being to get the LRA to release children and women in captivity when he met with the rebel commanders; he also writes that he warned Kony and the LRA leadership that the whole world would be watching their conduct with respect to the peace talks.

Egeland, who lives in Oslo, Norway, is now Director General of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. He clearly has excellent understanding of the untrustworthiness of the principal characters behind the Acholi tragedy, Kony and Museveni.

Egeland demonstrates intimate knowledge of the Uganda conflict in his book; he could play a superb role as co-mediator with Dr. Machar, in lending international credibility and getting the Juba Peace Talks back on track.

http://blackstarnews.com/?c=122&a=4529

Read more...

As Epidemic Ravages Acholi, Govt Dithers

The Monitor (Kampala) / NEWS 27 April 2008 / Posted to the web 28 April 2008

By Tabu Butagira and James Eriku (Kampala)

Since last October, a viral disease that the World Health Organisation says has no cure has been silently killing people in the northern district of Kitgum in Acholi sub-region, near the frontier with Sudan.

Residents and their political representatives say Hepatitis E epidemic, which initially struck Madi-Opei sub-county of Lamwo County is now intensifying. Government-provided figures show that current fatalities stand at 24 out of 1,109 cumulative registered cases.

Some of the affected people, however, have a bigger estimate of deaths - three times higher than the official count - from the contagion that causes inflammation of the liver.

Dr Samson Okware, the commissioner for community services in the Ministry of Health disagrees even as the infection spreads to the sub-counties of Agoro, Paloga, Padibe and now Muncwini in the neighbouring Chwa County. On Friday, Dr Okware said the spread of the already worsening epidemic is yet to peak amidst forecasted heavier downpour over the Acholi sub region in coming months although efforts are underway to contain it.

"The problem," he said, "Is that when it rains, run-off water ferries human waste downstream and this contaminates wells and streams from where sections of the local community draw water for domestic consumption."

Hepatitis E, just like its cousin infections - cholera and dysentery, is transmitted through ingestion of food and water contaminated with human waste.

Its symptoms listed on the WHO website include yellow discoloration of the skin and sclera of the eyes, dark urine and pale stools, loss of appetite, an enlarged, tender liver - a condition otherwise called hepatomegaly in medical parlance; abdominal cramps, nausea as well as vomiting and fever.

At the last official count in February, there were a total of 19 boreholes in Madi-Opei that hosts thousands of Internally Displaced People, uprooted from their homes by the Lord's Resistance Army insurgency that has ravaged the wider northern Uganda since 1987. By the time the epidemic broke out in November 2007, only a handful of these boreholes were functional. Those that were damaged, and had for long been neglected for repairs, were fixed only in recent weeks.

This perhaps exacerbated the problem since environmental health experts from the Ministry of Health headquarters have since confirmed that all water sources in the affected areas, except the boreholes, are contaminated. The clay pots where villagers store drinking water were also found to be harbouring the virus that causes Hepatitis E, which mainly kills pregnant women - in part owing to diminished immunity.

As a panacea or was it? The health ministry in February this year recommended the mass destruction of clay pots in areas where the epidemic was reported. But a combination of lack of alternative water storage facilities and traditional preferences has impeded implementation of this decree among an impoverished population that barely has the means to even put food on the table.

"[Health officials] are just telling our people to get rid of [clay] pots and use what?" wondered MP Livingstone Okello-Okello (Chwa, UPC), the chairman of the Acholi Parliamentary Group. "Government should give the people alternative utensils." "The situation is getting more desperate by the day, we are disappointed that it was not controlled earlier," he said, "We demand that government takes quick action to avoid further loss of lives."

Luckily, health agencies such Unicef, WHO and Medicines Sans Frontiers (MSF)-Holland, Oxfam, Avsi and Amref have given out thousands of eco-sanitary facilities, including jerry cans to the needy people.

Dr Emmanuel Otaala, the State minister for Health officially announced the outbreak of Hepatitis E in Kitgum on Dec. 4, 2007, two months after the index or first case was registered on October 25. At that time, three other epidemics; ebola, cholera and meningitis had simultaneously erupted in the western, mid-western and northwestern parts of the country. All except hepatitis E have been defeated.

Since the reported cases of Hepatitis were few then, local health workers say the Ministry of Health only briefly intervened and then withdrew suddenly. But what seems to be at the heart of the matter is that the Shs25 million that the ministry earmarked for the anti-Hepatitis E campaign was allegedly first wired to a different account before the district leaders provided the central government authorities the right account number on which the money was deposited as recently as April 17.

The lack of money, as expected, de-motivated stakeholders. "I don't know how this government behaves; when you give them information, they take it lightly and begin to run around only when it is already too late," Mr Okello-Okello said. Mr Okello-Okello said he petitioned Dr Otaala this week to dispatch senior health officials from Kampala to carry out an assessment. Dr Okware said there are already three core sub committees of water, social mobilisation and case management working together to fight the epidemic. Chlorine tablets are also being distributed to purify drinking water.

In spite of the interventions - that local leaders deride as dismal - a disturbing trend of increased infections is emerging as a sense of hopelessness convulses Madi-Opei, Agoro, Paloga, Muncwini and Padibe sub counties.

In a seven-page document (October 25, 2007 - April 21, 2008), nine NGOs that are helping Hepatitis E the long term solution lies in a "sustained health education campaign to improve basic hygiene at household level in a collaborative and participatory approach with district partners with the ultimate aim objective of reducing the risk of diarrheal disease outbreaks."

Read more...