Court tells Uganda to pay Congo $325M

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — The International Court of Justice on Wednesday ordered Uganda to pay $325 million in compensation to Congo for violence in a long-running conflict between the African neighbors that began in the late 1990s.

The compensation order came more than 15 years after the U.N. court ruled in a complex, 119-page judgment that fighting by Ugandan troops in Congo breached international law.

“The court notes that the reparation awarded to the DRC for damage to persons and to property reflects the harm suffered by individuals and communities as a result of Uganda’s breach of its international obligations,” the court’s president, U.S. judge Joan E. Donoghue, said.

The sum awarded was well below the request for more than $11 billion in damages Congo had submitted to the court.

The court broke down the compensation into different categories of damages. It assessed $225 million for “loss of life and other damage to persons” that included rape, conscription of child soldiers and the displacement of up to 500,000 people.

It assessed another $40 million for damage to property and $60 million for damage to natural resources, including the plundering of gold, diamonds, timber and other goods by Ugandan forces or rebels they supported.

The court ordered Uganda to pay the compensation in annual amounts of $65 million.

Henry Oryem Okello, Uganda’s minister of state for international affairs, was not immediately available for comment.

The case stemmed from years of bloody conflict in Congo’s mineral-rich east. A dispute over land escalated and turned the Ituri region into the epicenter of a regional war in which Congo’s neighbors backed different militias in their battles for influence.

The hostilities also spread west, including to the city of Kisangani, where Donoghue said the fighting was between Ugandan and Rwandan forces.

Under Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi, who was elected in 2019, relations between Uganda and Congo have been warm. The neighboring countries are now security allies.

The current military campaign began in November when Uganda’s army strikes against the Allied Democratic Forces rebel group.

With Tshisekedi’s authorization, Ugandan troops then entered Congo to hunt down the rebels, who are blamed for multiple deadly attacks on civilians inside Congo as well as a series of bomb attacks in Uganda.

Survivors of fighting in Kisangani expressed dismay at the Congolese government’s decision to allow Ugandan forces over the border to hunt rebels in the Beni region and Ituri.

“We ask our brothers in Beni to be vigilant with this Ugandan army because they came here to Kisangani to help us but they turned on us and we lost several of our brothers,” said one survivor, Freddy Makoba.

(AP/Chris Mamu) Ugandan soldiers, who had been fighting Ugandan rebels in Congo for the previous three years, cross the Mpondwe border point as they return to their home country in October 2001.