Warlord is convicted in historic judgment
THE HAGUE: The international war crimes court here found Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo guilty yesterday in its first ruling after a decade of work limited largely to Africa while major cases elsewhere remain beyond its reach.
Governments and rights groups level war crimes accusations at Syrian President Bashar al-assad for cracking down on protesters. But the International Criminal Court (ICC) cannot act because of deadlock among world powers at the United Nations Security Council, the only body that could order a prosecution.
Lubanga, 51, who will be sentenced later, was found guilty of recruiting and deploying child soldiers during a five-year conflict until 2003. An estimated 60 000 people were killed in the violence in Ituri region in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
He sat impassively in court in white robes and cap, having denied all charges. That one of his co-accused remains a serving army general in the DRC is, however, a source of disappointment to campaigners for justice – and an indication of the political limitations on the court.
It was set up to provide a permanent forum after ad hoc tribunals were used to prosecute those responsible for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and for the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s.
But the ICC can work only with the assent of political leaders: “Is it going to give pause to Bashar al-assad?” asked Reed Brody, counsel for Human Rights Watch, of the conviction of a man he called a “small fish” in Africa. “I don’t think so.”
“Have we seen atrocities fall off in the world? We only have to look at Syria to know it’s not the case,” he said noting how Russia and China vetoed efforts at the UN Security Council to refer Syrian leaders to the ICC.
That is the only way to initiate a prosecution, since Syria, like Russia and China but also the US, is not a party to the Rome Statute, which created the court in July 2002.
“It’s not the fault of the ICC,” said Brody. “It’s the fault of the Security Council and of the world order ... the international justice system does not operate in a vacuum.”
While welcoming the ver- dict against Lubanga, which may help set a precedent for other cases involving the recruitment of child soldiers, he added: “Those countries with political power and their allies have been shielded from the court.”
Among those accused by the court is Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-bashir, who has dismissed his 2009 indictment as a Western conspiracy and has both continued in office unhindered and been able to travel to sympathetic countries.
At The Hague yesterday, ICC Presiding Judge Adrian Fulford said in reading the court’s historic first judgment: “The chamber concludes that the prosecution has proved beyond reasonable doubt that Mr Thomas Lubanga Dyilo is guilty of conscripting and enlisting children under the age of 15 years.”
Lubanga was detained six years ago and faced three counts of war crimes. He could face up to life imprisonment, although a sentence will not be passed immediately. An appeal can be filed within 30 days.
The three-judge panel said children were forced into camps in the Ituri region, where they were placed under harsh training regimes and brutally punished. Soldiers and army commanders under Lubanga’s authority used girls as domestic workers and subjected them to rape and sexual violence, they said.
A conviction could now help lend momentum to other prominent cases, such as that against former Ivory Coast president Laurent Gbagbo. Gbagbo is charged with individual responsibility on counts of crimes against humanity – murder, rape and other forms of sexual violence.
The prosecutors’ focus on Africa was initially praised for focusing world attention on a region often overlooked, even though millions of people were killed in conflicts in recent decades. But more lately, prosecutors have been criticised for failing to pursue important cases elsewhere because they are politically challenging, such as Afghanistan, Iraq or Sri Lanka.
George Mukundi of the SAbased Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, said of the Lubanga verdict: “What we Africans are saying is, yes, it’s useful and good... But we would also like to see justice done, and being seen to be done, in other cases around the world.”