Category: africa

Save Darfur

Why the UN Security Council should stop the ICC’s efforts to indict al-Bashir

The International Criminal Court’s recent fumbled attempt to try Congolese rebel leader Thomas Lubanga Dyilo is the latest addition to a series of reasons why an ICC indictment of Sudanese president Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir would be unwise.


Darfur refugee Sam Ouandja
Photo courtesy of hdptcar on Flickr

Lubanga’s trial, which began last month after nearly three years of delays, was marred by incompetent handling of its first witness: a former child soldier who withdrew his testimony before the end of the first day, saying he had never served in Lubanga’s army and claiming that a humanitarian aid organization had told him what to say.

The witness had been promised that his identity would be kept a secret, but he took the stand in full view of those in the courtroom, including Lubanga. After he changed his story, it emerged that pre-trial judges had prevented the prosecution from witness proofing, a two-part process where lawyers can walk witnesses through the courtroom before the trial and explain procedure, and where witnesses can practice answering questions and can re-read their own prior testimonies to refresh their memories. Though different countries have different policies on witness proofing, the international criminal tribunals for both the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the Special Court for Sierra Leone all chose to allow it, citing its ability to prevent incidents like the one in the Hague last month.

Things are even messier in Sudan, where the ICC announced last July that it is considering indicting al-Bashir on charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes – a double first for the court, which has neither indicted a sitting head of state nor charged anyone with genocide. Moreno-Ocampo would like to charge al-Bashir with more than 300,000 deaths in Darfur and the internal displacement of nearly three million Sudanese citizens. He claims that the president ordered both Sudanese armed forces and the Janjaweed militia to attack and destroy villages belonging to three separate ethnic groups in Darfur.


Burning village painting at encampment for Darfur
Photo courtesy of futureatlas.com on Flickr

What’s happening in Darfur is despicable, and al-Bashir is undoubtedly responsible – if not for instigating the violence, at least for his failure to attempt to stop it. At the same time, the ICC’s charges, if passed (a decision is expected in November), will carry little weight. Sudan has signed but not ratified the Rome Statute, the act that created the court. This means the country is not legally bound to follow any ICC directives, raising the question of who, exactly, will waltz into Khartoum and slap handcuffs on al-Bashir. When news of the potential arrest warrant broke in July of last year, the deputy foreign minister of South Africa — a country whose post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been praised for its success — admitted that al-Bashir would likely never be arrested and said a warrant would not help bring peace to Darfur.

Even if al-Bashir’s arrest were probable, it would not be immediate, giving him ample time to retaliate against Darfur, something both experts and aid workers in Darfur say is likely. The day after the ICC announced its intentions to investigate al-Bashir, anti-Western riots took place in Khartoum and Darfur. It’s not unthinkable that, were the indictment to become a reality, Sudan might shut its doors to international aid organizations whose presence is still desperately needed in Darfur.

The ICC has a history of missteps in Africa. Its 2005 indictments – the court’s first – of five leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a Ugandan rebel group infamous for child abduction and extreme brutality, are widely blamed for disrupting the peace process in Uganda. LRA leader Joseph Kony reportedly walked out of negotiations with the Ugandan government upon learning of the warrants, and the group, which had eased its attacks in Uganda, has since launched a renewed offensive that included the massacre of nearly 1000 Congolese civilians last December.

In 2007, Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni asked the court to suspend the indictments in favor of a local justice process, hoping to encourage Kony to sign a peace agreement. Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo refused, and Kony is still in hiding as his troops pillage their way through northeastern Congo.

Article 16 of the Rome Statute gives the UN Security Council the power to put the ICC’s decision on hold indefinitely for any reason. Both the African Union and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference have pressured the Security Council to invoke the article, provided al-Bashir agrees to make a good faith effort toward peace in Darfur. Suspending the prosecution, if only temporarily, would avoid increased bloodshed and would allow the ICC to work through its trial issues with Lubanga before embarking on yet another case. If the ICC’s handling of the Uganda and Democratic Republic of the Congo cases are any indication of the court’s ability to carry out their mandate in the best interests of African conflicts’ victims, the Security Council should comply.

Crossposted on The Morningside Post and The Huffington Post (albeit with a disappointing typo in the title)

jetlag and misconceptions

On a flight this morning from New York to Chicago, I was seated next to a couple heading to visit their son. It was snowing, and I mentioned that I hadn’t yet seen snow in New York this winter because I’d been traveling so much. They asked where I was coming from, and when I told them I’d just been in Uganda, the man laughed and said, “You must be hungry.”

I didn’t know how to tell him that I’d eaten better in Kampala than I do in New York — Greek salads, macaroni and cheese, malai kofta, apple pie. I didn’t know how to erase this image of Africa he seemed to have, where people scramble for the few grains of rice that drop off a passing World Food Program truck or where babies bathe, if they bathe, in bracken water collected in a filthy ditch.

It’s not that he’s entirely wrong, which I think is why I have trouble describing Uganda to someone who’s never been there. Parts of the country, those scarred by conflict or disease, provide perfect footage for World Vision’s sponsor-a-child commercials: children sitting naked in the dust, huge families crammed into too-small huts, sons lost to war and daughters to malaria.


Kampala skyline, via peprice on Flickr


Homeless woman in New York, via dgphilli on Flickr

At the same time, Kampala is a bustling city, constantly under construction, where you can procure everything from a new Land Rover to a margarita. I am frustrated that people cannot seem to hold both these images in their minds, the same way that they somehow reconcile urban homelessness with Trump Towers and the Chrysler Building.

Even those who have seen both sides of Africa struggle with this, with how to present the realities of extreme poverty and shiny new Mexican restaurants without either feeding stereotypes or wrongly glossing over the problems that do exist. Life in much of Africa is still a struggle for existence, a struggle against hunger and sickness and violence. The same thing can be said of much of America: though civil wars may not regularly threaten our society, gang wars do (Rev told me this week that he’s afraid I’ll die in a drive-by shooting), as do food shortages and a lack of affordable medical care. In both cases, though, glittering skyscrapers and fancy hotels make up a regular part of the landscape. So why is one dichotomy so much more acceptable than they other?

I wish I had known how to explain this to this couple. I’m not sure how much good it would have done, though — as we were getting off the plane, they started harassing an elderly man who was having trouble getting out of his seat, blaming him for holding up the line. “Old people should stay home,” the woman muttered to her husband. It is perhaps not the best sign of my character that, in my exhausted, jetlagged state, I seriously considered kicking both of them.

why i blog about africa

Last November Abidjan-based blogger Théophile Kouamouo started the “Why I Blog About Africa” meme. Global Voices posted a round-up of responses from both Francophone and Anglophone bloggers, and now I’ve been tagged by Hash at White African. So, here goes:

I write about Africa because of the boda-boda driver I had earlier this week, who pleaded, “You add me 1000, you see I have no shoes!” and then told me I could come to Masaka with him and be his sister and his wife (exactly how this would work was unclear).

I write about Africa because two years ago, when I would come to Bubbles O’Leary’s Irish Pub in Kololo to use the free wireless, it was full of muzungus. Now, of the seven people in here with laptops, I am the only white one.

Sometimes I write about Africa because it is the only thing I can do: when I am angry that the HIV infection rate is rising in conjunction with the failures of American foreign policy or when I am ashamed of how little I understand this world.

Sometimes I write about Africa because it is funny: when I am pursued by a love-stricken boda-boda driver or when the Aga Khan seems omnipresent.

But mostly, I write about Africa because I am afraid I will forget. I am afraid that if this blog is not constantly on my mind, even when I am not writing, then I will forget my neighbor Moses, who gave me groundnuts and did Tae-Bo with me on my porch, things that bound us together as friends. I am afraid I will forget a dying communist and heated conversations on a balcony far above the city and the taste of warm Pilsner in the darkness of a Gulu night.

It sounds, even now as I am sitting surrounded by the smell of Kampala, melodramatic and romanticized. Still, for me, blogging about Africa means that a part of me is eternally connected to that place: that even if I am thousands of miles away from the continent, part of me will always exist there, just as part of it will always exist with me.

Web 2.0 by farmers, for farmers

The Busoga Rural Open Source and Development Initiative is a local Ugandan non-profit that uses digital technology, including a blog, SMS and online forums and audio files in English and local languages, to help farmers in Uganda share information about health, agriculture and education. Check it out:

via Kabissa

GVO: African bloggers react to ICC charges against Sudanese President al-Bashir

My next piece, co-written with John Liebhardt, is up at Global Voices Online:

Bloggers from around the world are reacting to the International Criminal Court’s recent decision to charge Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir with multiple counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Many of those bloggers are criticizing the indictments, claiming they are difficult to enforce and that they will bring more unrest to an already unstable nation.

Read more»

Featured in this round-up are Too Huge World, Sudanese Thinker, Sudan Watch, Emmanuel Abalo, Codrin Arsene, Nairobi Notebook, The Angry African, Victor Ngeny, Chris Blattman, Ugandabeat, Gay Uganda, Making Sense of Darfur, Daniel Sturgis and Ali Alarabi.