A small victory for justice

Ten years have had to go by since the establishment of the court, and six since the arrest of the accused, for the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague to issue its first ruling.

Thomas Lubanga, a Congolese warlord who may be sentenced to life imprisonment, has been declared guilty by three judges of abducting thousands of children and using them as soldiers in tribal struggles in which more than 60,000 people were murdered. These struggles, indeed, were only one more episode of the terrible ethnic and religious conflicts, normally underlain by economic interests, which in recent decades in central Africa have taken several million lives in the face of general international indifference.

Lubanga is far from being the largest chess piece in the field of vision of a court — for its critics, too much focused on Africa — which was created to prosecute those guilty of genocide, wartime atrocities and crimes against humanity. In fact, Lubanga came close to being acquitted on technicalities; and in large measure his trial reflects the shortage of resources, the exasperating slowness and the political and enforcement-related limitations of the ICC, an institution whose 120 signatories do not include states as decisive as the United States, China and Russia.

These shortcomings explain, for example, why a number of figures who stand accused of massive crimes remain beyond its reach. These include personalities such as the president of Sudan, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, responsible for the massacres in Darfur, who cheerfully visits neighboring nations with the complicity of the African Union, despite the fact a warrant for his arrest has been out since 2009.

With all these caveats, and in spite of its modest scope, the International Criminal Court’s ruling represents a victory for international justice against impunity, and a reparation, if only symbolic, for the thousands of victims of the bloodthirsty Congolese warlord.

Essential precedent

The ruling, apart from reminding public opinion of other prominent cases of mass atrocities still in the hands of the court (in the Ivory Coast, Libya, Uganda and Kenya), sets an indispensable precedent against the abduction and enslavement of children for sexual or military purposes. This is a widespread and repugnant plague, by no means exclusive to Africa, which has again been in the news worldwide in recent days in connection with the Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony, who is also included in the ICC’s most-wanted list.

The impact of the video recently publicized by an American NGO on Kony, the head of the lunatic Lord’s Resistance Army, which caused a bloodbath in Uganda, and whose lingering remnants are still active in the Congo, has forced the Congolese government to proclaim, with unusual urgency and solemnity, that he is still on its wanted list.