Child victim, loyal war spirit medium or war criminal: shifting the geography and logic of historical accountability in Dominic Ongwen’s ICC trial

Abstract

ABSTRACT The complications which played out in ascribing an identity: victim, perpetrator or both, in Lord’s Resistance Army’s (LRA) child abduction victim turned Warlord, Dominic Ongwen, calls for the rethinking of the international criminal justice system. While law operates in black and white, politics is fraught with and at times thrives in proverbial grey areas. In order for justice to be done, the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) geography and logic must be shifted epistemologically from the Global North to the sites where these atrocities were committed. The Roman-Dutch law logic, which largely informes the ICC’s jurisprudence, makes little existential logic to the thousands of the victims of the LRA’s over three decades of operations spanning over four countries. I argue against the token involvement of victims of human rights abuse by advocating for the deployment of local justice systems such as mato oput, as they not only resonate with the victims but also with the perpetrators, both herein termed survivors. Had mato oput been instituted first, the victim turned perpetrator complexity would have been addressed as the agent would have been cleansed, pardoned, and reintegrated into the community.