The International Criminal Trial as a Site for Contesting Historical and Political Narratives: The Case of Dominic Ongwen

Filip Strandberg Hassellind

doi:10.1177/0964663920971836

Abstract

This paper considers how the international criminal trial emerges as a site for contesting historical and political narratives, and how the proceedings against Dominic Ongwen in the International Criminal Court gives us yet another opportunity to do so. It focuses on how the criminal trial appears to reinforce the hegemony of some contested historical narratives over others in attempting to deal with the past. It is suggested that the conflict in Uganda as well as what is currently happening in the Ongwen trial cannot be understood in isolation from, on the one hand, interregional and factional struggles within the Ugandan territory and, on the other hand, a postcolonial logic. Departing from this nexus, the paper introduces, discusses, and analyzes the strategy of rupture as developed by Jacques Vergès. By scrutinizing the legal strategies employed by Ongwen and his defense team, the paper argues that their strategies demonstrate the ways in which historical and political narratives are susceptible to ‘rupture’ by counternarratives put forth by defendants who refuse to play their part in the global justice drama by pointing to the struggle for larger contextual issues. In the setting of the Ongwen trial, this paper argues that by tapping into the victim-perpetrator narrative, Ongwen’s defense team are, wittingly or unwittingly, ‘rupturing’ the binaries in international criminal law. The paper concludes by arguing that the Court may need to find a new approach to ‘courtroom historiography’ if it is going to survive, either with or without the Global South.

Highlights

Dominic Ongwen was, together with Joseph Kony, Vincent Otti, Okot Odhiambo and Raska Lukwiya, one of the leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA)
Is there a possibility for the defendant to decline to participate in such endeavors and to suggest an alternate narrative on how to understand the past’s relation to the present?. Using this question as a point of departure, focusing on the trial against Ongwen, this paper introduces, discusses, and analyzes the ‘strategy of rupture’ as termed by Jacques Verges, and the ways in which this legal defense has been applied in practice at the International Criminal Court (ICC) by Ongwen’s defense team in order to resist the Court in itself, and, and more generally, knowledge-making in Uganda’s transitional justice process
While Verges employed it in order to denounce colonialism, I believe what is happening in the Ongwen case is that, by disrupting the legal binary between victim and perpetrator, a space is opened for the broader disruption of the political context, enabling a challenge to the LRA bad/National Resistance Movement (NRM) good binary

Summary

Introduction

Dominic Ongwen was, together with Joseph Kony, Vincent Otti, Okot Odhiambo and Raska Lukwiya, one of the leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). This paper argues that the disagreement over Ongwen’s culpability relates to strategies of rupture in that the chosen defense tactics are, wittingly or unwittingly, ‘rupturing’ the binaries in international criminal law and, by extension, negotiating a new legal subject comprised of the hybrid, entangled subject position of the victim-perpetrator.

Results

Conclusion