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Abstract
ABSTRACTThe trial of Thomas Kwoyelo – the first war crimes prosecution of a former Lord's Resistance Army fighter, and the only domestic war crimes prosecution in Uganda at the time of writing – has been packed with drama, intrigue and politics. The article considers what Kwoyelo's trial means for those most affected by the crimes he allegedly committed, and, more broadly, what it means for the ‘transitional justice’ project in Uganda. The article is concerned primarily with how the trial has been interpreted ‘on the ground’ in Acholiland: by local leadership; by those with a personal relationship to Kwoyelo; by direct victims of his alleged crimes; and by those who were not. Responses to the trial have been shaped by people's specific wartime experiences and if or how his prosecution relates to their current circumstances – as well as by the profound value of social harmony and distrust of higher authorities to dispense justice. We conclude with a discussion of the relevance of our findings for the practice of ‘transitional justice’ across the African continent.
Highlights
The trial of Thomas Kwoyelo – the first domestic war crimes case in Uganda – provides a fascinating exemplar of international and domestic political machinations that shape the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) accountability debate in Uganda
We develop a more detailed analysis, arguing that local perspectives are shaped in large part by how Kwoyelo and his alleged crimes are understood to impact upon immediate socio-economic and cosmological relational dynamics in the context of a fragile peace
This, in turn, is guided by whether Kwoyelo, as an individual, and his alleged crimes are intimately known and directly experienced or whether both are subsumed into broader narratives about war, peace and distrust of the government of Ugandan (GoU)
Summary
Since the end of the Cold War, transitional justice – a set of judicial and nonjudicial measures designed to redress legacies of heinous human rights abuses – has become a normalized and anticipated international and national response to mass atrocity. The broader transitional justice field remains overshadowed by a set of binaries that have long dominated the debate These binaries tend to essentialize and objectify justice needs in post-conflict places around false dichotomies of ‘local versus international’ and ‘restorative versus retributive’ approaches, positing the notion of non-Western local order against Western liberal order and leading to what Hinton calls ‘identity shrinkage’ (Hinton 2011: 7; Moe 2013; Macdonald forthcoming).
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