As the Rome Statute review conference in Kampala wound up, it was clear not everyone shared the position and optimism of the International Criminal Court on nailing those it has indicted.

Officials of the Court remain bullish that the arrest of major suspects indicted — Sudan’s President Omar al-Bashir and leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army Joseph Kony of Uganda — is only a matter of time.

ICC Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo says those indicted are becoming increasingly isolated and will be arrested soon.

The Court indicted President Bashir and issued an arrest warrant last year for war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed under his watch since 2003 when the Darfur conflict broke out.

Kony and his commanders

At the review conference of the Rome Statute that ran from May 31 to June 11 in Kampala, Mr Ocampo expressed similar sentiments over the arrest of Kony and his top commanders that were indicted alongside the elusive rebel leader in 2005.

Mr Kony and his commanders are wanted in the Hague to answer 33 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in northern Uganda since 2002.

For decades, the LRA was supported by Bashir’s Khartoum government, but it lost its base in Southern Sudan when the North and South signed a Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) in 2005.

Once the arrest warrants came out, the rebel outfit shifted base to northeastern Congo and the Central Africa Republic where it has continued to kill and displace thousands. Because of this, many voices at the Review Conference say the optimism that these indicted men will be arrested is wishful thinking by the Court’s bureaucracy.

Clearly, the continued failure to arrest both the LRA leader and President Bashir has security implications for the region.

The LRA atrocities now span four member states of the regional peace and security grouping known as the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region — namely Uganda, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central Africa Republic.

Were President Bashir to be arrested, the implications, both political and diplomatic, would be far reaching for the region’s stability.

For Kampala, it is diplomatically awkward not to invite a sitting head of state of a fellow African country to an African Union Summit, let alone arrest him, concedes Mirjam Blaak, Uganda’s deputy head of mission to Brussels and lead person to the ICC.

In addition, the actions of those indicted undermine the region’s stability. For instance, Kony and the LRA’s victims are spread around several countries. In the past year and a half, the LRA has killed nearly 2,000 people in Southern Sudan, DRC and Central African Republic while more than 30,000 have been displaced.

This is the cost of impunity, Mr Ocampo charges, but how and when to end it, remains a puzzle.

Aborted peace process

A year after the LRA arrest warrants were issued, the Southern Sudan leadership started a peace process between the Kampala and the LRA in order to flush out the latter and pave way for the smooth implementation of the CPA.

But after 22 months of peace talks in the Southern Sudan capital of Juba, the process fell through when the principal actors failed to sign the final peace agreement.

Legal expert and member of the Juba peace talks delegation Jacob Oulanya says the LRA cited ICC indictments as the biggest impediment to signing the peace agreement.

“There were three positions before Juba: Prosecution now, not yet or never. It was the unanimous decision of the people of northern Uganda that prosecution was ‘not yet.’ In other words, for the LRA to sign, we had to be creative: Find a system that was acceptable to the international community and also attractive to the LRA. Throughout this process the word ICC was the most cited,” said Mr Oulanya.

The five situations currently before the Court rotate around countries within the Great Lakes Region — Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, the DRC and the Central African Republic. How these cases are disposed of has grave implications for regional stability and indeed, the Court’s ability to end impunity and dispense justice.

Northern Uganda, Congo and the Central African Republic were referred by the countries’ respective governments, while Darfur was referred by the UN Security Council. The ICC Prosecutor took up the issue of the 2007 post election violence in Kenya, and in March, the Pre-Trial Chamber authorised investigations and Mr Ocampo reported last week that work to bring those who committed crimes in Kenya is “progressing well.”