Around March 1990, a 10-year-old boy was walking to school in northern Uganda when he ran into rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Led by Joseph Kony, a former catechist in the Catholic church who had exchanged the rosary for fetishes and an AK-47 rifle, the LRA was the rump of the old army in Uganda that, since colonial times, had been dominated by people from the north.

The British considered the northern tribes to be warlike and, in typical divide-and-rule fashion, had built the repressive colonial army around them, with southerners dominating the civil service.

This northern-dominated army had taken power under Idi Amin in 1971 and ruled the political-military landscape until 1986 when Yoweri Museveni led the National Resistance Army rebels, dominated by southerners, to power.

The northerners mobilised armed responses to recapture state power but these were either defeated militarily or dismantled through peace deals and offers of amnesty.

For whatever reason, the LRA, which remained the last group standing, turned against its own people and over the next two decades carried out barbaric and grotesque acts that, in their shocking cruelty, drowned out the original political basis of the rebel group as the armed wing of disaffected northern politicians. 

To populate its fighting ranks, the LRA abducted boys and girls and turned them into fighters and sex slaves, respectively. Dominic Ongwen, the little boy who ran into the rebels that rainy morning, could easily have remained a statistic, one of the estimated 60,000 children abducted over the course of the war between the LRA and the Ugandan government.

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Destined for infamy

However, Ongwen was destined for infamy. Initiation rites for many abductees usually involved killing those caught trying to escape, often with their bare hands or using crude weapons such as rocks and machetes.

It was a chilling example of what lay in store for those who dared to try. It also left them covered not only in the blood of their victims but also in the shame and stigma of murder.

Undeterred, some would go on and risk escape, often when sent on food-gathering errands. Many — the actual number is unknown — were killed in battle. Thousands were rescued in encounters with government forces. Somehow, Ongwen stayed in the LRA.

By the age of 18 Ongwen had become a major. By the time he became a brigadier, in his early 20s, Ongwen had developed a reputation as a daring and fierce fighter and had become one of the top LRA commanders.

In 2003, the government of Uganda took the LRA to the International Criminal Court, becoming the first state party to appeal to the new court that had just been set up to try war crimes and crimes against humanity. Ongwen was one of five LRA top commanders, including rebel leader Kony, indicted by the ICC.

Last week, Ongwen appeared before the ICC in The Hague, less than a month after he handed himself over to the Seleka rebels in the Central African Republic.

READ: Man claiming to be LRA commander surrenders

Gone were the military fatigues, the green gumboots and the short and dirty dreadlocks. In his blue suit, white shirt and tie, Ongwen looked like a civil servant, not a man accused of seven counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity including, murder, enslavement, inflicting bodily harm, looting and cruel treatment of civilians. Only the menacingly cold stare in his eyes served as a reminder that this was a man familiar with death and suffering.

Should the ICC judges decide to put Ongwen on trial later in the year, as is widely expected, it will provide the opportunity for closer scrutiny of what really happened in northern Uganda, the role of the various protagonists and the relevance of the ICC as an antidote to impunity.

Proving Ongwen’s individual crimes and the wider atrocities committed by the LRA should be easy and relatively straightforward; there are thousands of survivors and former rebel fighters on hand to testify about the gruesome things they saw or were ordered to do. Hundreds lost their lips or ears to the machetes wielded by the rebels, but that is not enough to silence the victims.

The subtext of the Ongwen trial is however likely to be a lot more complicated. To begin with, he is likely to argue that he is more of a victim than a perpetrator — a young boy who was abducted and forced to choose between killing or being killed — and that he should be protected, not prosecuted, by the court.

As one opinion leader put it at a recent public dialogue in northern Uganda, “Ongwen was abducted, destroyed and ruined. He was made a teacher of a system whose motto value is kill to survive.”

In fact, the public dialogue organised by the Refugee Law Project and the Northern Uganda Transitional Justice Working Group, both NGOs operating in Uganda, reveals that while many are happy to see Ongwen on trial in the Netherlands, reconciliation will take a lot more than the trial of one or a handful of LRA top commanders.

“Ongwen’s fate is not a personal dilemma but a dilemma for Uganda and the ICC to grapple with,” a summary report from the dialogue and radio talk shows conducted to debate the matter in northern Uganda noted.

“It was partly on this account that many of the participants and callers preferred Ongwen to be handed over to the ICC, but on condition that the court pay attention to the plight of the victims in LRA-affected areas, reopen the entire investigations in northern Uganda, ensure full accountability for atrocities committed by all parties to the conflict, and accord Ongwen a fair hearing.”

These demands by the victims raise fresh complications. First, while the ICC has investigated and indicted senior LRA commanders, it has not investigated reports of atrocities committed by government soldiers — despite some of them being well documented.

At a basic level, for instance, what culpability should the Uganda government bear for failing to protect Ongwen and thousands of other children from being abducted by the LRA?

Was the herding of almost two million people in northern Uganda into internally displaced people’s camps by government troops a pragmatic attempt to protect them from the rebels or collective punishment of entire communities across generations?

As the Anglican Bishop MacLeord Baker Ochola II said at the recent dialogue in northern Uganda: “The government of Uganda cannot take Ongwen to court since it is also implicated in the same crimes as well as the question of responsibility to protect its citizens.”

Second, the ICC mandate is not retrospective; it does not cover war crimes and crimes against humanity that occurred before its inception at the turn of the millennium. This is problematic because the LRA war goes back to around 1988 and, in fact, has deeper inspiration from the earlier military-ethnic conflicts in Uganda.

Wars go through cycles of violence that ebb and flow; is it thus reasonable to deliver justice by looking at the tail end of a long-running conflict?

This leads to even more complex considerations about the nature of the LRA war and the crimes Ongwen is alleged to have committed. Were these criminal acts or was it political violence underpinned by a political agenda? If it was the latter — and the LRA did claim some form of political agenda in the early days and in the failed Juba Peace Talks with the Uganda government in 2005/6 — is it possible to deal with the violent symptoms without understanding or unravelling the underlying political causes and the actions of all sides of the conflict?

As Professor Mahmood Mamdani argued at a public lecture in Nairobi a year ago: “Political violence is seldom a standalone act. It is most often part of a cycle of violence. When it comes to a cycle of violence, victims and perpetrators often change sides. There is no permanent victim and no permanent perpetrator.” 

ICC’s dilemma

Already, more than 10,000 former rebels have been granted amnesty and many reintegrated into the army to fight against the LRA. A particularly notorious one, Onen Kamdulu, even managed to obtain amnesty and testify on behalf of the government in the treason trial against opposition politician Kizza Besigye before he was arrested and charged with highway robbery. Political violence may be different from criminal violence but some people are capable of doing both.

The ICC has come under repeated attack over allegations that it picks on African leaders while ignoring the protagonists in other conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere.

There is some merit in that criticism but the more important charge against the ICC — one that rarely makes the news headlines — is that it seeks to impose a judicial, winner-takes-all solution to what are often essentially political problems.  

There is already evidence of this in northern Uganda. The end of the fighting in 2006 (when the LRA relocated to the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and the Central African Republic) was followed not by a judicial process but by political manoeuvres to win the support of a region that had, up to that point, remained hostile to the Museveni regime.

The Uganda government’s response to the “Northern Question” has not been a mass trial of suspects, an investigation of atrocities or even a truth and reconciliation process. It has been political patronage, through (mismanaged) post-war recovery plans, a personal charm offensive by President Museveni and appointment of opinion leaders from the area to senior positions in the government and the ruling party.

Electoral evidence from 2011 — when Museveni and the NRM received the most votes ever in northern Uganda — seems to suggest that the political response is working to bring about reconciliation between the north and the south.

Supporters of the ICC process say the LRA indictments helped to bring international pressure and attention to the rebellion, forcing the fighters out of northern Uganda. And there is merit in the argument, although the improved military capabilities of government forces and the end of the civil war in South Sudan played major roles, too.

Many will trumpet the trial of Dominic Ongwen at the ICC as evidence that international justice is working. In the villages of northern Uganda, however, victims and perpetrators of the war cross paths daily as they try to rebuild their lives. In the dirty business of civil war, no one is entirely guilty and no one is entirely innocent.

Only time will tell whether the judicial process of the trial that could soon be held in the faraway Dutch city can capture that pragmatic and political reality.