Reparation hopes dim for Ugandan survivors of war crimes
Saturday February 24 2018
Ugandan victims of the Lord’s Resistance Army at a displaced people's camp in northern Uganda in 2006. There is limited funding for survivors of war crimes. PHOTO | AFP
The guns in northern Uganda may have fallen silent 12 years ago, but the wheels of justice and the much anticipated reparations for the victims of the war against Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army grind agonisingly slower.
While a trial for one of the five indicted commanders continues at The Hague and another at Uganda’s High Court, the people who suffered war crimes and crimes against humanity at the hands of the rebels are yet to get any assistance from the Trust Fund for Victims (TFV): Projects have so far assisted only 45,000 victims since 2008.
A joint monitoring team led by the president of the Assembly of State Parties (ASP) of the International Criminal Court Judge O-Gon Kwon visited Gulu and Lira districts in northern Uganda, where the TFV has so far spent €8.5 million ($10.4 million) on projects that were established to assist the victims.
“I will do my utmost to promote the important work of the Trust Fund for Victims and the need for sufficient funding to carry out its mandates,” said Mr Kwon.
The officials said they were “deeply impressed” with the amount of work that the implementing partners have done to help war victims.
For instance, using funding from the TFV, the Orthopaedic Centre at Gulu Regional Referral Hospital made and distributed 2,544 artificial limbs to victims of landmines between 2009 and 2017.
Assistance mandate
However, the executive director of TFV Pieter de Baan decried the limited funding sources.
“We would like to spend much more, €100 million ($123 million) or more,” he said. “But limitations of our funding do not allow us to.”
Along with lack of capacity to arrest indicted suspects, funding is also one of the challenges that the Rome Statute faced when it established the ICC in 2002 to investigate crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide.
In 2004, the Rome Statute created the TFV to implement court ordered reparations, provide physical and psychosocial rehabilitation or material support to victims of crimes.
Mr de Baan told The EastAfrican that the TFV currently has €12 million ($14.8 million), covering northern Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cote d’Ivoire and Mali, where it has an assistance mandate for victims of crimes whose alleged perpetrators are still before the Court.
In Kenya, the TFV plans to start projects and programmes for thousands of victims of the 2007-08 post-election violence.
A programme will also be set up in the Central African Republic, whose citizens have suffered horrific crimes.