Historic War Crimes Court Verdict Condemns Congolese Warlord
The international war crimes court at The Hague found Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo guilty on Wednesday in its first ever ruling after a decade of work limited largely to Africa while major cases elsewhere remain beyond its reach.
Governments and rights groups level war crimes accusations at Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for cracking down on protesters. But the International Criminal Court (ICC) cannot act because of deadlock among world powers at the United Nations Security Council, the only body that could order a prosecution.
Lubanga, 51, who will be sentenced later, was found guilty of recruiting and deploying child soldiers during a five-year conflict until 2003. An estimated 60,000 people were killed in the violence, part of much wider bloodshed in central Africa.
He sat impassively in court in white robes and cap, having denied all charges. That one of his co-accused remains a serving army general in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo is, however, a source of disappointment to campaigners for justice - and an indication of the political limitations on the court.
It was set up to provide a permanent forum after ad hoc tribunals, inspired by the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders, were used to prosecute those responsible for war crimes in the former Yugoslavia and for the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s.
But the ICC can work only with the assent of political leaders: “Is it going to give pause to Bashar al-Assad?” asked Reed Brody, counsel for Human Rights Watch, of the conviction of a man he called a “small fish” in Africa. “I don’t think so.”
“Have we seen atrocities fall off in the world? We only have to look at Syria to know it’s not the case,” he said, noting how Russia and China vetoed efforts at the United Nations Security Council to refer Syrian leaders to the ICC.
That is the only way to initiate a prosecution, since Syria, like Russia and China but also the United States, is not a party to the Rome Statute, which created the court in July 2002.
“It’s not the fault of the ICC,” said Brody, who established a reputation as a scourge of dictators during efforts to bring Chile’s Augusto Pinochet to trial. “It’s the fault of the Security Council and of the world order … the international justice system does not operate in a vacuum.”
While welcoming the verdict against Lubanga, which may help set a precedent for other cases involving the recruitment of child soldiers, he added: “Those countries with political power and their allies have been shielded from the court.”
Among those accused by the court is Sudan’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who has dismissed his 2009 indictment as a Western conspiracy and has both continued in office unhindered and been able on occasion to travel to sympathetic countries.
Navi Pillay, a former ICC judge who now heads the U.N. human rights agency and has been a severe critic of leaders in Syria, Sudan and elsewhere, stressed, however, that the Lubanga verdict was a “major milestone in the fight against impunity”.