THE HAGUE: Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court began presenting evidence Tuesday to support their charges against fugitive Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony at the global court’s first ever in absentia hearing, alleging that he inflicted horrors on Ugandan society that still echo two decades later.
Kony is facing 39 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity as the fugitive leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, which terrorized northern Uganda for decades.
“The social and cultural fabric of Northern Uganda has been torn apart, and it is still struggling to rebuild itself,” deputy prosecutor Mame Mandiaye Niang said in his opening statements.
The LRA began its attacks in Uganda in the 1980s, when Kony sought to overthrow the government. After being pushed out of Uganda, the militia went on to attack villages in Congo, Central African Republic and South Sudan. It was notorious for using child soldiers, mutilating civilians and enslaving women.
Niang said that victims were still “scarred in their body and spirit.”
As part of his presentation to a panel of three black-robed judges, Niang showed multiple graphic videos of the destruction the prosecution says was wrought by the LRA, including a clip from a Uganda police video depicting a body being removed from the rubble of a burned out building.
The court’s so-called confirmation of charges hearing comes two decades after it issued an arrest warrant for Kony.
The ICC hearing is not a trial, but allows prosecutors to outline their case in court. After weighing the evidence, judges can rule on whether or not to confirm the charges against Kony, but he cannot be tried unless he is in ICC custody.
Court-appointed counsel for Kony argued the proceedings violate their client’s fair trial rights and should not have been held at all.
“The empty chair impacted the preparation of the defense,” lawyer Peter Haynes said, pointing to the courtroom seat where Kony would be if he was present.
The hearing has been seen as a test case for the court moving forward with other cases where the likelihood of having a suspect detained is considered remote, such as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Everything that happens at the ICC is precedent for the next case,” Michael Scharf, an international law professor at Case Western Reserve University, told The Associated Press.
Scharf added that while the whereabouts of Netanyahu and Putin are known, Kony has eluded US special forces and remained at large despite a $5 million reward. He also noted that the warrants for Netanyahu and Putin were issued in recent years, whereas Kony has been wanted since 2005.
Kony was thrust into the global spotlight in 2012 when a video about his crimes went viral. Despite the attention and international efforts to capture him, he remains at large.
The ICC proceedings against Kony will be followed by many in Uganda, where survivors welcome the charges even as they regret the failure to catch him.
“He did many things bad,” said Odong Kajumba, who escaped the LRA after he was captured and forced to carry a sack of sugar to Uganda’s border with Sudan in 1996. If they can arrest Kony, he said, “I am very happy.”
Not everyone is happy with the proceedings moving forward.
”Why do you want to try a man you can’t get? They should first get him,” said Odonga Otto, a former lawmaker from northern Uganda. “It’s a mockery.” Trying Kony while he is in custody makes court proceedings “more real” for victims and survivors of his alleged crimes, he said.
Another LRA commander, Dominic Ongwen, was convicted in 2020 of 61 offenses including murders, rapes, forced marriages and recruiting child soldiers. Ongwen was himself abducted by the militia as a 9-year-old boy, transformed into a child soldier and later became a brutal commander in the rebel group.
Ongwen is currently serving his 25-year sentence in Norway.
ICC opens war crimes case against Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony
https://arab.news/va2mu
ICC opens war crimes case against Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony
- Kony is facing 39 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity
- “The social and cultural fabric of Northern Uganda has been torn apart and it is still struggling to rebuild itself,” deputy prosecutor Mame Mandiaye Niang said
Isolated Kremlin critics lament lost future at Nemtsov memorial
- Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death
- Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street
MOSCOW: On a bridge next to the Kremlin on a drizzly Friday morning, a lone Russian police officer stood looking at the half-dozen bunches of flowers laying in memory of slain opposition figure Boris Nemtsov.
The symbolism was almost too much.
Four years into Moscow’s full-scale offensive on Ukraine, which has seen President Vladimir Putin eradicate all forms of dissent and usher in strict military censorship laws that have silenced his critics, few Russians dared, or wanted, to pay tribute.
Nemtsov, a longtime Putin opponent, was shot and killed on February 27 2015, meters from the Kremlin’s red walls. He was 55.
Hundreds used to flock to the makeshift memorial on the anniversary of his death, which came on Friday.
This year, there was barely a trickle. Those who turned up were visibly nervous.
“So few people, they’ve all forgotten,” lamented one elderly man, who refused to give his name.
“Everybody is afraid,” a woman standing nearby added.
Since Russia ordered troops into Ukraine it has intensified a crackdown on dissent, with almost no opposition to the Kremlin visible on the street.
AFP reporters on Friday morning saw only around a dozen mourners alongside Western ambassadors laying red carnations.
“Keep moving, don’t gather in a crowd, don’t block the way for other citizens,” a police officer said through a megaphone.
Three days after Russia launched its offensive on Ukraine in 2022, protesters had staged an impromptu rally against the war at the memorial on the anniversary of Nemtsov’s death.
Nemtsov’s supporters have always accused Chechen leader and key Putin ally Ramzan Kadyrov of ordering his killing.
Kadyrov has rejected the claims.
Five Chechens were convicted of a contract killing but investigators never said who it was ordered by.
- ‘Everything is persecuted’ -
For his followers, Nemtsov is a totemic figure in Russian political life — seen as a once-future leader who might have taken the country on a different path.
“I come here every year,” said 79-year-old scientist Sergei at the bridge on Friday.
“Russia should have had — though unfortunately it didn’t work out — a leader exactly like Nemtsov,” he told AFP, declining to give his surname.
“Right now everything here is suppressed, everything is persecuted, people are sitting in prisons.”
A physicist by education, Nemtsov rose to fame in the 1990s as a young, liberal provincial governor, and was widely tipped to take over from Boris Yeltsin.
He gave his hesitant backing to Putin when the ex-KGB spy was tapped to enter the Kremlin instead, but became an early — and fierce — opponent of what he cast as the Russian leader’s creeping authoritarianism.
He had largely lost popularity and was only a marginal figure in Russian politics when he was killed in 2015. Still, his murder shocked the country and the world.
“The hopes of the whole country were pinned on him — of all the people who wanted it to be free here,” said Olga Vinogradova, a 66-year-old volunteer who tends to the pop-up memorial to Nemtsov on the bridge.
“When this man was killed, naturally, all of us were, we were all just executed at that moment. Because our hopes were destroyed,” she said.
“With this memorial, we remind people that there was a different path for Russia. And that there was a real person who could have led us down this path.”
- ‘Forced out’ -
Nemtsov had strongly opposed Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine and Moscow’s military backing for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
He was also a close and early ally of Alexei Navalny, who died in 2024 in an Arctic prison in what his supports say was a poisoning.
Open opposition to the Kremlin is unheard of inside Russia since the first days of the Ukraine offensive — when riot police cracked down hard on the thousands that took to the streets to protest.
All major critics of the Kremlin are in exile, prison or dead.
Those that remain have been silenced.
“Many have been forced out of the country, some have been killed,” said Gleb, a 23-year-old photographer.
A movement or person like Nemtsov was “impossible” to imagine right now, he said.
Still, he held on to a slither of hope.
“But everything can change at any moment.”
