Breakdown and Repair in International Criminal Law: The Case of Dominic Ongwen
Jill Stauffer
Associate Professor, Department of Peace, Justice and Human Rights
Academic Director, Center for Peace and Global Citizenship
Haverford College
International criminal law is a field of theory and of practice that aims to end impunity for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. It is, thus, deeply involved in contemporary discourses of breakdown and repair. I’ll use the case of Dominic Ongwen at the ICC to pose questions about what international criminal justice can and cannot see, and what it can and cannot do, with regard to cultural breakdown and our human attempts to fix what breaks.
Ongwen is an ex-child soldier who was abducted at the age of 10, brutally indoctrinated into a violent way of life, and forced into combat. He allegedly became so good at partaking in the violence that he was promoted up the chain of command of the Lord’s Resistance Army. He is now in his 40s and on trial at the International Criminal Court, charged with 70 crimes against humanity and war crimes, including abduction and conscription of child soldiers, murder, attacks on civilian populations, enslavement, torture, rape, forced pregnancy, and sexual slavery.
It’s worth noting that he is a victim of some of the same crimes with which he is charged. A widespread and long-term situation of rightlessness—or structural violence that rendered rights meaningless—created the situation where someone like Ongwen could end up where he did. That raises a key question: how do we determine what it means to find someone responsible for being one outcome of a complex history of ethnic and regional conflict based in disparities of wealth and political power that meant that large numbers of people were, for generations, never effectively protected by their government or their communities? Is a legal proceeding seeking to establish individual criminal responsibility capable of seeing what broke down in Uganda, and will a legalistic version of repair fix what is broken?
I will not argue that Ongwen cannot be responsible—children and adults do have agency; putting an end to impunity for atrocity is a worthy goal; finding him responsible might help his victims feel that justice has been done; establishing what happened using rigorous legal procedures creates an archive of harm; and all of that does matter. But I will ask us to consider what we lose if we let ourselves feel satisfied with the idea of individual criminal responsibility at work in this case. If corruption, legacies of colonialism, disputes over natural resources, population displacement, internment in camps, constant vulnerability to attack, and reliance on humanitarian aid form the backdrop to the choices with which Ongwen and many others were faced, who is responsible for that? That question points to a diffuse form of responsibility that rests not only with the LRA but with conditions in Uganda and with the history of colonial and postcolonial Africa as well—and that is some pretty diffuse responsibility that includes large parts of the non-African world hoping that what some call a quasi-imperialist court will solve a problem no one wants to look at closely. What kind of proceeding or mode of judgment would teach us about our own responsibility for, or implication in, the histories that gave us the present moment? Could that also be what’s broken and in need of repair?