Politics
Michela Wrong rejects the primrose path
Published 31 October 2005
I find it strange that we in the west don't want to allow Africa similarly flexible notions of justice to those that served us well
Sometimes, writing about Africa, an image comes unbidden to mind. It's the vision of a cobblestone path, winding to the horizon. The path is lined with primroses - some Shakespearean reference there, I think. It is the path of good intentions, and it leads to hell.
The primrose path has been on my thoughts a lot this month, ever since I read the words of Betty Bigombe, a former Ugandan minister responsible, until recently, for persuading the guerrilla movement ravaging her country's north to come in from the cold. Her work trying to win the trust of commanders of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), she despairingly told journalists, had been dealt a fatal blow. "There is now no hope of getting them to surrender." The reason? The International Criminal Court (ICC) had just issued five arrest warrants - its first - for the LRA's leaders, including the former choirboy turned psychopath Joseph Kony, now wanted on 12 counts of crimes against humanity and 21 counts of war crimes.
Bigombe later moderated her words, but there are many in north Uganda who share her original damning assessment. Elders of the Acholi tribe, civil society organisations and local bishops have all been warning for months that the involvement of the ICC risks sabotaging hopes of ending the nightmare in the north.
Despite grandiose promises voiced over nearly two decades, the Ugandan army has failed to crush a rag-tag guerrilla movement. Many believe the generals are too busy skimming profits from a western-supported military campaign to want to change the status quo. Given the army's manifest incompetence, reconciliation seemed until recently the best chance of improving life for the thousands of villagers who stream into towns each night to escape attack. If that meant amnesties for despicable human beings, so be it.
Even before the ICC publicised its warrants this month, its role was casting a pall over the traditional ceremonies used to mark rebels' re-entry into civilian life. A child of 10 - the age of many of those abducted by the LRA - could grasp the basic premise that a fighter thinking of handing in his AK-47 might pause if simultaneously assured he would then be held accountable, in court, for all he had done.
Yet human rights organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have hailed the ICC's announcement as a triumph for global justice. Why? Because they believe in the primordial importance of "putting an end to impunity". "Kony is exactly the type of person for whom the ICC was created - an amoral warlord whose crimes include murder, rape, kidnapping, slavery and amputation," rejoiced one group, Citizens for Global Solutions. Impunity: the human rights organisations do so bang on about it. The climate of impunity must be ended, they say. If a warlord with his eye on the presidency realised that somewhere, sometime, he would be made to account for his crimes, he might not commit them in the first place.
I find this puzzling, given how very useful - nay, positively necessary - a climate of impunity proved in allowing our own western societies to put past horrors behind them.
Here in Europe we too had our warlords and our rampaging armies, atrocities and war crimes. Tackling the "climate of impunity" after the Second World War would have meant not only prosecuting the pilots who razed Dresden and the officials who ordered the bombing of Nagasaki, but trying the countless "ordinary" individuals who betrayed their Jewish neighbours to the Nazis, who informed on the Resistance or pocketed government salaries in Vichy France. The trials would have dragged on for decades.
It didn't happen. There was a general recognition, after Nuremberg, that if anything was to emerge from the rubble, communities would be required to turn a blind eye to the most blatant of injustices, swallow their bile as everyday, low-level collaborators, torturers and sadists walked free. The notion of ultimate justice was abandoned, because building the future seemed more important than brooding over the past. Life is an imperfect experience.
So I find it strange that we in the west don't want to allow modern Africa similarly flexible notions of justice. If the Amnesty Internationals and Human Rights Watches of this world have their way, African communities, uniquely in the history of the world, will savour the rigours of "pure" justice, a realm in which nothing is forgotten, each sin totted up, and - most ludicrously of all in the African context - appropriate "reparations" are paid to the victims. The murky compromises that served the west so well are not, apparently, good enough for Africa. If, in the process of pursuing this legalistic utopia, peace and reconciliation are fatally undermined, that's just too bad.
This is a strange kind of favour to do the continent. I'm left wondering why it is that the aid workers and student campaigners who routinely denounce the IMF and World Bank for imposing inappropriate economic policies on African nations, in defiance of local wishes, never utter a peep over the even greater cultural arrogance manifested by human rights organisations presuming to know best. Too busy treading the primrose path, I suppose.
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