Thanks fail. So I think that introduction to the Ugandan context summarises the angst that drove my research.
And it was really within the context of our common frustration about the debates
and perhaps a very narrow framework that the debates were operating on,
which was how is it that the ICC was going to affect peace in Uganda with the ICC going to lead to peace with the ICC,
going to derail possibilities for peace? And there was a lot of speculation happening on all sides of this conversation.
And so my initial research was motivated by that observation.
But because I have I have thought about this for a while and I could say so many things.
What I decided to do was to narrow it down to a written piece of work,
and that might make fieldwork easier in terms of reaching me and making me keep quiet.
After a certain period of time for that, I can I can be sure to cover some of the most important elements within the allots.
He allotted fifteen to twenty minutes timeframe.
And I think what you will realise is that some of the debates that animated the Ugandan case are very much present currently in the Sudan situation
with regard to the referral of of various Atabay issuing of various arrest warrants in the Sudanese case and the conversations about peace,
justice for the ICC and what's coming in. What what can explain various peace processes, really.
Those debates are still alive. And so that is the context of my work.
And also, just to add that quite a bit of the paper is the presentation of the first quite preliminary.
So if you have any reflections, thoughts, some horse additions that you think I should think about at the end of it,
I'd love to hear what what you'd have to say, because I very much appreciate feedback.
And then, as Phil also mentioned, it's very much based on interviews with the athletes and stakeholders in the conflict as a way of trying to
go beyond the discourse that was taking place at the level of international organisations and the media.
So the question that I'm really trying to answer is, how did the ICC affect this process?
If I call and I will do so in three steps.
The first step would be a very quick zoom through the history of Uganda.
And then I will talk about the conflict, the involvement of the ICC and the subsequent peace process.
The second step will be to give two common explanations that are given for the Juba, his process,
and one of those explanations privileges shifts in military and political considerations on the ground.
And the second explanation, privileges, explanations of privileges, arguments about principles, norms and international institutions.
And then the third section of the paper will propose that a fuller explanation might
be acquired through adding a crucial but often overlooked an element of an agency.
And watch my evidence seems to point to is a conclusion that Juba, the dispute,
the peace process was one of the by-products of elite agents appropriating
International Criminal Court in pursuit of a range of non justice political goals.
So that gives you a quick overview of what it is that I'm going to tell you.
So Section one, the historical overview within the context of a turbulent post independence history in Uganda,
the conflict between the government of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army was triggered in 1986 by the NRA.
And I raised the National Resistance Army of the current president.
Was that any when the NRA overthrew the then government of the Uganda National Liberation Army
and that government that was overthrown was composed mostly of soldiers from northern Uganda,
70s armies subsequently occupied northern Uganda.
This area actually land where a former overthrown army came from in order to confront the supposed popular base for the U.N. a u.
N n a. And in the process of repress and perpetrated widespread atrocities against the
population resentment's to the occupation that led to a series of rebellion,
most notably the Holy Spirit movement of Alice Laquinta.
And while her rebellion was eventually defeated, Corney and what eventually came to be called the Lord's Resistance Army,
the NRA had taken the mantle of spiritual discourse of Cleanseas to violence, and that is really what the NRA has been popularly known for.
So the war then resulted in a high exposure of brutality for most of the population.
In northern Uganda, perhaps as many as 66000 children were abducted.
Now, those numbers vary depending on who you're talking to and what their agenda might be.
But the bottom line is that a lot of abductions took place.
And in the media,
Kony and the NRA were portrayed by the government of Uganda as a ragtag army that was perpetually on the verge of being defeated by the Ugandan army,
which is also called the UPDF. So if I throw out that acronym, hopefully will not confuse you too much.
And this this this RIFs army was also thought of as a pointlessly violent group without a discernible political goal.
Now, a range of scholars have been gone on to a point out what might be considered to be political goals of the NRA.
What's the common narrative nonetheless is one that very much privileges that a political understanding of the Lord's Resistance Army.
And at the same time, the common narrative also marginalises the other aspects of abuses,
which include how it is that they UPDF, that is the Ugandan army,
were also complicit in a range of human rights abuses in northern Uganda,
most notably the internment of 80 to 90 percent of the actual population in internally displaced people comes.
So the ICC became effective in July 2000 and to end by 16th of December 2003,
the governments of Uganda had asked the ICC to intervene to address the war crimes committed by the
NRA and effectively became the first the first state referral to the International Criminal Court.
What this did was to spark a controversy on the wisdom of seeking legal solutions
to political problems with varying levels of nuance and agreement on alternatives.
The basic debate questioned whether the ICC should proceed with a prosecution
because it was appropriate or because it would lead to the desired consequences.
So why should we allow the ICC to intervene? And what are the kinds of consequences of intervention?
Malkasian. But the unexpected seems to happen because in May of 2006,
a secret process mediated by the government of southern Sudan took a public turn with the appearance of the appearance of images of Kony in the media.
For the first time and this was in a in a widely watched BBC interview.
And in this particular interview, Kony was calling for peace and he was talking about the way in which he does not target civilians.
He only targets people who are affiliated with that with 77 percent of the army or the seven force.
The Juba peace process begun mediated by the government of South Sudan Vice President Riek Machar.
A series of agreements were signed over a two year period,
including an agenda item three that detailed the process by which the ICC would be marginalised and
accountability pursued in Uganda through both formal and informal possible without the explicit.
By March of 2008, there was a signed a code on just about everything that the NRA had sought to get agreement on.
What remained with the signing of a symbolic final peace agreement on April 10th of 2008 and end in March 2008.
This is when Phil and I were having this workshop in Uganda and they were absolutely fascinating.
And we can discuss those in the question and answer session by April 10th of 2000 and eight.
That was the first time that Kony was expected to show up in order to sign this final peace agreement.
He did not show up, citing fear of arrest.
And soon it was evident that he would not sign at all unless the ICC arrest warrants were suspended.
The peace process was considered as terminated by the 14th of December 2008,
when the Ugandan army launched Operation Lightning Thunder against the Lord's Resistance Army in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
So given that background, how can we explain that you.
But this process. Now, here I go to the two explanations that I mentioned earlier.
The first common explanation of Juba rests on shifts in the political and military framework,
and it asserts that the ICC have little independent impact on the peace process outside the ships in post-Cold War military considerations.
The explanations in this camp to begin with, the understanding that Juba was the 10th peace process in Uganda since 1994, depending on how you count.
But most most common counts begin with.
They'd begun by one process of 1994, 1995 and proceed through a whole range of interventions that are attempted by both civil society,
the church and various establishments, including international organisations, until the Bego Mitchell process, which was still ongoing.
By the time of the arrest, warrants for the Lord's Resistance Army were being issued by the ICC.
So given that there were all this peace processes that were ongoing, people in this camp of explanations would argue that the ICC was not unimportant.
In fact, according to the the LRAD legal adviser, he mentioned that the ICC would have made this people,
meaning the NRA high commands even more obstinate because there would not have known that there was any way to get around the ICC.
So that view that the ICC would have marginalised the possibilities of negotiation.
Instead, what they do is offer two explanations for Juba. The first explanation they offer is on domestic military balance.
According to the UPDF spokesperson, initially the LRAD had advantage over the UPDF and this is what they say.
I quote, They were operating in a terrain more familiar to them than us, and the rebels were much younger than many of our troops, he said.
And then in another interview, the secretary to the president attributed the military's new advantage to what he called the president's stubbornness.
And I quote, President Museveni had been husband's stubborn when the West and everybody was calling on a cut down in defence spending.
He was insisting that the army had to be better equipped and that once the army was better equipped, we were going to have different results.
What happened was that 70 did not respond to the calls that he keep military spending below one point nine percent,
actually below two percent at one point five percent. And instead, by 2002, 2003, military spending was up to 21 percent, according to some accounts.
It is this shift in the military capacity of the government of Uganda that this
group of explanations would give credit for pushing the peace process underway.
So the NRA was militarily defeated. And so it makes sense that they would negotiate excuse me, that they would negotiate.
The second strand of arguments against him privileging the the military political explanations focus on geopolitics.
And as we know, the Ugandan army was involved in a long proxy war with Sudan,
Uganda supporting the Sudanese People's Liberation Army, the SLA, and in retaliation, Sudan supporting the NRA.
Now, there is the question as to who supported whose rebels.
First is one that is contentious. But the ultimate outcome is that there was a proxy war between Uganda and Sudan.
In 2005, the Khartoum government signed a comprehensive peace agreement with espionage,
an event that was seen from the military perspective of Uganda as a success in the
Ugandan military strategy of supporting the SPL in southern Sudan and then the NRA,
which had then been used by Khartoum to attack the SPL.
It became, in theory, defunct. In the case of that negotiated agreement between the north and the south.
Further, the LRAD is location in southern Sudan in light of this comprehensive peace agreement.
Their location was no longer safe because it is now under the control over their former enemies.
In this view, the meeting between Salva Kiir and Joseph Kony at the beginning of the Juba process where Kony was given by Kiir three choices,
which is negotiate leaves Sudan or be militarily pursued, stemmed from this security consideration in the subregion.
This was summarised by quotes that I obtained from a member of the cessation of hostilities
monitoring team who was looking at who was monitoring whether the Dubai peace process.
And he said the balance of forces had changed. The NRA had no chance.
When Machar approached them to stop or come to the negotiating table, they had no alternative.
And so in this explanation, the context was absolutely instrumental to the Juba peace process.
And the third explanation I want to give, it's too much, too much airtime is focussed on donor pressure.
And this talks from the October 2000 and fourth visit by the then head of the UN, Ochoa.
The office of the U.S. or the UN Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and Egeland.
And then he said that Uganda was the world's the world's biggest neglected crisis.
And that suddenly put the issue of Uganda on on on very many donors radar screen.
And since May seven, he was very keen to remedy his view or he is that his role as a donor guarding it is important
for him to correct that image and therefore he put in place a process for peace negotiations.
So, in summary, the interaction between the UPDF military strength,
the reduced Sudanese support for the NRA and Beechnut international pressure also serves to dislodge
the L'Abri from South and Sudan and push them into the DRC and facilitate the peace process.
Shortcomings of these explanations are quite a few.
For instance, we cannot understand from this explanation why it is that the LRB are very explicitly afraid of the ICC.
Nor can we understand the content of the peace talks because the peace talks spend an
overwhelming amount of time concerned with issues of peace and justice and accountability.
How you respond to this particular normative concerns that happen to be part of the spirit of the times.
And so obviously we can't understand why the LRAD refused to sign the final peace agreement,
citing the ICC unless we actually say that ISIS is important, in which case we would have to move to a different set of explanations.
So then the second explanations of Juba are those that look at the ICC in terms of in terms of what I mentioned earlier,
international ideas, norms and institutions. One mechanism through which the court is expected to influence states behaviour is
described by some scholars in international relations as normative socialisation.
And this is a process by which states arrive.
But I quote, collective understanding about appropriate behaviour, which in turn leads to a change in identity, interests and behaviour.
Well, identity and interests, but behaviour being informed by the international norms.
The road to socialisation includes a variety of strategies that work in what a number of scholars have called a spiral model,
including domestic pressure, moralisation argumentation, persuasion and institutionalisation.
To what extent, then, was normative socialisation instrumental in explaining what happened in Juba?
For the ISIS, his role in Juba socialisation is seen to work through, put it through both persuasion and coercion,
explanations based on persuasion, credit, what they call soft power.
That term by nigh but soft power of the ICC.
According to Nye, soft power operates through persuasion,
persuading and attracting others into shaping their preferences rather than through coercion.
The idea of soft power has gained currency beyond the sphere of influence of the state and
has been used to describe strategies by people and leaders and institutions and so on.
Bourke-White also cites a similar explanation when he talks about the ICC as having the capacity to reshape the
culture of the target target states and even the identities of criminal perpetrators through Naum internalisation.
There is some evidence for normative socialisation. First,
the NRA appears to understand the implications of international justice and acknowledged the parameters of acceptable behaviour with regard to war.
For instance, the BBC interview that I cited earlier where Kony appeared for the first time in over two decades in public view,
Kony rejected the suggestion that he had targeted actually civilians.
The NRA negotiators on their part when they had public consultations and there was one I attended
in December of 2000 and seven one of the they started the public consultation with an apology.
And I'll read you what one gentleman called Gemzar Beta, who was one of the lead negotiator, said.
He said The NRA and the high command are sorry for what happened in this country and they ask for forgiveness.
Equally, the NRA also has forgiven all those collaborators who are working with the government.
They have forgiven everybody. So I stand here to say, let us make this a new beginning.
We have a responsibility to those people of the north and not east Uganda.
So there is an extent to which they seem to be bowing to international pressure and particularly the concern for victims,
which is very much part and parcel of the of the of the norms that are propounded by the ICC.
Through the signing of the accountability agreements that I've described earlier, the NRA proposed to push themselves under domestic justice,
giving every appearance of responding to the international pressure against impunity.
And this is very well captured by one of the 11 negotiators when you said nobody believed that the Ellory would accept to even agree,
except to agree that it is good that they committed crimes in Uganda.
But they have been able to say so. They have. I know.
I know. OK. So there is that. There is. There is those are the explanations based on persuasion.
But there is a range of explanations that give the ICC credit and they're based on on coercion.
And this, for example, is what's a common cause. The looming presence of the ICC,
which is supposed to be to give the looming presence of the ICC will motivates actors
to behave in particular ways because they're afraid of what the ICC might do,
arrest them. And so the argument there is that the ICC affected the LRO into their consideration,
irrational of huckstering of the ICC into their considerations and the cost benefit
analysis weighed on them that in the in favour of a negotiated settlement.
Now and obviously during the actual peace process, the influence of the ICC is very strong because the contents,
as I have mentioned earlier, is very much a content of justice and accountability, and the discourse of victims is very strong.
Now, why is this explanation insufficient? Because, again, it's the way in which we think about socialisation in theory,
is that it has to if there is a very strong element of demand from below,
the population are demanding justice and they are linking with international norms,
intrapreneurs of various natures who then collectively put pressure on the state in the case of Uganda.
You do not have that what you have the demand of the excessive intervention from the executive.
It is the president who actually referred the case of Uganda to the International Criminal Court.
So we cannot uncritically say that the case of Uganda was a case of normative socialisation.
Again, neither can we understand in complete compliance what happens when the government of Museveni says all we are willing to work with the ICC,
but then decide if Kony behaves himself. We will equally behave himself.
We will waive the ICC as though the ICC was really not an issue that that that was of fundamental importance.
So the complete in compliance is something else that the existing theories cannot help us understand.
And what I argue is that we need to. Sorry. One more thing on the incomplete.
Compliance is that we need to remember that in the beginning of the peace process, the the Ugandan army killed one of the wanted men called Rucker.
And then it also allowed to pass through the territory that they were controlling.
Another L'Abri commander called Dominic on when, in other words,
they had they did not see the need to comply with the ICC as important as the domestic process that they had started of the peace process.
So one can ask, to what extent was the ICC really the driving force in the observations that we see?
The third section, which I am unable to get into in great detail, but which is is perhaps the most interesting.
But I'll get into it. I'll get into it during the question and answer.
I'll just really quickly summarise it.
What the section is going to be doing is understand seek to understand the the role of the ICC in Juba from the perspective of Elitch agents.
And this my explanation starts from the premise that states and the state and its act and make choices on how to
use tools available to them in the pursuit of a variety of political goals in a process similar to what's good,
Goodman and Jinkx called Acculturation, or Subotic in her work in former Yugoslavia, has called Norm Highjacking.
What we find is that evidence in Uganda points to the idea of unappropriated ICC, where the norm of justice was in circulation,
but for ends other than those for which the norm founders and promoters intended.
In particular, what I was going to argue in this section is that in the first instance,
the ICC was instrumentalise in order to politicise the conflict in the north and essentially to externalise the costs,
political costs of the war, the war with Sudan. However, the unexpected proposal for peace talks by the government of southern Sudan.
What the politics back into the process of governance of the governments of Uganda consideration.
And at this point, the ICC was appropriated for the second time to serve as a stick to push forward the peace process.
And at this point,
with the interests that were driving the Ugandan government where that one is needed to get some brownie points with the population in the north.
Number two, the ICC was becoming slightly dangerous because everybody was making noise about the Ugandan army being investigated.
And number three, it actually seemed that the LRAD were afraid of the ICC and therefore they could add that
this combination of factors could be used to push forward our beneficial peace settlement.
And so the Juba peace process was therefore a by-product of this exercise in the elite appropriation, all international norms.