Had he, while growing up within the LRA, on the stroke of midnight on his 15 th birthday, gained the ability to act as a morally responsible adult? His defence argued he had not. A former child soldier, Ongwen became the first known person to be found guilty of crimes also committed against him. After a trial like a ‘long walk’, according to defence counsel Odongo, Ongwen was convicted of 61 war crimes and crimes against humanity – including attacks upon civilians such as murder, torture, enslavement and pillaging, sexual and gender-based crimes, and recruiting child soldiers – and sentenced to 25 years in prison, which prosecutor Gumpert has since described as ‘a very, very long time’. He rose to the position of brigade commander, contributing to the LRA’s decades of atrocities that terrorised Northern Ugandan communities. Ongwen grew up under the wing of LRA leader Joseph Kony, who remains at large. Ongwen was a surname Dominic invented, to protect himself and his family, on the day of his abduction into the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) aged nine. In the Ongwen case, the victim-perpetrator binary appears particularly precarious. The judgment’s language choices position Ongwen in contrast to victims, empathy with his experiences inhibited, and his own voice silenced, refracted and recreated. According to ICC procedure, a single perpetrator is then depicted. The judgment’s language choices represent a coherent, unified victim experience, encouraging the reader’s empathy while drawing together individual accounts of suffering. Such legitimacy, some have argued, is particularly sought by ICL, as young law seeking to prove itself to the international community. But what if the International Criminal Court (ICC) makes findings about events in which it seems unclear who is who? This article argues that the language of the ICC judgment against Dominic Ongwen sustains the victim-perpetrator binary, legitimising the court’s findings. Victims on one hand, perpetrators on the other: a binary to which International Criminal Law (ICL) remains committed. The case is that they want you to hold Ongwen responsible for the conduct of Joseph Kony. The cobweb pleading of this case and the cobweb strategy of pleading everything, adopting everything, your Honours, has helped to muddy notice in this case, complicating the case. Ongwen: In the name of God, I deny all these charges in respect to the war in Northern Uganda. Presiding Judge Bertram Schmitt: You are not in the position to ask the court questions… Do you make an admission of guilt with respect to any charge? Keywords: child soldiers, close analysis, International Criminal Court, International Criminal Law, judgment, legitimacy, Lord’s Resistance Army, Ongwen, symbolic prosecution, victim-perpetrator binaryĭominic Ongwen: Do you agree that I’m the leader of the LRA? Do you agree that my life was not ruined? International criminal courts/ tribunalsĬatching Dominic Ongwen in the Language of the International Criminal Court.This may limit the ICC’s ability to find and tell truths that reflect the individual experiences of those whose hopes for recovery and reconciliation it wishes to answer. These tendencies may reduce the accuracy of ICL’s representations of suffering, obscuring complexity and contradiction. Throughout my analysis, I point towards the injustice of the judgment’s tendencies towards unifying victim experiences and separating one perpetrator. I present the ICC and its modes of operation as a powerful, patient spider, building this web and catching this fly by crafting its own language. Caught like a fly, Ongwen becomes isolated and entangled within the court’s singular understanding of him. Ongwen stands in contrast, his complexities held at a distance from the reader’s perceptions and empathy. Against this spiderweb of victimhood, the court’s language casts one perpetrator. Such personal testimonies are constantly knotted to a sense of the general, enabling a perception of collective victimhood. Representations of individual testimonies encourage empathy, delineating figures of victims. Drawing on literary methods of close analysis, and thereby extending possibilities for theorising ICL, I argue that the judgment creates a spiderweb-like structure of descriptions of suffering. Through minute, delicate choices, the judgment’s language sustains and legitimises a fragile binary upon which its findings depend. This article argues that the victim-perpetrator binary to which International Criminal Law (ICL) remains committed is maintained and legitimised by the language of the International Criminal Court (ICC) judgment against Dominic Ongwen, a former child soldier and brigade commander in the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).
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