Brought Up to Be a War Criminal

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Dominic Ongwen has been charged with committing the same crimes that were committed against him as a child soldier in the Lord’s Resistance Army. To what extent is Ongwen responsible for his actions as an adult, given that he himself was abducted as a 10-year-old child? The International Criminal Court in The Hague is to determine the answer to this question.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) has recently confirmed 70 charges against Dominic Ongwen for war crimes and crimes against humanity. Ongwen is accused of committing these crimes as a member of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

Dominic Ongwen appears at the ICC. PHOTO: International Criminal Court

During over 20 years of conflict with the Ugandan government, the LRA has recruited huge numbers of child soldiers, practised enslavement, and committed murders, rapes and other atrocities against civilian populations in northern Uganda, Southern Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Ongwen has been charged with individual responsibility for crimes including attacks against the civilian population, murder, rape, sexual slavery, forced pregnancy, forced marriage, torture and other inhumane acts, pillaging, the use of child soldiers, enslavement and persecution. Ongwen is the first of five accused LRA commanders to appear before the ICC.

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This Week in South Sudan – Week 18

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Monday 2 May Rebel general Peter Gadet said he would continue to fight because the August 2015 peace agreement between President Salva Kiir and First Vice-President Riek Machar does not address the root cause of the conflict. At least three SPLA soldiers were killed and a general wounded after a group of soldiers opened fire… Read more »

Insecurity in the Humanitarian Cyberspace: A Call for Innovation

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Humanitarian practitioners and scholars are currently struggling with how to analyse the opportunities and challenges of technological innovation. This includes not only what technological innovation can do for humanitarianism but also what it does to humanitarian action. Over the last two decades, innovations have fueled the creation of a humanitarian cyberspace. It is now time for the task of addressing the challenges posed by the humanitarian cyberspace to be prioritised on the humanitarian innovation agenda.

PHOTO: Grace Cahill/Oxfam

The term cyberspace broadly refers to the realm of computer networks and the internet. The traditional notion that the ´virtual` world is a different social space than the ´real world` is by now obsolete, also in the humanitarian context.

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Why the Veto Powers All Support Protection of Civilians (And Why They Often Fail to Agree on It)

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The Protection of Civilians (PoC) expands the responsibility of the UN Security Council (UNSC) for international peace and security to the internal affairs of conflict-ridden countries. As such, it bolsters the authority of the five permanent members (the P5) in world politics and presents them with a flexible tool for exercising this authority. In reply to the question “what’s in it for them”, in this blog post we argue that in addition to shaping their responses to situations like Syria and Libya, the principle of PoC shapes the very dynamics of the Council itself, and ultimately the decisions of conflict actors anticipating international responses.

Syrian civilians returning to Tell Abyad, 2015. PHOTO; Creative Commons

The difference in the international response to the twin crises that erupted in Libya in 2011 (to which the UNSC responded with a firm resolution) and Syria in 2012 (where a state of civil war continues in the absence of any Security Council protection resolution) offers a useful entry point to the question of ‘protection’ as it is understood and acted upon in the UNSC. Protests in both countries flared up within the wider context of the Arab Spring upheavals across the Middle East/North Africa region from late 2010. In both cases the Libyan and Syrian authorities responded with force, leading to a sharp escalation of the violence. The subsequent responses of the international community, however, could scarcely have been more different.

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Assisted Return Not a Permanent Solution for All Asylum Seekers

Posted by and & filed under Law and Ethics, Migration

Photo: Arne Strand, CMI

Many asylum seekers who choose assisted return are from a country destroyed by war and conflict. More than half of those who return to countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq plan to migrate again. Assisted return is a viable type of support to assist with the return, but is not sufficient to prevent large numbers of people once again leaving insecure countries of return. Only minor changes are required, however, to increase the potential for permanent return.Read More

This Week in South Sudan – Week 17

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Tuesday 26 April Media reports on Riek Machar’s return to Juba and inauguration as First Vice-President: The New York Times: “Riek Machar, South Sudan Opposition Leader, Returns as Part of Peace Deal” The Wall Street Journal: “South Sudan’s Rebel Leader Returns to Join Government” Voice of America “South Sudan Rebel Chief Sworn In as Vice… Read more »

Trends in Armed Conflict, 1946–2014

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Headlines from battlefields in Syria, Libya​​, Nigeria, Afghanistan, and Ukraine give the impression that the world is becoming ever more violent. Indeed, since 2013 the number of armed conflicts in the world and the number of battle deaths has risen. Fortunately, the long-term trends nevertheless driving the waning of war are still at work.​

  • Since the Korean War, battle casualties have been declining.
  • As a result of the civil wars in Syria and Iraq, casualties have risen to the highest level in 25 years, but are still far below levels of the Cold War.
  • The number of conflicts has also risen in 2013 and 2014, although much lower than those in the early 90s.

Read more in a Policy Brief from the Conflict Trends Project at PRIO.

This Week in South Sudan – Week 16

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Wednesday 20 April International media reports on Riek Machar’s postponed return: The New York Times: “South Sudan: Uncertainty Over Rebel Leader’s Expected Return” The Guardian “South Sudan peace deal in balance amid opposition leader’s continued absence” Financial Times “Machar’s aborted return sets back peace plans in South Sudan” BBC “South Sudan peace at risk –… Read more »

The Precarious China-Russia Partnership Erodes Security in East Asia

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Chinese troops on the march in the Red Square

With the explosion of the Ukraine crisis in spring 2014, Russia made a determined effort to upgrade its strategic partnership with China and achieved instant success. Large-scale economic contracts were signed in a matter of a few months, and the military parades in Moscow and Beijing in respectively May and September 2015, in which the two leaders stood shoulder to shoulder, were supposed to show the readiness of two world powers to combine their military might. In fact, however, the partnership has encountered serious setbacks and as of spring 2016, is significantly off-track.

It is the economic content of bi-lateral cooperation that has registered the most obvious decline. The volume of trade, which the officials promised to double in just a few years, actually contracted in 2015 by about a third comparing with 2014. The economic crisis in Russia and the sharp decline in purchasing power were the main reasons for this setback, and there are no reasons to expect an improvement in 2016 or in the years to come. The dramatic drop of oil prices in 2015 has not only devalued the much-trumpeted “400 billion dollars” gas contract signed in May 2014. It has also destroyed the economic foundation of the partnership because the development of “green fields” in East Siberia and construction of pipelines to China has become entirely cost-inefficient.

The rest of the article is in Contemporary Security Policy, posted April 22.

This Week in South Sudan – Week 15

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Monday 11 April President Salva Kiir appointed nine new ambassadors, a move seen as an attempt to solidify his diplomatic roots in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.  Tuesday 12 April The SPLA (IO) accused the South Sudanese government air force of shelling their positions in Wau County, Western Bahr el Ghazal State. The local command… Read more »