A Ukrainian police officer serving in Kosovo died today from wounds sustained during Monday's riots in Mitrovica, a frequent flash point. The lightly armed UNMIK police were forced to withdraw from the city when the riot gained steam, and were replaced by NATO troops. Ban condemned the riots. Serb authorities blamed NATO of using excessive force. This video from Russia today gives you a sense of the scale of destruction visited on Mitrovica yesterday.
The recipient of the International Criminal Court's first-ever indictments may avoid the dock in the Hague. Via Opinio Juris (the best international humanitarian law blog out there) Ugandan President Youweri Museveni says that he will no longer hand Joseph Kony, leader of the notorious Lord's Resistance Army, over to ICC authorities for an international trial. Instead, Museveni will pursue a local form of justice akin to a traditional truth and reconciliation process against Kony, who recently signed a landmark peace agreement with the government.
This has to be disappointing to the ICC. Kony is certainly deserving of jail time. His militia terrorized the Acholi people of northern Uganda for more than two decades. On the other hand, the ICC deserves some credit for bringing Kony to the negotiating table. It was not until the ICC began its investigation and issued indictments that the LRA began to seek a peace agreement with the Ugandan government in good faith; the ICC indictments provided the critical leverage to get the peace process going. So what to do about this peace v justice dilemma? The Enough Campaign says so long as the peace process remains on track, the Security Council should invoke the ICC charter and suspend the indictments in favor of local forms of justice. Makes sense to me.
At a lunch on the lawn of the Executive Mansion in Monrovia, Liberian president Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf offered this happy toast to the health and prosperity of the American president and his country, which she described as Liberia's "number one partner." Liberia was the final destination on Bush's six-day tour of Africa, and he received accolades there echoing the praises sung to him in his previous stops in Benin, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana. Beninese can now even celebrate a day named after President Bush -- his trip there was the first ever by an American president -- and Ghanaians can drive on a highway named in his honor.
Undoubtedly, President Bush deserves compliments for much of his work in Africa. His administration has greatly increased assistance to combat HIV/AIDS and malaria and has invested significant sums in promoting development. Humanitarian aid, however, is not a sufficient policy on its own, particularly in a society still experiencing the tensions of 14 years of civil war. The billions of dollars that the U.S. contributes to fighting disease, as well as the millions of textbooks that Bush has promised to provide for Liberia's educational system, must be supplemented by concrete contributions to maintaining peace and stability in Liberia. Unfortunately, President Bush's budget proposal falls almost $50 million short of meeting the needs of the UN peacekeeping force in Liberia, which, as we've mentioned before, was critical to Liberia's dramatic turnaround and will continue to be central to its stability in the future.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Samantha Power chose an auspicious day to give her first "Sergio talk" -- a discussion of her new book, Chasing the Flame: Sergio Vieira de Mello and the Fight to Save the World, Tuesday afternoon at The New America Foundation. Power's book is a chronicle of the life and influence of Vieira de Mello, the career UN diplomat tragically killed in August 2003 after a suicide bombing of the UN's headquarters in Baghdad. While the UN has bravely continued to operate in Iraq, the staff of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) -- the agency to which Vieira de Mello dedicated much of his career -- has until now worked almost entirely out of Amman, Jordan. Wednesday, however, High Commissioner Antonio Guterres announced that he would send the organization's first representative to Baghdad since Vieira de Mello's premature death.
The weight of UNHCR's responsibility -- dealing with over 2 million refugees in Syria and Jordan, as well as an even greater number displaced within Iraq, all with a Baghdad staff that will soon increase to just five -- underscores the courage with which the UN has conducted its mission in Iraq. Despite a persistent lack of security, the UN has nonetheless taken on some of the greatest challenges in Iraq and contributed to some of the country's most tangible successes. As Power reminded listeners at yesterday's talk, the indelible images of Iraqis proudly showing their purple hands, stained with the ink from their ballots, trace directly back to the UN's crucial role organizing Iraq's landmark elections.
This weekend finally saw the much anticipated declaration of independence by Kosovo. We've been predicting this moment for a couple of months, so back in November we asked United States Institute of Peace scholar Daniel Serwer to help us anticipate some of the immediate consequences of a Kosovo's declaration of independence. At the time, he was quite pessimistic.
What would be the fall-out [from Kosovo's unilateral declaration of independence?] It could be bad. You could have efforts by Belgrade to grab the northern piece of Kosovo, which has a Serbian majority, and declare its own independence. And perhaps even Republika Srpska (the Serbian half of Bosnia) as well. Belgrade is in a position to make a lot of trouble in the aftermath of a Kosovo declaration of independence.So far, things are relatively stable in Republika Srpska. But this is certainly not the case in the northern part of Kosovo, where Reuters is reporting that mobs of Kosovar-Serbs torched border crossings and a police station in protest. The New York Times even quotes one unnamed western diplomat, saying "we are minutes to partition." Kosovo, a very small country, may soon become even smaller--and more ethnically homogeneous.
In an op-ed in Tuesday's Washington Post, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, confident in the steps that Iraqi leaders are taking to solidify their country's sovereignty, called on Congress to support negotiations of a "normal bilateral relationship" between the U.S. and Iraq. The U.N.'s authorization of American presence in Iraq is set to expire at the end of the year, and Rice and Gates, anticipating a longer-term need for U.S. troops, advocate for developing a renewed "status-of-forces" agreement -- which dictates the terms under which troops act -- directly between the U.S. and Iraq.
In a day-long open meeting at the UN, officials discussed ways to finally end the terrible scourge of child soldiers. From the UN News Center
The Security Council must "take concrete and targeted measures" against those parties that persistently use or abuse children during armed conflicts around the world, the United Nations envoy on the issue said today, urging that well-meaning words be transformed into effective actions. Addressing the Council during a day-long open debate, the Secretary-General's Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict Radhika Coomaraswamy noted the ongoing impunity for those persistent violators that use or abuse children during wars. From the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to Myanmar and from Sri Lanka to Uganda, parties to armed conflicts kill, maim, abduct or sexually assault children; deny humanitarian access to children in need; and recruit and use child soldiers. In total, at least 58 parties are known to be offenders.Read more. Edith Lederer is also on the story. (A child soldier in the Democratic Republic of Congo's eastern town of Malindi on December 2003. REUTERS/Finbarr O' Reilly, courtesy www.alertnet.org)
On February 24, 2003 a militia from the National Integrationist Front--many of them child soldiers--attacked the village of Bogoro in Ituri, a restive province in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. 200 civilians were killed in the attack, prisoners were thrown into a locked house with decaying corpses, and women and girls were enslaved by the marauding force.
Not long ago, an attack like this would simply go unpunished--and in all likelihood, unnoticed. But not today. The International Criminal Court announced the arrest and detention of the leader of the attack, one Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui. DRC authorities arrested Ngudjolo, handed him over to ICC authorities where he was transported from DRC to the Hague. He is currently in prison in the Hague awaiting arraignment.
I, for one, am thankful to be living in an era in which crimes like this do not go unpunished. Visit the Coalition for the International Criminal Court to see how you can help end the era of impunity for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
On Monday, the Security Council issued a statement condemning the rebel assault on Chad's capital, N'Djamena and urging Member States to support the Chadian government. The speed at which the Security Council responded to this threat underscores the distinction between defending a sovereign government from rebel attack and responding to a genocide perpetrated by a government on its own people.
Even though the Security Council's statement had been toned down to omit references to military force or to Sudanese involvement in the attack, it implicitly gave France, which maintains 1,400 troops in Chad, the green light to defend President Idriss Deby's government. French president Nicolas Sarkozy explicitly articulated his country's willingness to intervene militarily, asserting yesterday that "if France must do its duty, it will do so." In the tragic history of the Darfur genocide, by contrast, no country has so baldly proclaimed its readiness to pony up military support -- or even peacekeepers or equipment -- in the face of opposition from the Sudanese government.