Uganda: healing or judging?

This is an extremely informative and inspiring article in today’s NYT about the use of traditional healing ceremonies to reconcile conflict-torn communities in northern Uganda.
Reporter Marc Lacey reports from Gulu, in northern Uganda, that,

two very different systems – one based on Western notions of justice, the other on a deep African tradition of forgiveness – are clashing in their response to one of this continent’s most bizarre and brutal guerrilla wars, a conflict that has raged for 18 years in the rugged terrain along Uganda’s border with Sudan.
The fighting features rebels who call themselves the Lord’s Resistance Army and who speak earnestly of the import of the Ten Commandments, but who routinely hack up civilians who get in their way. To add to their numbers, the rebels abduct children in the night, brainwash them in the bush, indoctrinate them by forcing them to kill, and then turn them – 20,000 over the last two decades – into the next wave of ferocious fighters seeking to topple the government. Girls as young as 12 are assigned as rebel commanders’ wives. Anyone who does not toe the line is brutally killed.
The international court [that is, the Hague-based ICC], invited to investigate the war by President Yoweri Museveni, has announced it is close to issuing arrest warrants for rebel leaders including, no doubt, Joseph Kony, the self-styled spiritualist calling the shots. But some war victims are urging the international court to back off. They say the local people will suffer if the rebel command feels cornered. They recommend giving forgiveness more of a chance, using an age-old ceremony involving raw eggs.

“When we talk of arrest warrants it sounds so simple,” said David Onen Acana II, the chief of the Acholi, the dominant tribe in the war-riven north, who traveled to The Hague recently to make his objections known. “But an arrest warrant doesn’t mean the war will end.”

No, indeed it does not.
Uganda is not, alas, one of the countries I’m writing about in my current book project, which deals precisely with this issue of the relationship between “judging/prosecutorial” approaches to dealing with the legacies of atrocious conflict and alternative, amnesty-based and more “healing”-oriented approaches.
One of my key “cases” is that of Mozambique, where the local people used a very similar, healing-based approach drawing on many indigenous (that is, pre-colonial) healing traditions to deal with the legacies of the equally ghastly violence that occurred during the 1977-92 civil war there.
The Mozambicans concluded their peace agreement, with Italian and UN backing, in October 1992. That was just before the UN created the first of the ad-hoc war-crimes courts of the modern age– the one for former Yugoslavia, called ICTY.
After the creation of ICTY, and the parallel ad-hoc tribunal for Rwanda– ICTR– activists in the western-based human rights movement got the idea that creating war-crimes courts to deal with the legacies of atrocious violence was definitely the best thing to do… In 1998 they secured the passage of the “Rome Treaty”, which established a permanent International Criminal Court, ICC, which came into effect in 2002.
Since then it has been much harder for people seeking a negotiated end to atrocity-laden conflicts to succeed, because one of the key “incentives” peace-seekers had in pre-ICC situations– that of offering amnesty to former wrongdoers– had been almost completely taken away from them by the creation of the ICC.
Luckily, though, last week a delegation of 24 Ugandan men and women representing four different social groupings in northern Uganda visited ICC prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo to discuss the situation there and their concerns about the effects of a reckless issuing of indictments.
Back in July last year, Moreno-Ocampo had announced that he had formally “found” that there was sufficient evidence of atrocities in northern Uganda that he had decided to open a formal judicial investigation into the situation. This kind of “investigation” could normally be expected to lead to the issuing of indictments, though none has been issued– for Uganda or anywhere else– by Moreno-Ocampo yet.
The joint statement issued at the end of last week’s meeting between the delegates from northern Uganda and Moreno-Ocampo made the following points:

[quotation starts here:]
The Lango; Acholi; Iteso and Madi community leaders and the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court have agreed to work together as part of a common effort to achieve justice and reconciliation, the rebuilding of communities and an end to violence in Northern Uganda.
The community leaders reach out to local communities, the Government of Uganda, national and international actors to join this common effort.
We urge the Lord