Northern Uganda Messenger Post

Key Words : Uganda, Uganda Law Society(ULS), Uganda Parliamentarians (MPs), Carnal Knowledge, Paedophiles, Adulterers, polygamy, Underage Sex, Defilement, International Criminal Court (ICC), ICC Bill 2006, Joseph Kony, Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), Child Soldiers, Yoweri Museveni, Age of consent, Minimum Recruitment Age. The independent Ugandan daily, The Daily Monitor , has reported that Uganda Law Society (ULS) and a select committee of the Ugandan parliament have agreed to lower the minimum age for legal responsibility from the internationally recognised 18, to 15, so that abducted children gang-pressed into the ranks of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA ), could be tried for the same crimes their abductors and commanders have been indicted for - war crimes and crimes against humanity -by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The LRA is a notorious rebel army that has been fighting dictator Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, for the last 23 years. The insurgents earned their notor...

Proponents of mato oput Advocates and promoters of mato oput can be loosely divided into four subgroups with their international barnacles. The first group are a section of Acholi elite imbued with imposed self-doubt and collective guilt, who are emotionally and mentally dazed and dizzied by twenty-one years of violence, blood and death, and have internalised Museveni and NRM/A propaganda of Acholi collective complicity in Uganda’s historical socio-political pathology, perceiving their current predicaments as some just divine retributions for past evil deeds of their forebears or kith and kin. For them, mato oput is just penitence. The second group of Acholi who embrace mato oput and support its use in northern Uganda over post-Nuremberg international humanitarian and human rights norms and special war crimes tribunal practices, are those who see its adoption as a matter of cultural pride and international recognition for an otherwise obscure and nationally marginalised minority group....

End of conflicts must ensure human rights The perception of whether justice has been served or injustices committed in the course of a war is a judgement that follows from two possible lines of assessment. First, opinions are formed on the general accounts of the conduct of the conflict and a verdict is passed. Second, we may choose to look at individual acts or events in the course of the war and give separate judgements of their just or unjust characteristics. Depending on the approach we adopt, it ought not to be an “either –or” judgement that glosses over complex and serious issues that demand careful considerations. Mato oput and partial ICC indictments of the LRA, suffer from such generalisation and limited focus to a truncated period of the conflict. It is partly for this reason that I would like to argue against mato oput - the Acholi traditional practice of conflict resolution -and the limited and selective ICC investigations and indictments, as suitable complementary models f...