On Monday 15th April, the Dutch Embassy and Time magazine partnered to co-organise a screening at the Frontline Club of Peace vs Justice: a documentary about the violence of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), particularly against children, in northern Uganda. An expert panel discussion followed.

Klaartje Quirijns (left), Geoffrey Robertson (centre left), Matthew McAllester (centre right), Mugambi Kiai (right)       Photo: Jim Treadway

Directed by Klaartje Quirijns, Peace vs. Justice explores how to find justice for Kony, and peace for Uganda, where three million people have been victimized by the LRA, either directly or indirectly, according to the film’s closing credits.

If Kony is captured  (one hundred U.S. Special Operations troops were dispatched toward this end in Central Africa last year ), the film asks: should his crimes be placed solely into the hands of local justice in Uganda?  “The people I met in northern Uganda…actually most people…will say that,” Quirijns told the audience.

The movie highlights however that Ugandans have failed to achieve peace with the LRA for over two decades.

Many hope to see Kony tried by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Netherlands, yet panelist and British barrister Courtenay Griffiths was sceptical:

“If you look at virtually every situation in which the ICC are involved, you can see certain Western interests at play. And what you have to realize is that the language of human rights, and humanitarian intervention, has now become a fig leaf behind which powerful Western countries can intervene around the world to protect their own, particularly economic, interests.”

Courtney Griffiths (left), Barney Afako (centre), Klaartje Quirijns (right) Photo: Jim Treadway

Was Griffiths right to doubt the ICC’s intentions? asked moderator Matthew McAllester.

“No,” human rights lawyer and fellow panelist Geoffrey Robertson affirmed. The ICC has brought both hope and fear that war crimes will not be tolerated, he emphasized.

“You can’t say it’s a neocolonial court,” he added.  “Yes, we won’t probably get [Tony] Blair.  Although Dr. Kissinger’s travel plans are very curtailed. So are George Bush’s. There are a lot of places they can’t go to. Why? Because of international justice.”

Finally, Mugambi Kiai, a professional advocate for accountability in African governance, demanded a change in the conversation about Kony, Uganda, and the ICC:

“When is it that we stop looking at the ICC as a panacea? As the vehicle through which we get justice? …  Where are the domestic remedies that we so need? [In Kenya,] we’ve been told: we’ve got a new judiciary, we’ve got a new constitution. That’s all hogwash!

They’re not doing enough to transform the political conversation that transforms all of these historical injustices into good governance, into a political method that respects rights, respects values, respects dignity. That is not the conversation that’s going on, and that’s a tragedy.”

 

You can watch the discussion below:

Despite hundreds of thousands of people having taken to the streets of London and elsewhere to voice their opposition to military action in Iraq, on 19 March 2003, air strikes on the Presidential Palace in Baghdad began.

What followed was a US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein’s government, and marked the start of years of violent conflict. Ten years on, in a debate chaired by Channel 4 News’ Jon Snow, we will ask: have lessons been learned?

The legacy of the Iraq War changed Western foreign policy, but with talk of Northern Africa becoming a new front in the war on terror, have the mistakes of Iraq been sufficiently ingrained on the consciences of populations and governments? To what degree is the impact on relations between the Middle East and the West still felt?

We will also be examining what has been heard at the Chilcot Inquiry and why we are still waiting to hear the findings.

Chaired by Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow.

The panel:

Caroline Wyatt has been BBC defence correspondent since October 2007, covering the work of British Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2003 she was embedded with British troops reporting on the war and its aftermath in and around Basra. Previously she has been BBC correspondent covering Paris, Moscow, Berlin and Bonn.

Rt Hon Jim Murphy is Labour Member of Parliament for East Renfrewshire. He is currently the Shadow Secretary of State for Defence and has previously served as Secretary of State for Scotland.

Jack Fairweather is the author of A War of Choice: Britain in Iraq 2003-9. The Daily Telegraph’s Baghdad and Gulf correspondent for five years, he was an embedded reporter during the Iraq invasion, winning the British equivalent of the Pulitzer prize for his reporting. Most recently he has been the Washington Post’s Islamic world correspondent. He is a fellow of the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, and is working on a history of the Afghan war.

Peter Oborne, the Daily Telegraph‘s chief political commentator and author of The Rise of Political Lying and The Triumph of the Political Class.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock is chairman of the UN Association in the UK, the strategic advisory company Gatehouse Advisory Partners Ltd and Lambert Energy Advisory Ltd. He was a career diplomat from 1969 to 2004, developing specialisations in the Middle East, Transatlantic Relations and the United Nations. He served as UK Ambassador to the UN in New York from 1998 to 2003 and as UK Special Envoy for Iraq, based in Baghdad, from 2003 to 2004.