Month: May, 2016
How should we think? How do we understand the Sanders movement?—Part 7
| May 11, 2016 | 7:54 pm | Analysis, Bernie Sanders, class struggle, Donald Trump, political struggle | Comments closed

Wednesday, May 11, 2016

http://oregonsocialistrenewal.blogspot.com/

How should we think? How do we understand the Sanders movement?—Part 7

We are winding this series down on thinking and thought processes, but we’re not quite done. In the first post in this series we made an argument for critical thinking and critical thinking skills and then we tried to show why critical thinking, by itself, only takes us so far. We tried to make a case for thinking as an art and as a science; something we do and improve upon constantly because it enriches our lives and helps us change reality. We then shifted gears and focused on dialectical materialism and on the work of Alexander Spirkin and some other philosophers because Spirkin and the others are most accessible to modern readers in a hurry.

I want to avoid anything here that sounds transactional—the idea that thinking and correct ideas are only there to accomplish pragmatic ends and that if one can only “think right” then only good will follow. Two lines from Mao come to mind here. In A Letter To The Red Guards Of Tsinghua University Middle School (1966) Mao said, “Marx said: the proletariat must emancipate not only itself but all mankind. If it cannot emancipate all mankind, then the proletariat itself will not be able to achieve final emancipation.” and Mao is said to have said in this period that “Marxism comprises many principles, but in the final analysis they can all be brought back to a single sentence: it is right to rebel.” Gil Scott-Heron took it further and said, “You see, revolution sounds like something that happens, like turning on the light switch, but actually it’s moving a large obstacle, and a lot of folks’ efforts to push it in one direction or the other have to combine.” Our point here is that the projects of change, revolution and liberation are imperfect and that correct thinking or correct actions, taken by themselves, don’t guarantee outcomes since human beings are involved at every step of the way. We can’t somehow design and redesign reality in order to satisfy our desires. Instead, we take Marx at his word when he wrote “Man must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice…The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself…The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice…All social life is essentially practical…The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity.”

So today I’m going to focus on why the processes and logic that I have tried to spell out in the last 6 posts on this topic take us to a point of supporting the Sanders movement. The point here is to apply our method and logic, however imperfectly, and get us to a point where we can see how dialectical materialism is used in taking up a current political question. This is not an easy matter to take up on the left these days and I want to reach back to a post going into some detail about these matters which frames some of what we’re talking about here.

I’m going to take Mao’s On Practice as a point of departure. Mao says, “Above all, Marxists regard man’s activity in production as the most fundamental practical activity, the determinant of all his other activities. Man’s knowledge depends mainly on his activity in material production, through which he comes gradually to understand the phenomena, the properties and the laws of nature, and the relations between himself and nature; and through his activity in production he also gradually comes to understand, in varying degrees, certain relations that exist between man and man. None of this knowledge can be acquired apart from activity in production…Man’s social practice is not confined to activity in production, but takes many other forms–class struggle, political life, scientific and artistic pursuits; in short, as a social being, man participates in all spheres of the practical life of society. Thus man, in varying degrees, comes to know the different relations between man and man, not only through his material life but also through his political and cultural life (both of which are intimately bound up with material life). Of these other types of social practice, class struggle in particular, in all its various forms, exerts a profound influence on the development of man’s knowledge. In class society everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.” This obligates us to look at the class make-up of the Sanders movement and the other political campaigns underway.

Evidence seems to indicate that the Sanders movement draws primarily from the working-class and what is referred to as “the lower middle-class” and the youth. We know that the dominant concerns among these classes and groups are precariousness, education and debt and the fabric of democracy. We also know that precariousness is less a matter of being in a particular social class, a “precariat,” and more a matter of working class life. And we know that the working class, the “lower middle-class” and the youth are some of the core social forces in the US, the people best situated to make change and reconstruct society.
The Clinton campaign draws on a different class base. The appeal here is to the so-called “middle-classes,” certain industries and economic institutions and the bureaucracies which manage social crises—the non-governmental organizations, the Democratic party establishment, the union leaderships, the public-private partnerships and sections of academia. These are wavering social forces; they can fall in any direction, but they do not represent or actualize the most reactionary social forces. Clinton’s political base in the Democratic party necessarily forces her to respond to the core social forces who remain in the Democratic party—women, people of color, union leaderships—and to be a mediating force between those core forces and the capitalist forces also present in her party. When someone says that Clinton “can get things done” they are describing this mediating role. One peculiarity of US politics is that people at the grassroots are often forced to ally with people at the top in order to win reforms through coalitions, almost guaranteeing a conservative movement at the base for periods of time. On the other hand, we are talking about discreet periods of time which hold in them all of the contradictions present in capitalist society.

We need to be careful to distinguish here between the forces at work and do this in a way which is consistent with the logic we laid out in our previous 6 posts. The tensions we are describing here reflect shifting forces and balances of power, attempts to find equilibrium while some part of the core forces are also trying to make a spontaneous break or leap, relations between existing forces. The Sanders movement represents working-class and “lower-middle-class” interests based on real fears and a democratic hope, while the Clinton campaign represents a particular wing of capitalism and has within it a contradictory relationship between core social forces and these capitalist institutions. The two forces, the Sanders movement and the Clinton campaign, exist is relationship to one another because the economic forces underlying them exist in relationship to one another. These relationships have deep and contradictory aspects to them. For instance, another peculiarity of our politics is that the shift in economic and political relations in the US has meant a shift in the role of the military-industrial complex so that Clinton can correctly position herself as a hawk and a leading figure in the military can speak openly about the military opposing Trump. The quantitative and qualitative features of bourgeois (capitalist) rule are also shifting in relation to one another and in relation to peoples’ struggles.

Beyond the matter of the economic forces at work stand matters of race, class and gender which increasingly appear as antagonistic contradictions among the peoples’ forces. Our take-away point here is that Clinton’s capitalist backers do not represent the most reactionary segments of capital, they do not come from the monopolies and trusts which are now threatened by crisis and by imperialist crises. This will certainly change, but for now Clinton represents other interests.

Not so for Trump. We can say that Trump draws from a “middle-class” who feel that they are in sharp decline and that he represents the most reactionary segments of capitalism—the trusts, the monopolies, the forces negatively affected by imperialist crises, finance capital. We can also say and demonstrate that these are the forces which most benefit from racism and sexism and most easily glom onto the reactionary religious values as an ideology. These forces are “reactionary” in the full sense of the word: they are reacting to the historic values of the Enlightenment and science, but they are also reacting to the peoples’ struggles as expressed in Occupy, the trade unions and the fight for higher minimum wages, anti-racism and Black Lives Matter, the fight for immigrant rights, the fight for LGBTQIA+ rights and so on. It is not only that the Trump forces oppose us on these specific political questions, but also that they represent economic forces which are directly threatened by these forces. In the context of the elections, the Trump campaign is the opposite of the Sanders movement in theory, practice and structure because they each represent contending forces. The Clinton campaign represents a middling force because it represents economic and political forces in crisis who are both scared of social change and who are presently excluded from the ranks of the most reactionary capitalist forces.
If the forces represented by Trump are truly ascendant that our job is to change the balance of forces and the relationship between these forces. We do this by changing the quantitative aspects of the forces at work—bringing more people from the working-class and “lower-middle-class” into the struggle, for instance—-and then by changing the qualitative nature of the struggle by agitating, educating and taking the dare to struggle and win. I think of this as a kind of planetary map, but one in which we get to move the planets around and affect the pull of gravity in each one. If Sanders loses the nomination or loses the election we will need a different order of “planets” in place and different pulls of gravity—a united front, if you will, against the black hole that is Trump’s incipient fascism or the “dark flow” of a Clinton administration vacillating and then sucking the life out of the momentum we are building on the left with the Sanders movement. And if he is somehow elected, we need to consolidate forces immediately and be able to push for a people-before-profits social and political agenda. In any case, we are forced to confront and try to change reality. “If you want knowledge, you must take part in the practice of changing reality. If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change the pear by eating it yourself. If you want to know the structure and properties of the atom, you must make physical and chemical experiments to change the state of the atom. If you want to know the theory and methods of revolution, you must take part in revolution. All genuine knowledge originates in direct experience,” says Mao.

This united front, this change in the order of “planets” and “gravity,”cannot logically be based on a “Sanders-only” approach to the elections. Neither can it be based on a surrender to conservative forces or, for that matter, to spontaneity. We are talking here about a principled or scientific change in relations between contradictory class forces in order to “negate a negation.” In this case it may be a matter of us (workers) joining forces with others to “negate” or oppose Trump’s incipient fascism and the most “negative” or reactionary sections of the capitalist ruling class and the means of production, distribution and administration which they own and control. Or it may mean a temporary class alliance driven by necessity and the need to elect and then push a President Clinton on every key issue. In either case, we are talking about negation and continuity, not progress. Spirkin says, “Development is not a straight line and not motion in a circle, but a spiral with an infinite series of turns. Forward motion is thus intricately combined with circular motion. If all processes in the world developed only successively, without repeating themselves, such things as life, animal and human behaviour, and the life of society could never have arisen; mental activity, consciousness, material and spiritual culture could never have come into being. The process of development also involves a kind of return to previous stages, when certain features of obsolete and replaced forms are repeated in new forms. The process of cognition on a new basis often repeats cycles that have already taken place.”

We take this position with our main concern being with moving from negation to progress, and with some anger at those forces on the left who blocked the left from consolidating and protesting under the Obama administration and those who want to dissolve socialist organizations. This failure to consolidate, organize and fight under Obama is not something to repeat.

In the past, and in other countries, the kind of social-democratic forces represented by Sanders were given some ability to manage social crises when there was an economic downturn. They could ally with the trade union leaderships and enforce austerity in limited ways and as junior partners. Prior to that the social democrats derived much of their power from functioning as a bulwark against the USSR and the committed left. Now there is no USSR, the US organized left is especially weak, the trade union leaderships in the US do not represent more than 12 per cent of the workers and the economy is temporarily in relatively good shape. So it is that we now have a different set of circumstances than we have had in the past and, as a result, new possibilities emerge.

In line with this thought we will wrap up this post with a summarizing quote from Mao. He said, “It often happens, however, that thinking lags behind reality; this is because man’s cognition is limited by numerous social conditions. We are opposed to die-herds in the revolutionary ranks whose thinking fails to advance with changing objective circumstances and has manifested itself historically as Right opportunism. These people fail to see that the struggle of opposites has already pushed the objective process forward while their knowledge has stopped at the old stage. This is characteristic of the thinking of all die-herds. Their thinking is divorced from social practice, and they cannot march ahead to guide the chariot of society; they simply trail behind, grumbling that it goes too fast and trying to drag it back or turn it in the opposite direction…We are also opposed to ‘Left’ phrase-mongering. The thinking of ‘Leftists’ outstrips a given stage of development of the objective process; some regard their fantasies as truth, while others strain to realize in the present an ideal which can only be realized in the future. They alienate themselves from the current practice of the majority of the people and from the realities of the day, and show themselves adventurist in their actions.”

Who is Hillary Clinton?
| May 9, 2016 | 9:44 pm | Analysis, class struggle, corporate crime, Hillary Clinton, Imperialism, political struggle, war profiteering | Comments closed

Empire Files: Abby Martin Exposes What Hillary Clinton Really Represents

Published on Apr 17, 2016

Digging deep into Hillary’s connections to Wall Street, Abby Martin reveals how the Clinton’s multi-million-dollar political machine operates.

This episode chronicles the Clinton’s rise to power in the 90s on a right-wing agenda, the Clinton Foundation’s revolving door with Gulf state monarchies, corporations and the world’s biggest financial institutions, and the establishment of the hyper-aggressive “Hillary Doctrine” while Secretary of State. Learn the essential facts about the great danger she poses, and why she’s the US Empire’s choice for its next CEO.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PV_PLCC6jeI&sns=em

Uganda: Accountability and Child Soldiers
| May 6, 2016 | 8:09 pm | Africa, political struggle | Comments closed

AfricaFocus Bulletin
May 5, 2016 (160505)
(Reposted from sources cited below)

Editor’s Note

“After two decades spent fighting in the bush, Dominic Ongwen, a
senior commander in the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA),
faces trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) on seventy
counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. … the first time
that a former child soldier will be prosecuted at the ICC and the
first time that an accused faces charges for the same crimes
perpetrated against him. As such, the Ongwen trial raises myriad
questions and poses difficult dilemmas regarding the prosecution of
child soldiers.” – Justice in Conflict symposium

For a version of this Bulletin in html format, more suitable for
printing, go to http://www.africafocus.org/docs16/uga1605.php, and
click on “format for print or mobile.”

To share this on Facebook, click on
https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http://www.africafocus.org/docs16/uga1605.php

The demands of justice, accountability, and healing after any
conflict are all imperative. But satisfying any of these demands,
much less all three, is far from easy, particularly in the case of
child soldiers. The role of the International Criminal Court is
controversial in many ways. But the issues raised in this symposium
would remain difficult, regardless of whether the decisions were being made
by any other international or national court, governmental body, or truth
commission.

This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains the introduction and excerpts
from three of the commentaries in an on-line symposium on the
Dominic Ongwen Trial and the Prosecution of Child Soldiers.
Commentaries included are by Ledio Cakaj, Rosebell Kagumire, and
Mark A. Drumbl. Additional commentaries in the symposium are
available at http://tinyurl.com/havs44v

For additional background, analysis, and sources on the Lord’s
Resistance Army and the conflict in Northern Uganda, widely
publicized in the “Kony 2012” on-line campaign, see in particular:
http://www.africafocus.org/docs12/kon1203a.php and
http://www.africafocus.org/docs12/kon1203b.php

For other previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on Uganda, visit
http://www.africafocus.org/country/uganda.php

++++++++++++++++++++++end editor’s note+++++++++++++++++

The Dominic Ongwen Trial and the Prosecution of Child Soldiers – A
Justice in Conflict Symposium

by Mark Kersten

Justice in Conflict, April 11, 2016

http://justiceinconflict.org – Direct URL:
http://tinyurl.com/havs44v

After two decades spent fighting in the bush, Dominic Ongwen, a
senior commander in the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA),
faces trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) on seventy
counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In early 2015,
Ongwen was surrendered to the ICC via another rebel army, the Séléka
rebel coalition and US forces ‘hunting’ for LRA combatants in the
Central African Republic. To date, Ongwen is the only alleged
perpetrator from northern Uganda to find himself facing judges at
the ICC. Ongwen’s trial is momentous for many reasons. It marks the
first time that a former child soldier will be prosecuted at the ICC
and the first time that an accused faces charges for the same crimes
perpetrated against him. As such, the Ongwen trial raises myriad
questions and poses difficult dilemmas regarding the prosecution of
child soldiers.

To examine these issues, Justice in Conflict is honoured to host an
online symposium on The Dominic Ongwen Trial and the Prosecution of
Child Soldiers. …

Symposium contributions include:

The Life and Times of Dominic Ongwen, Child Soldier and LRA
Commander, by Ledio Cakaj

Rupturing Official Histories in the Trial of Dominic Ongwen, by Adam
Branch

The Ongwen Trial and the Struggle for Justice in Northern Uganda, by
Rosebell Kagumire

What Counts against Ongwen – Effectiveness at the Price of
Efficiency?, by Danya Chaikel

There is Nothing Extraordinary about the Prosecution of Dominic
Ongwen, by Alex Whiting

We Need to Talk About Ongwen: The Plight of Victim-Perpetrators at
the ICC, by Barrie Sander

Shifting Narratives: Ongwen and Lubanga on the Effects of Child
Soldiering, by Mark A. Drumbl

Press Release: Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Speaks
on the Trial of Dominic Ongwen, by Mark Kersten

**************************************************************

The Life and Times of Dominic Ongwen, Child Soldier and LRA
Commander

by Ledio Cakaj

April 12, 2016

[Ledio Cakaj is a researcher working on conflict in East and Central
Africa. His book, When the Walking Defeats You; One Man’s Journey as
Joseph Kony’s Bodyguard, will be published in November 2016 by Zed
Books.]

It must be strange being in Dominic Ongwen’s shoes. Suited up in a
large room in a foreign country with fancy lawyers and judges
staring him down, accusing him of unspeakable crimes. No wonder he
seems amused, bewildered and confused. The legal proceedings must be
particularly outlandish to a man, who, snatched from his family as a
child, tried to excel at whatever life threw at him, only for life
to change the script over and over again. And it must be
particularly frustrating for him to be compared to Joseph Kony, a
man whose clutches Ongwen has tried to escape for at least the last
decade.

At ten or so, Ongwen excelled at school and was expected to go far,
become a teacher like his parents, a lawyer or a doctor. When
fighters from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) abducted him in the
early 1990s, he was too small to walk long distances or fight, even
though children already fought in the LRA ranks. It was Ongwen’s
perseverance and his desire to do well and make the adults proud
that saw him not only survive the hostile environment but also
become a noted fighter. Had the country of its birth provided him
with basic security, he might have become a noted lawyer or perhaps
a doctor.

At fifteen Ongwen was exposed to – and allegedly forced to
participate in – the massacre of over 300 people in the village of
Atiak, masterminded by Vincent Otti, Ongwen’s mentor in the LRA.
Under Otti’s guidance, Ongwen had to punish civilians who did not
help the LRA, fight Ugandan soldiers, and abduct more youths to fill
the ranks. Refusal brought beatings and death.

While in the first years of his life as a rebel Ongwen might have
acted under duress, he was taught, and likely convinced, that the
LRA’s struggle was just. Kony addressed assemblies of LRA members in
true Sunday Mass style saying that the LRA fought for the rights of
the Acholi people, who were abused by the Ugandan army. He swore
that the Holy Spirit had forced him to save the Acholi. Kony was
fond of a line from the Old Testament: “If you are led by the
Spirit, you are not under the law.”

Apart from fighting for his people, Ongwen was also told he was
lamony — a soldier. The world that Ongwen-the-soldier inhabited was
different to the one Ongwen-the-child left behind. Being alive was
contingent on killing others. To take their food, clothes, or their
ability to shoot back. Survival chances increased with promotion
into officer ranks as low-level fighters were the first to die from
bullets or pervasive shortages of food. Ongwen obeyed orders, fought
hard, and excelled in the way of the rebels. By his late teens he
was a commander with bodyguards, ‘wives’ and young servants.

Ongwen was good at fighting and killing. But he never was a top
commander, certainly not on par with those who had joined Kony from
the start, like Kenneth Banya, Vincent Otti or Okot Odhiambo. Sadly,
there were many others like Ongwen in the LRA, young men abducted as
children who were eager to please the Lapwony Madit (Big Teacher)
Kony. Many of them like, Ochan Bunia, Vincent ‘Binany,’ or Otim
‘Ferry,’ have died fighting for Kony. Others, like Patrick Agweng or
Jon Bosco Kibwola were killed on Kony’s orders, mostly as sacrifices
to appease his ego. Of the surviving ones, Okot George ‘Odek,’ who
left the LRA in February 2016, told me, he worried he would be
charged by the ‘World Court (a reference to the International
Criminal Court (ICC)),’ like Ongwen. Similarly, Opiyo Sam, another
LRA commander who returned to Uganda two years ago, claimed he does
not know or understand why Ongwen was singled out by the ICC.

Growing older made Ongwen wiser to Kony’s ways, which in turn made
him lose his commander status and its associated benefits handed out
by Kony as he saw fit. Ongwen became openly critical with Kony and
was demoted. In his mid-20s Ongwen seemed interested in leaving the
LRA but he was too scared to do so, feeling trapped. He was
terrified of the bad spirits he had unleashed and worried that they
would haunt him if he left the rebels – and the protection of the
Holy Spirit – to become a civilian once again. He was also concerned
with being thrown in prison or being killed by the Ugandan
authorities – a common fear for many LRA members.

Ongwen tried more than once to find a way out of the LRA, discussing
defection with local clergy, fellow fighters and his ‘wives.’ In
early 2006 as he contemplated surrender once more, Otti called from
Congo’s Garamba Park. The LRA leaders prepared for peace talks -the
Juba Talks – and Kony wanted to show full strength. He wanted all
the fighters to assemble in Congo but openly suspected Ongwen, who
led one of the last remaining small groups in Northern Uganda, of
wanting to quit. Otti said that a new World Court – a reference to
the ICC – wanted to capture and kill Ongwen but that the peace talks
offered a way out. Ongwen agreed, reluctantly leaving Uganda in
August 2006, the last LRA commander to make it to Congo.

As the peace talks stalled, Ongwen became reportedly depressed and
resorted to alcohol, particularly after Kony allowed its consumption
in the spring of 2007. In November 2007 Kony had Otti killed,
effectively ending the peace process and any possibility of making
the ICC arrest warrants go away, as Otti had promised Ongwen.

At the end of 2008, after the Ugandan army launched Operation
Lightning Thunder against LRA bases in Garamba Park, LRA groups
carried out retaliatory attacks against Congolese civilians, leaving
more than a thousand dead in a few weeks. Ongwen was reportedly in
charge of a group that attacked Doruma, killing many as they
celebrated Christmas. Throughout 2009 and until 2014, he operated in
northeastern Congo, often following river Duru into South Sudan
where his troops attacked civilians, mostly to secure food. He
continued to lead his own group, often refusing to liaise with
Kony’s messengers or respond to Kony’s radio messages. Kony remained
suspicious and critical of Ongwen. On three different occasions, he
threatened to have Ongwen killed, including in October 2007 when
Ongwen was the only commander to protest Otti’s execution.

In late 2014, a Kony bodyguard stumbled upon Ongwen’s group -at that
point acting independently of Kony – near the Congo – Central
African Republic (CAR) border. Ongwen was somehow convinced to join
Kony in Kafia Kingi, a Sudanese Army controlled area in Southern
Darfur, where Kony had him tortured and put under house arrest. As
in previous instances, Kony said he did not want to kill him because
his sister, also abducted at a young age, was one of Kony’s favorite
wives. With the help of a fighter who was supposed to guard him,
Ongwen managed to escape before Kony could do much worse.

Ongwen reportedly left the LRA camp barefoot and barely clothed and
walked for days towards the CAR border where he was helped by cattle
keepers, who took him to a Seleka group, near the town of Sam
Ouandja, CAR. Not understanding Ongwen’s importance, the Seleka
commander reached out, via a local merchant and an NGO worker, to
the American Special Forces in Obo, CAR. A US helicopter was
dispatched to transport Ongwen from Sam Ouandja to Obo where he was
later handed over to the Ugandan army. After a few days in Obo at
the Ugandan army base, Ongwen was flown to Bangui and then to The
Hague.

***************************************************************

The Ongwen Trial and the Struggle for Justice in Northern Uganda

by Rosebell Kagumire

April 14, 2016

[Rosebell Kagumire is a Ugandan journalist, communications
specialist, public speaker and award-winning blogger. She has over
10 years experience working at the intersection between media and
rights in crisis, women’s rights, peace and security.] For previous
posts in the symposium, click here.

My first trip to northern Uganda was in 2005. I was working at a
newspaper in Kampala and went on an assignment. The air was still
and tense, our hosts warned us not to stay late at the bar in Gulu
town, the biggest town in the province of Acholiland. I had many
interviews, comprising of countless horror stories from children as
young as five on what they had gone through during the war. They
were still ‘night commuters’ – children would leave their homes in
the rural areas to spend a night in the relative safety of Gulu town
where the army could protect them from being abducted. I was one of
the Ugandans privileged enough not to have any direct experience
with war. My parents weren’t. Post-independence Uganda saw many
turbulences and the struggle for power continued. In the vacuum and
absence of national consolidation, resistance and rebel movements
mushroomed.

The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) were one of the last rebel
movements to emerge and put up the longest rebellion, well known for
their horrendous tactics and the terrible crimes they committed
against the populations of Northern and North Eastern Uganda. The
children I spoke with on that 2005 trip lived in a totally different
world than me, even though we were from the same country. Besides
the LRA’s violence, they also witnessed other children, as well as
their siblings, parents and relatives either mutilated or die of
preventable disease in internally displaced peoples camps set up by
the Government of Uganda to ‘protect’ them. You didn’t have to know
international criminal law to know these were crimes against
humanity.

One of the teenage boys I interviewed was Simon. Simon had been
recently released after a few months at a rehabilitation centre. But
it wasn’t really rehabilitation, as the sheer volume of children
either rescued or escaped from the LRA was too high for the
available centres to provide adequate psychosocial support.

Simon had passed through one of those centres and so we sat down to
hear his story. As with the heinous acts many children recounted to
me, it was hard not to feel pressure rise in your chest listening to
these stories. Simon was forced to kill his parents with a machete
before he was abducted. The rebels threatened to kill the whole
family if he wouldn’t do it. Forcing Simon to kill his parents began
the process of mutating him into a child soldier. Simon spent many
years with the LRA, during which he knew he couldn’t return. How
could he come back to a community that knew he had killed his own
parents? And what was home? His siblings, his relatives, could he
ever be forgiven? These were questions that Simon couldn’t move
past.

Like many child soldiers, Simon would go on to kill many more people
during his time in the LRA. Finally, after five years in the bush at
the age of 20 he was returned to his surviving relatives in the camp
after a rescue by the Ugandan army in 2005. But the family didn’t
want anything to do with him and, in the absence of proper
government run shelters and psychosocial services, Simon still
battled trauma and nightmares when I visited him again in 2008.

Simon’s life comes to mind when considering the proceedings against
Dominic Ongwen. Ongwen was abducted by the LRA as a child and rose
through the ranks of the rebel group. When he was surrendered to the
ICC in early 2015, my thought was that any of the children I had
interviewed could have become an Ongwen. If they hadn’t been
rescued, some could have gone on with their fear of return replaced
with the power that the gun and rebel hierarchy bring.

We are told that Ongwen’s trial is about justice. But what does that
mean for the local communities who have to heal? This includes those
families whose children were abducted just like Ongwen and families
whose children were abducted by Ongwen. The calls for forgiveness
from some victims are not a surprise. Many know their own children
are still struggling to overcome the trauma and cope with the crimes
they were forced to carry out.

While some believe Ongwen’s trial will go a long way to holding LRA
accountable and bring some form of justice to victims (evidenced by
the more 2,000 victims who have agreed to support the trial), other
victims have called for local justice measures and reconciliation.
This has precedence, they claim, as top former LRA commanders were
granted amnesty by the Government even though they could easily be
charged with hundreds of counts of war crimes themselves. The
commanders live freely in northern Uganda and many argue that, given
that he was abducted, Ongwen, deserves the same pardon.

On the other hand, the ICC trial will be important for both victims
and the country as a means to understand and confront what really
happened in northern Uganda. Ongwen faces 70 counts of war crimes
and crimes against humanity include murder, persecution, torture,
pillaging, conscription of child soldiers, and sexual and gender-
based crimes, which he allegedly committed between 2003 and 2005 in
the internally displaced camps of Lukodi, Pajule, Abok and Odek in
the north. But in Uganda, while many condemn the LRA and the crimes
committed, missing is the role of government which many in the north
would have wanted to see interrogated — and investigated.

For the people of northern Uganda, the charge of forced marriage
will be of particular significance. The Rome Statute doesn’t cover
it as a crime but the prosecutor has charged it as cruel inhuman
treatment. Through the prosecution of forced marriage, the sexual
crimes against many women who were abducted and given as rewards for
men fighting will uniquely bring out the plight of women during this
war. The trial will also have to dig deeper into how one transitions
from victim to perpetrator and how capable one can be, if abducted,
in forming the necessary intent to commit the crimes Ongwen is
charged with. The trial in general will hopefully highlight the
complexity of the 20-plus year war where the lines between victim
and perpetrator are sometimes blurred.

Many also hope that Ongwen’s ICC appearance and his possible trial
will move the Government and other actors to finally tend to the
real needs of the communities on the ground who still have no
reparations programs nor reconciliation and truth-seeking processes.
The communities are still in need psycho-social support and it is
largely wanting. If the proceedings against Ongwen at the ICC can
help increase the chances that the people of northern Uganda receive
the attention and services they deserve, it holds out the
possibility of being a success.

***********************************************************

Shifting Narratives: Ongwen and Lubanga on the Effects of Child
Soldiering

by Mark A. Drumbl

April 20, 2016

[Mark A. Drumbl is the Class of 1975 Alumni Professor of Law &
Director, Transnational Law Institute, Washington & Lee School of
Law.]

On March 23, 2016, ICC Pre-Trial Chamber (PTC) II issued its
decision confirming charges against Dominic Ongwen. PTC II confirmed
many charges, including for sexual and gender-based crimes. Ongwen
will be tried for some crimes that he had himself endured. These
include the war crime of cruel treatment, conscription and use as a
child soldier, and the crime against humanity of enslavement.

Ongwen was abducted into the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) at the age
of 9 while walking home from school. He was bullied, brutalized, and
indoctrinated as a child soldier. He rose through the ranks. He
ascended to the upper echelons of power, although these remained
tightly controlled by LRA leader Joseph Kony.

Irrespective of how high he ascended, however, Ongwen’s point of
entry remains fixed as a young, kidnapped, orphaned, and abused
child. Ongwen’s defense team invoked this point of entry in its
submissions. Defense counsel did so to make two specific legal
points. First, that the ongoing and continuous nature of the crime
of child soldiering means that Ongwen left the LRA – nearly thirty
years later – still as a child soldier and, thereby, that he should
be entitled to the evacuation of individual criminal responsibility
that hortatorily inheres in the international legal regime that
protects child soldiers. Second, the defense team submitted that
coming of age in the LRA amounts to a kind of institutionalized
duress that excludes criminal responsibility under Rome Statute
article 31(1)(d) rather than just mitigating sentence. According to
the defense, Ongwen “lived most of his life under duress (i.e. from
the age of 9.5 years old)” and his “so-called rank was demonstrative
of one thing: that he was surviving better than others while under
duress”.

When making both arguments, the Ongwen defense team extensively (yet
unsuccessfully) invoked the findings of Dr. Elisabeth Schauer, a
court-appointed expert whose testimony on the dissociation and
trauma arising out of the child soldiering experience had been
dispositive to the Lubanga case. In Lubanga, child soldiers were the
victims and Lubanga the adult perpetrator; in Ongwen, the accused is
a former child soldier and many of his alleged victims were children
at the time.

PTC II perfunctorily dismissed Ongwen’s first argument without
providing any reasons. PTC II also dismissed the second argument,
although not quite as perfunctorily. One judge, moreover, will
append in due course a separate, concurring opinion.

Reasonable minds can disagree as to whether the defense arguments
have merit. The point of my commentary is not to revisit these
arguments. …

Instead, my point is to emphasize that international criminal law
should proceed in consistent and predictable ways. Here, PTC II
slipped. Its understanding of the agency of actual and former child
soldiers in Ongwen departs from the understanding previously
deployed by the Lubanga Trial and Appeals Chambers, in particular in
the sentencing judgments.

Lubanga cast the linkage between the past as a child soldier and the
present as a former child soldier as linear and continuous. The
child soldiering experience was constructed as ongoing and assured:
it rendered the children as victims damaged for life, with their
reality today as derivative of their previous suffering. Once a
child soldier in fact, always a child soldier in mind, body, and
soul. In Ongwen, however, the linkage between the accused’s past as
a child soldier and his present as a former child soldier was seen
as discontinuous and contingent.

In his opening statement in the Lubanga trial, then Chief Prosecutor
Luis Moreno-Ocampo portrayed the former child soldiers as indelibly
wounded and recurrently traumatized.

“They cannot forget the beatings they suffered; they cannot forget
the terror they felt and the terror they inflicted; they cannot
forget the sounds of their machine guns; they cannot forget that
they killed; they cannot forget that they raped and that they were
raped.”

The 2012 Lubanga sentencing judgment (confirmed on appeal in
December 2014) had prioritized and excerpted from Dr. Schauer’s
expert submissions that the Ongwen defense team sought
unsuccessfully to invoke. Elements of Dr. Schauer’s work pertinent
to the Lubanga sentencing analysis include her submissions that
“children of war and child soldiers […] often suffer from
devastating long-term consequences of experienced or witnesses acts
of violence” and that conflict experiences “can hamper children’s
healthy development and their ability to function fully even once
the violence has ceased.” …

In Ongwen, however, a different narrative emerges. This narrative
contemplates agency, choice, and action. In response to the
defense’s emphasis on Ongwen’s entry into the LRA as an abducted
child, PTC II held that “the circumstances of Ongwen’s stay in the
LRA […] cannot be said to be beyond his control… [.]” PTC II
concluded that “escapes from the LRA were not rare.” It underscored
that Ongwen “could have chosen not to rise in hierarchy and expose
himself to increasingly higher responsibility to implement
policies.” It added that the evidence demonstrates that Dominic
Ongwen “shared the ideology of the LRA, including its brutal and
perverted policy with respect to civilians”. PTC II noted that
Ongwen could “have avoided raping” forced wives, “or, at the very
least, he could have reduced the brutality of the sexual abuse”.

PTC II thereby shied away from the Lubanga narrative of the
pernicious, ongoing effect of being compelled as a child into a
violent armed group and socialized therein. Whereas the defense
sought to link Ongwen’s conduct as an adult to his horrid
experiences as a child, PTC II only examined his agency as an adult
– as if he had never been a child, let alone a child in the LRA. In
rejecting the duress submissions in Ongwen, PTC II elides Ongwen’s
status as a former child soldier. It’s as if he lost that status, or
ceded it. Hence, there is a proper way to be a victim. Victimhood is
contingent, so to speak, even aleatory.

In truth, the Ongwen narrative reflects the diverse experiences of
actual and former child soldiers and the complexities of survival
and social navigation in invidious circumstances. After all,
problematic essentialisms abound in the Lubanga criminal judgments.

That said, in the push to confirm charges against Ongwen, PTC II
invokes language that should perturb child rights activists. The
Ongwen confirmation of charges decision conflicts with a tenet of
post-conflict rehabilitation and reintegration. This tenet
approaches all persons (regardless of age) who had become associated
with armed groups and armed forces while under the age of 18 as
former child soldiers and accords them entitlements and treatment
that hinge upon this status.

The contrast between Ongwen and Lubanga vivifies how narratives of
agency, choice, and constraint may become instrumentalized by judges
to suit the prosecutorial impulse. This contrast additionally
reflects the clumsiness of the criminal law in conceptualizing child
soldiering specifically and, in Ongwen’s case, victim-perpetrator
circularity generally.

*****************************************************

AfricaFocus Bulletin is an independent electronic publication
providing reposted commentary and analysis on African issues, with a
particular focus on U.S. and international policies. AfricaFocus
Bulletin is edited by William Minter.

AfricaFocus Bulletin can be reached at africafocus@igc.org. Please
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or to suggest material for inclusion. For more information about
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They are wrong
| May 5, 2016 | 8:30 pm | Bernie Sanders, political struggle | Comments closed
The Clinton campaign thinks this campaign is over,
They are wrong.
Maybe it’s over for the insiders and the party establishment, but the voters in Indiana had a different idea. The campaign wasn’t over for them. It isn’t over for the voters in West Virginia. It isn’t over for Democrats in Oregon, New Jersey and Kentucky. It isn’t over for voters in California and all the other states with contests still to come.
I understand we have an uphill climb to victory, but we have been fighting uphill from the first day of this campaign. I am in this campaign until the last vote is cast, and that’s why I have to ask:
Last night Donald Trump became the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party. Poll after poll shows we are the best campaign to take him on, and by a wide margin. There is nothing more I would like than to take on defeat Donald Trump, someone who can never become president of this country. And that is why we must continue to fight for the values we share, and to win this primary.
In solidarity,
Bernie Sanders
Nigeria: Shapes of Violence, 2
| May 4, 2016 | 8:18 pm | Africa, political struggle | Comments closed

Nigeria: Shapes of Violence, 2

AfricaFocus Bulletin
April 27, 2016 (160427)
(Reposted from sources cited below)

Editor’s Note

“It has been two years since the world’s deadliest terrorist
organization – Boko Haram – abducted 271 girls from their high
school in the town of Chibok – a tragedy that would shine much
needed international attention on conflict in northeastern Nigeria.
Sadly, the Chibok girls are only one part of a much larger story of
violence against women and girls in the northeast. … the needs of
all those whom the Chibok girls symbolize – thousands upon thousands
who have suffered gender-based violence at Boko Haram’s hands – are
being unaddressed.” – Refugees International

For a version of this Bulletin in html format, more suitable for
printing, go to http://www.africafocus.org/docs16/nig1604b.php, and
click on “format for print or mobile.”

To share this on Facebook, click on
https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=http://www.africafocus.org/docs16/nig1604b.php

This AfricaFocus Bulletin contains excerpts from a new report by
Refugees International, documenting the failures of humanitarian
assistance to address gender-based violence in northeastern Nigeria,
both by Boko Haram and among those who have been displaced by the
violence. Also included is an Amnesty International report on an
entirely separate case of violence, in which Nigerian security
forces in December last year perpetrated “mass slaughter of hundreds
of men, women and children …and the attempted cover-up of this
crime,” against followers of a Shiite Muslim group in Zaria in
north-central Nigeria.

As these examples show, the realities of violence, whether in
Nigeria, other African countries, or indeed in rich countries such
as the United States as well, are often far more complicated than
the stereotypes that often prevail among those observing them from a
distance. Thus, violence in Nigeria is often simplistically
characterized as “religious conflict” between Muslims and
Christians. A new collection of empirical studies released this year
by Nigeria Watch, based in Ibadan, Nigeria, provides a more complex
perspective, documenting, for instance, that intra-Muslim conflict
is more common that conflicts between Muslims and Christians, and
that much of the conflict involving both Muslims and Christians is
based on secular rather than religious motives.

Another AfricaFocus Bulletin, available on the web but not sent out
by email, contains excerpts from one of the chapters in this new
report, focused specifically on violence involving Christians and
Muslims in Nigeria. The full 216-page report is available at
https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/37759

Other recent articles with relevant background on Boko Haram in
particular include the following from the Washington Post and the
New York Times.

“Here’s why so many people join Boko Haram, despite its notorious
violence,” by Hilary Matfess, Washington Post, April 26, 2016
http://tinyurl.com/hqw6og4

“Failure to Share Data Hampers War on Boko Haram in Africa,” by Eric
Schmitt and Dionne Searcey, New York Times, April 23, 2016
http://tinyurl.com/jzsmla7

“Women Who Fled Boko Haram Tell of Devastation and, Rarely, Hope,”
by Helene Cooper, New York Times, April 22, 2106
http://tinyurl.com/z48hplw

“Abducted Nigerian Girls Have Not Been Abandoned, U.S. Says,” by
Helene Cooper, April 20, 2016
http://tinyurl.com/z4bj6md

“Boko Haram still a threat months after ‘technical victory,’ by
Bradley Klapper|AP, Washington Post, April 19, 2016
http://tinyurl.com/h3dfy48

“What’s Worse Than a Girl Being Kidnapped?,” by Adaobi Tricia
Nwaubani, New York Times, April 15, 2016
http://tinyurl.com/hcak5ch

“Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls two years ago. What happened to
them?,” by Kevin Sieff, Washington Post, April 14, 2016
http://tinyurl.com/zj57sxg

“Boko Haram Turns Female Captives Into Terrorists,” by Dionne
Searcey, New York Times, April 7, 2016 http://tinyurl.com/jqyxw2d

“They were freed from Boko Haram’s rape camps. But their nightmare
isn’t over,” by Kevin Sieff, Washington Post, April 3, 2016
http://tinyurl.com/zxcpob3

For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on Nigeria, visit
http://www.africafocus.org/country/nigeria.php

++++++++++++++++++++++end editor’s note+++++++++++++++++

Nigeria’s Displaced Women and Girls: Humanitarian Community at Odds,
Boko Haram Survivors Forsaken

Refugees International, April 21, 2016

http://www.refugeesinternational.org/reports/2016/nigeria

It has been two years since the world’s deadliest terrorist
organization – Boko Haram – abducted 271 girls from their high
school in the town of Chibok – a tragedy that would shine much
needed international attention on conflict in northeastern Nigeria.
Sadly, the Chibok girls are only one part of a much larger story of
violence against women and girls in the northeast. But the attention
on this remote corner of the Sahel has not translated into sustained
humanitarian assistance for all those that have been affected.
Humanitarian stakeholders are under tremendous strain due to the
enormity of the emergency, conflicts between aid agencies, limited
resources, and an ineffective partner in the Nigerian state. As a
result, the needs of all those whom the Chibok girls symbolize –
thousands upon thousands who have suffered gender-based violence at
Boko Haram’s hands – are being unaddressed. Moreover, the lackluster
humanitarian response is placing women and girls affected by Boko
Haram at further risk of gender-based violence.

Background

Northeast Nigeria has been the primary theater for the militant
group Boko Haram’s insurgency since 2009. Violence has ebbed and
flowed over the years as the insurgents evolved from a homegrown
uprising against the police in three states to a more sophisticated
and ruthless extremist Islamist group, which pledged allegiance to
ISIS in 2015. The sheer brutality of Boko Haram, marked by mass
abductions, indiscriminate killings, suicide bombings, sexual
violence, and slavery, has earned it the unsavory designation as the
world’s deadliest terrorist group. The toll is not certain, but
reportedly 20,000 have been killed as a result of the insurgency. In
2014, Boko Haram intensified its attacks, resulting in a sudden
growth in the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) arriving
in Maiduguri, the capital city of the northeastern state of Borno.

Much criticism, both domestic and international, has been leveled at
the Nigerian government for its perceived failure to deploy a more
robust strategy to eliminate the scourge of Boko Haram. Muhammadu
Buhari made the defeat of Boko Haram a central pillar of his
successful campaign for the 2015 presidential elections. He assumed
power in May 2015, and in December announced that Nigeria had
technically defeated Boko Haram – a declaration found to be
outlandish by many Nigeria watchers, as violence continues. Although
the validity of this statement is arguable, the Nigerian Army (NA)
did intensify its campaign against Boko Haram in 2015, “liberating”
– in their words – areas that were under the militants’ control.
This campaign resulted in further displacement in Borno, including
into Maiduguri.

Multiple reports document the horrors that women and girls have
experienced under Boko Haram. Further, a recent report documents the
difficulties that abducted women and girls have reintegrating back
into their families and communities, particularly for those labeled
as “Boko Haram wives.” Yet there is a dearth of information on what
and how humanitarian assistance is serving the very specific needs
of these women and girls.

In February 2016, Refugees International (RI) conducted a mission to
Nigeria to assess the needs of those displaced in Borno State, and
how the humanitarian community can best serve women and girls. The
RI team met with federal and state authorities, the UN,
international non-governmental organizations (INGO) and community-
based organizations, human rights defenders, local volunteers,
members of the donor and diplomatic communities in Abuja and
Maiduguri, and IDPs and host community members in Maiduguri. The
humanitarian crisis facing the aid community in the northeast is
nothing short of daunting.

The Humanitarian Panorama

The humanitarian crisis facing the aid community in the northeast is
nothing short of daunting. According to the 2016 Humanitarian Needs
Overview (HNO), 14.8 million people are affected in four states of
the northeast. 7 The UN estimates that of this number, seven million
are in need, three million of whom are estimated to be entirely
inaccessible. It is worthwhile to note, however, that precise
numbers are difficult to attain due to the humanitarian access
constraints. This is especially the case for Borno, where nearly 70
percent of the territory was inaccessible at the time of the HNO.
Consequently, most humanitarians believe that the numbers of people
in need are much higher.

Overall, there are an estimated 2.2 million displaced in the
northeast, according to the International Organization for
Migration’s most recent displacement tracking exercise. 9 This is a
sharp increase from the much more modest figure of 261,000 in
December 2014, as per the HNO. The vast majority of the displaced –
1.3 million – are in Maiduguri and its environs. Their arrival more
than doubled the population of the city in a single year. Only
approximately eight percent of the IDPs are in government-run IDP
camps or settlements. The Nigerian authorities only deliver
humanitarian assistance to those in camps, which are managed by the
National and State Emergency Management Agencies (NEMA and SEMA,
respectively). The remainder must fend for themselves, depending on
the kindness of relatives and hosts among the local population –
hosts that are increasingly exhausting their limited resources – as
well as local faith-based institutions that have neither the
resources nor the expertise to deliver humanitarian aid. A very
small percentage of IDPs are being served by the small INGO
community.

Access to food – both in and out of the camps – was the primary
concern cited by IDPs with whom RI spoke. According to figures
released in March 2016 by the UN Office for Affairs (OCHA), an
estimated 2.5 million children are malnourished. Within the
government-run camps, the number of displaced far outstrips the
number of water, sanitation, and hygiene facilities that
international standards call for in camp settings, forcing women and
girls to wait for hours in lines, with many ultimately opting for
open urination and defecation. One INGO working in the host
communities in Maiduguri asserts that nearly every household is
housing IDPs, in some cases multiple families, and host families are
now selling their assets to be able to feed displaced people under
their care. Livelihood opportunities are grossly limited for those
living both inside and outside of camps. Finally, several
displacement sites have been targeted by Boko Haram suicide bombers,
leading to restrictive policies involving basic human rights such as
freedom of movement, which impact both IDPs’ protection and their
ability to participate in income-generating activities.

Against this backdrop, at the time of RI’s visit, there were only a
handful of UN agencies, with very limited personnel, and less than
ten international organizations operating in Maiduguri. At time of
writing, the 2016 UN humanitarian appeal for Nigeria is dangerously
underfunded. As of April, only $33.7 million of the $248 million
proposed for the UN humanitarian response plan—just 14 percent—has
been met.

Boko Haram’s survivors, in the shadow of humanitarian action

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, International Alert,
UNICEF, and several journalists have all reported on the horrors of
life under Boko Haram and the very specific needs of women they have
interviewed – medical, psychological, livelihood, and community
reconciliation opportunities. Yet it is RI’s assessment that there
has been minimal effort to identify and/or address these women and
girls’ needs, much less target them as priority beneficiaries for
any programming. The humanitarian crisis in Borno State has led to
infinite protection risks for women and girls. Boko Haram has
abducted countless women and girls throughout its campaign in the
northeast. No one is entirely certain how many women and girls have
been abducted to date, in part because the Nigerian authorities have
yet to respond to civil society’s desperate calls for a survey in
the northeast, by which families could register the data of their
missing. Whatever the figure, it is surely dwarfed by the number
that have been exposed to Boko Haram’s brutality during its campaign
to overrun and control territory, of which gender-based violence
(GBV) has been a feature. Definitive counts of those who have been
subjected to Boko Haram’s rule in this manner are difficult to come
by, but it is reasonable to believe that it figures in the
thousands. As IDP numbers swell in Maiduguri, so do the number of
women and girl survivors of Boko Haram’s horrifying GBV tactics. As
the NA clears Boko Haram from territory, it rescues people who had
been trapped, the majority of them women and girls, and takes many
of them to displacement sites. In the month of March 2016 alone,
troops had rescued 11,595 hostages from Boko Haram, according to NA
Spokesman, Colonel Sanu Usman.

According to humanitarians with whom RI spoke, Nigerian authorities
share little to no information on its process for vetting women and
girls and releasing them. Some humanitarians, however, believe that
it is quite simply because there is no formal process. Further,
there is no process for identifying women and girls that have
escaped and fled to Maiduguri without the assistance of the
military. And there is no mechanism by which the military and
humanitarians can coordinate to identify women and girls so they can
benefit from much-needed services. RI interviewed one 14-year-old 14
who exemplified the protection risks this situation creates. She was
abducted during an attack on her village of Baga and taken as a wife
by a Boko Haram IDP women and children living in a host community in
Maiduguri.

…

During RI’s mission, only one humanitarian agency told the RI team
that procedures were in place to identify and provide services to
women and girls associated with Boko Haram, or for the women and
girls that are brought to Maiduguri on a near-daily basis by the
military. …

However, life for a woman or girl in the host communities is not
necessarily more secure. All of the displaced women living in host
communities whom RI interviewed spoke of the risks of violence. IMC
carried out a safety audit in the seven host communities where they
implement programs, and the three top concerns women expressed, in
order of priority, were domestic violence, rape, and denial of
resources. According to the women IMC serves, domestic violence has
become a serious issue due to food insecurity. Women suffer beatings
when they cannot provide food or when they ask for money to buy
food. On the third month of IMC programming, volunteers were
recording as many as twenty rapes per week in the seven communities.
Women are also reporting that they are often denied resources to
purchase medicines or food. When asking a group of women in a focus
group what self-care they practice to alleviate their trauma, RI
learned that women and girls are reportedly purchasing and drinking
bottles of cough syrup to “go to sleep and forget.”

There is no meaningful integrated GBV-prevention and response
programming in Maiduguri. …  To RI’s knowledge, at the time of
RI’s visit, only one INGO – International Medical Corps (IMC) – had
a holistic GBV prevention and response program that included
sensitization, referrals for medical care, and psychosocial
counseling, but the reach was limited to only seven host communities
and three IDP camps. However, this short-term U.S. government-
funded program is coming to a close, pending the acquisition of
alternative funding sources. Several other organizations were doing
psychosocial counseling for women and children, but they did not
specifically fall under the rubric of GBV.

…

Further, medical interventions designed specifically for survivors
of sexual violence across the board are limited due to an
unanticipated reason: the global displacement crisis. The pressures
on the global humanitarian system are reverberating in northeast
Nigeria: the agency mandated with procuring Inter-Agency
Reproductive Health kits, the United Nations Population Fund
(UNFPA), has been unable to secure a shipment of Kit 5, the medical
kit designed to treat STIs. UNFPA’s suppliers in Denmark, China, and
the Netherlands informed the country office that they were unable to
fulfill the purchase order due to the overwhelming global demand;
their supplies are exhausted. Kits are currently under production
and should be made available to UNFPA Nigeria at the end of April
2016.

…

RI is also concerned that traditional humanitarian psychosocial
support programming may not be of the caliber that the context
warrants. The trauma endured by the Boko Haram-affected populations
cannot be underestimated. Community based organizations told RI that
apart from the suffering resulting from abduction, sexual violence,
the loss of partners and children, the violence of war, and loss of
all assets, Nigerian women in the northeast are also facing a
profound gender identity crisis. It is not the woman’s traditional
role to “bury one’s husband” or to be the head of a household, and
the rapidly shifting role is compounding the trauma they have
endured and imperiling their resilience capabilities.

According to service providers and some IDP women who chose to speak
about their mental health, women feel helpless, fear men, feel they
have lost all self-worth, and are hopeless when facing the
uncertainty of the future. When asking a group of women in a focus
group what self-care they practice to alleviate their trauma, RI
learned that women and girls are reportedly purchasing and drinking
bottles of cough syrup to “go to sleep and forget.” Upon further
investigation, RI learned that this is not a pre-existing coping
mechanism amongst women and girls. In fact, demand for cough syrup
in camps has increased such that supplies have become scarcer,
driving the price up from 60 Naira per bottle to 150-200 Naira.
Meanwhile, multiple international and local aid workers expressed
concern that some current UN and INGO psychosocial support
interventions may not be staffed adequately, contrary to what their
own literature might otherwise indicate. Aid workers highlighted
that several women’s safe spaces – tents – erected by one UN agency
are often empty. IDP women from several sites confirmed to RI that
they are unaware of trauma support programming and that the tents
are going unused.

The fact that GBV programming does not figure among core
humanitarian programming is a failure to global commitments to both
prioritize women and girls, and place GBV prevention and response
programming in its much-deserved category of a “lifesaving”
activity. On the contrary, one senior UNFPA staff member told RI
that a request to access UN Central Emergency Response Funds (CERF)
to hold a GBV referrals pathway workshop was denied on the basis
that “CERF funds can only be used for life-saving activities.”

…

**********************************************

Nigeria: Military Cover-Up of Mass Slaughter at Zaria Exposed

Amnesty International Press Release

22 April 2016

http://www.amnesty.org – Direct URL: http://tinyurl.com/jnafcom

Mass slaughter of hundreds of men, women and children by soldiers in
Zaria and the attempted cover-up of this crime demonstrates an utter
contempt for human life and accountability, said Amnesty
International as it publishes evidence gathered on the ground
revealing how the Nigerian military burned people alive, razed
buildings and dumped victims’ bodies in mass graves.

The true horror of what happened over those two days in Zaria is
only now coming to light. Bodies were left littered in the streets
and piled outside the mortuary. Some of the injured were burned
alive Netsanet Belay, Amnesty International

The report, Unearthing the truth: Unlawful killings and mass cover-
up in Zaria, contains shocking eyewitness testimony of large-scale
unlawful killings by the Nigerian military and exposes a crude
attempt by the authorities to destroy and conceal evidence.

“The true horror of what happened over those two days in Zaria is
only now coming to light. Bodies were left littered in the streets
and piled outside the mortuary. Some of the injured were burned
alive,” said Netsanet Belay, Amnesty International’s Research and
Advocacy Director for Africa.

“Our research, based on witness testimonies and analysis of
satellite images, has located one possible mass grave. It is time
now for the military to come clean and admit where it secretly
buried hundreds of bodies.”

More than 350 people are believed to have been unlawfully killed by
the military between 12 and 14 December, following a confrontation
between members of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) and
soldiers in Zaria, Kaduna state.

IMN supporters – some armed with batons, knives, and machetes – had
refused to clear the road near their headquarters, the Hussainiyya,
for a military convoy to pass. The army has claimed that IMN
supporters attacked the convoy in an attempt to assassinate the
Chief of Army Staff. IMN members deny this.

Following an initial confrontation the military surrounded other
locations where IMN supporters had gathered, notably at the
residential compound of IMN leader Ibrahim Al-Zakzaky. Some people
were killed as a result of indiscriminate fire. Others appeared to
have been deliberately targeted.

All available information indicates that the deaths of protesters
were the consequence of excessive, and arguably, unnecessary use of
force.

Children injured and killed

Zainab, a 16-year-old schoolgirl, told Amnesty International: “We
were in our school uniforms. My friend Nusaiba Abdullahi was shot in
her forehead. We took her to a house where they treated the injured
but, before reaching the house, she already died.” A 10-year-old boy
who was shot in the leg told Amnesty International how his older
brother was shot in the head as they tried to leave the compound.
“We went out to try to shelter in a nearby house but we got shot.”

Shot and burned alive

On 13 December, two buildings within Ibrahim Al-Zakzaky’s compound,
one of which was being used as a makeshift medical facility and
mortuary, were attacked by soldiers. Alyyu, a 22-year-old student,
told Amnesty International that he was shot in the chest outside the
compound and was taken inside for treatment: “There were lots of
injured people in several rooms. There were dead bodies in a room
and also in the courtyard. Around 12-1pm soldiers outside called on
people to come out, but people were too scared to go out. We knew
they would kill us. Soldiers threw grenades inside the compound. I
saw one soldier on the wall of the courtyard shooting inside.”

One mother described a phone conversation with one of her 19-year-
old sons before he was killed alongside his twin brother and their
step brother and sister in the compound. “They are shooting those
injured one by one,” he told her.

As soldiers set fire to the makeshift medical facility in the
compound that afternoon, Yusuf managed to escape despite serious
gunshot wounds: “Those who were badly injured and could not escape
were burned alive,” he told Amnesty International. “I managed to get
away from the fire by crawling on my knees until I reached a nearby
house where I was able to hide until the following day. I don’t know
how many of the wounded were burned to death. Tens and tens of
them.”

Footage believed to have been shot on mobile phone by IMN supporters
after the incident shows bodies with gunshot wounds as well as
charred bodies strewn around the compound.

Cover-up

After the incident the military sealed off the areas around al-
Zakzaky’s compound, the Hussainiyya and other locations. Bodies were
taken away, sites were razed to the ground, the rubble removed,
bloodstains washed off, and bullets and spent cartridge removed from
the streets.

Witnesses saw piles of bodies outside the morgue of Ahmadu Bello
University Teaching Hospital in Zaria. A senior medical source told
Amnesty International that the military sealed off the area around
the morgue for two days. During that time he saw army vehicles
“coming and going”.

A witness described to Amnesty International what he saw outside the
hospital mortuary on the evening of 14 December: “It was dark and
from far I could only see a big mound but when I got closer I saw it
was a huge pile of corpses on top of each other.  I have never seen
so many dead bodies. I got very scared and run away. It was a
terrible sight and I can’t get it out of my mind.”

Another witness told the organisation how he had seen diggers
excavating holes at the site of the suspected mass grave: “There
were five or six large trucks and several smaller military vehicles
and they spent hours digging and unloading the trucks’ cargo into
the hole they dug and then covered it again with the earth they had
dug out.  They were there from about 1 or 2 am until about 5 am.  I
don’t know what they buried. It looked like bodies, but I could not
get near.”

Amnesty International identified and visited the location of a
possible mass grave near Mando. Satellite images of the site taken
on 2 November and 24 December 2015 show disturbed earth spanning an
area of approximately 1000 square metres. Satellite pictures also
show the complete destruction of buildings and mosques.

“It is clear that the military not only used unlawful and excessive
force against men, women and children, unlawfully killing hundreds,
but then made considerable efforts to try to cover-up these crimes,”
said Netsanet Belay.

“Four months after the massacre the families of the missing are
still awaiting news of their loved ones. A full independent forensic
investigation is long overdue. The bodies must be exhumed, the
incident must be impartially and independently investigated and
those responsible must be held to account.”

On Monday 25 April, the military are expected to give evidence to
the Judicial Commission of Inquiry established by the Kaduna State
Government in January 2016. On 11 April, a Kaduna State government
official told the Judicial Commission of Inquiry that the bodies of
347 members of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) were collected
from the hospital mortuary and an army depot in Zaria and buried
secretly in a mass grave near Mando (outside the town of Kaduna) on
the night of 14-15 December. The IMN claim a further 350 people who
went missing during the incidents in Zaria remain unaccounted for.

During field research carried out in Kaduna state and Federal
Capital Territory (FCT) in February 2016, Amnesty International
delegates interviewed 92 people, including victims and their
relatives, eyewitnesses, lawyers and medical personnel. Attempts
were made to interview members of the military.

IMN leader Al-Zakzaky and his wife Zeinat Al-Zakzaky were arrested
and held incommunicado. They were only allowed access to their
lawyer for the first time on 1 April 2015, three and a half months
after their arrest. Amnesty International has not had access to
those who remain in detention but has received information from
medical sources that some of the detainees were not allowed access
to necessary medical care for several weeks after their arrest.

Amnesty International is calling for those IMN supporters charged in
connection with this incident to be tried promptly and fairly and
for those still held in detention without charge to be either
immediately charged or released.

*****************************************************

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