The International Criminal Trial as a Site for Contesting Historical and Political Narratives: The Case of Dominic Ongwen

Abstract

This paper considers how the international criminal trial emerges as a site for contesting historical and political narratives, and how the proceedings against Dominic Ongwen in the International Criminal Court gives us yet another opportunity to do so. It focuses on how the criminal trial appears to reinforce the hegemony of some contested historical narratives over others in attempting to deal with the past. It is suggested that the conflict in Uganda as well as what is currently happening in the Ongwen trial cannot be understood in isolation from, on the one hand, interregional and factional struggles within the Ugandan territory and, on the other hand, a postcolonial logic. Departing from this nexus, the paper introduces, discusses, and analyzes the strategy of rupture as developed by Jacques Vergès. By scrutinizing the legal strategies employed by Ongwen and his defense team, the paper argues that their strategies demonstrate the ways in which historical and political narratives are susceptible to ‘rupture’ by counternarratives put forth by defendants who refuse to play their part in the global justice drama by pointing to the struggle for larger contextual issues. In the setting of the Ongwen trial, this paper argues that by tapping into the victim-perpetrator narrative, Ongwen’s defense team are, wittingly or unwittingly, ‘rupturing’ the binaries in international criminal law. The paper concludes by arguing that the Court may need to find a new approach to ‘courtroom historiography’ if it is going to survive, either with or without the Global South.

Breaking Through the Legal Binary: Media Labelling of Dominic Ongwen as a Victim–Perpetrator

“…Building on Shepler (2014; see also Beier, 2015), we recognize that children affiliated with armed groups are political actors; a “child soldier” is as political an agent as a “soldier.” We also build on Bouris’s (2009) theory of complex political victims and Baines’ (2009) work on complex political perpetrators. Baines (2009: 163) applies her concept of complex political perpetrators to Ongwen and more generally to “youth who occupy extremely marginal spaces, settings of chronic crisis, and who use violence as an expression of political agency.” Weber (2021) extends the complex political perpetrators concept to female ex-combatants in Colombia and Guatemala, many of whom joined armed groups as minors. For Baines (2009: 163), “Ongwen represents a troupe of young rebels who were ‘bred’ in the shadows of illiberal war economies.…”

“…The LRA abducted at least 20,000 boys and girls over a period of 20 years, including Ongwen's abduction as a youth in the late 1980s (Kelly et al, 2016). The dual role of children as both victims and perpetrators is a key feature of LRA culture, structure, and command (Akhavan, 2005;Strandberg Hassellind, 2021).…”