Institute for War & Peace Reporting (London)
10 July 2009
analysis
Court accused of doing too little to tell people in Africa about its work.
The International Criminal Court, ICC, is under increasing pressure from lawyers, NGOs and journalists to do more to inform African communities affected by violence about the progress of investigations and trials of those accused of war crimes.
The ICC is based in The Hague in The Netherlands, thousands of kilometres away from the countries it deals with: Uganda, the Central African Republic, CAR, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC.
It is in the DRC - the country with the most indictees before the court - that the voices of discontent are the loudest.
IWPR has interviewed Congolese journalists, lawyers and civil society activists who say that people on the ground have little idea about what is going on in The Hague.
The ICC has instigated proceedings against five Congolese so far and investigations continue. Ituri militia leader Thomas Lubanga is currently on trial, and Germain Katanga and Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui, also from Ituri, will take the stand in September.
Shortly afterwards the trial of ex vice-president Jean-Pierre Bemba will commence. Only rebel leader Bosco Ntaganda remains at large.
Spreading the word about what is happening in The Hague in the DRC, a country the size of Western Europe, is an unenviable challenge.
The court has thus far concentrated its efforts in Ituri province, holding daily two hour-long interactive conversations with eight community radio stations there.
But journalists say attention needs to be spread elsewhere.
OTHER WORRIES
Faustin Kuediasala, from the daily Kinshasa-based newspaper Le Potentiel, says because there is little access to information about the court, interest in it is waning, "The Congolese have other worries than the ICC."
It is to reach people like Kuediasala that the outreach section of the ICC was established. Four outreach staff are stationed in The Hague and six in the DRC, dedicated to ensuring that affected communities understand and can follow the work of the court.
After a long struggle to find the right people (one post had to be re-advertised five times) there are now two outreach officers in Bangui, the CAR capital. Two people work on outreach in Darfur - mainly from refugee camps in Chad - and five in Uganda.
They are plagued by logistical problems. Getting to affected communities, which frequently lie in pockets of ongoing violence, is often deemed too risky.
Even the court says the annual outreach budget of 650,000 euros (910,000 US dollars) is not enough.
"It needs to be very clear that with the limited resources we have, we will only be able to conduct very limited outreach. We want to do it, but if the states don't give us enough resources, we can only do what we can do," said Claudia Perdomo, head of outreach at the ICC.
But activists on the ground say the court's limited budget is misspent and outreach targets the wrong people, leaving those who need to know about the court in the dark.
NORTH KIVU
The problem appears to be most serious in war-torn North Kivu province. The area has been beset by conflict in recent years and ICC prosecutors have started an investigation into sexual violence crimes, the recruitment of child soldiers and the illegal flow of weapons.
Prosecutors remain tight-lipped about progress and the four ICC outreach officers stationed in Kinshasa and Bunia have only been to North and South Kivu a handful of times.
Journalists in Goma - North Kivu's regional capital - say they don't have enough information about the court, and are struggling to provide news to the population.
"Two years ago, a journalist from Bujumbura brought me a leaflet speaking about ICC. This is the only occasion I heard about it," said Primo Pascal Rudahigwa, programme officer at DRC broadcaster RTNC, the official radio in Goma. "Personally, I have no idea on what ICC is doing in Kivu," he added.
Goma journalist Albert Kambale said the ICC has to intensify its activities, "It could be better to organise activities between three and four times a month ... they have to inform us so that we can inform others."
As well as engaging with journalists to disseminate information, Juvenal Munubo, a lawyer from Goma, says more needs to be done to brief the legal community, and that the lack of communication of the ICC is tarnishing its image, "The ICC is holding meetings of 30 to 60 minutes in luxury hotels, [but] to what end?
"You cannot understand the ICC within 30 minutes, even if you are a lawyer. You need at least two weeks. But apparently the preoccupation of the ICC is elsewhere [than Goma]."
Perdomo said her team is working out the best way to inform the Kivus about what is happening at the ICC, but until an arrest warrant comes out of the Kivus investigation, her team is bound to concentrate efforts on Ituri.
But international NGOs say the court should start outreach in an area as soon as it decides to investigate.
"Otherwise you get to the stage of the trial and people don't know anything about the ICC, and it is hard to go back and create informed awareness," said Alison Smith from the NGO No Peace Without Justice.
INSECURITY
The ICC has cited continuing insecurity as a reason for not being on the ground in the Kivus, but Smith says that not being present is the ICC's biggest flaw. "You need to be there. People want to know but if you don't go there, there is no chance they will know," she said.
Perdomo said that her team follows security advice from the United Nations Mission in the DRC and that "whenever there is a window of opportunity because the security conditions allow us, we go".
She stressed that security issues influence who she hires and field coordinators have to be international so that they can be plucked out of the country if there is a problem. "With a local person we cannot - their families are still there. They can face retaliation from enemies of the court. We operate in ongoing conflicts," she said.
Perdomo insisted that the court cannot put people in risk, "This is something we are not going to do. This is not a game."
However, Chidi Anselm Odinkalu from the Open Society Institute said, "If the ICC cites security as an excuse for not taking outreach to where it is needed, we must spare more than a thought for the victims who live in these places that the personnel of the ICC are afraid to go to. What happens to them?"
The court is dedicated to broadcasting the opening and closing days of each trial in the DRC but sending the satellite signal to RTNC is expensive, and broadcasting the beginning and end of all the current trials adds up to 90,000 euros.
This takes quite a chunk out of the overall 650,000 euros, but Perdomo says sending live TV images is necessary.
BIG SCREEN
To make sure as many people as possible saw the first day of the Lubanga trial in January, the ICC set up a big screen in the town centre in Bunia, the capital of the Ituri region. But far more people than expected tried to cram in to the screening, and it eventually had to be suspended.
To make matters worse, RTNC cut the transmission just before the defence's opening remarks, causing uproar among Lubanga supporters. "If you don't control what's broadcast you can't control the message. It means the ICC is not in complete charge of the message they want to give to people of DRC," Smith said.
She also rejected arguments that a lack of money is the reason for poor outreach.
"A full robust outreach programme needs proper financial support. But in the interim there are less expensive ways to do it. All you need is someone on the ground with a mobile, an internet connection, and some documents, and you can do effective outreach. But you need enough people on the ground to do outreach in this way," Smith said.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
