The Prophet Motive

What drives Joseph Kony to kidnap children and enslave them, to slaughter innocent people, and to spread fear across some of the most impoverished states in Africa? Peter Eichstaedt takes a crack at that question in a brief article--"Kony 20Never"--on the Foreign Affairs website.

Eichstaedt, who never found Kony in spite of pursuing him for years (like Ugandan and American military forces), did speak to some of Kony's former lieutenants. What emerges from those conversations is a portrait of a man who is convinced that he speaks for God and is offended when his own people, the Acholi, reject him (perhaps because his soldiers have burned their villages and stolen their children). Eichstaedt also says that Kony is a survivor (and survivalist) who fears being tried by the International Criminal Court (which indicted him in 2005) because he believes it would lead to his execution--in spite of the fact that the ICC is not empowered to impose the death penalty.

Those looking for a rational actor may need to check in on some other rebel leader.

Taylor's Sentence

The Special Court for Sierra Leone has imposed a sentence of fifty years in prison for former Liberian president Charles Taylor.  Judge Richard Lussick, who delivered the sentence, said the crimes Taylor had committed were of the "utmost gravity in terms of scale and brutality."

For more on the sentence--and the trial as a whole--see the Open Society Justice Initiative's special website here.

Lubanga Convicted

Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, the leader of a Congolese rebel group who stood accused in the International Criminal Court of recruiting and deploying child soldiers, has been found guilty.  Lubanga was the first suspect taken into custody by the ICC, in 2006, and now becomes the first to have a verdict rendered.  This is also the first time an individual has been tried before an international court for war crimes involving the use of child soldiers.

This brief film produced by the Open Society Justice Initiative and WITNESS offers an overview of the case against Lubanga and the trial prior to the rendering of the verdict, which occurred today at The Hague.

For more on the issue of child soldiers, see Amnesty International USA, Human Rights Watch, the Child Soldiers Initiative, or Child Soldiers International.