Uganda's Civil war and the Politics of ICC Intervention‪.‬

INTRODUCTION With its 2003 "Referral of the Situation Concerning the Lord's Resistance Army to the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Ugandan government launched a legal process that, it claimed, would bring peace and justice to war-torn northern Uganda. The ICC prosecutor officially opened an investigation in response to the referral in July 2004, and in October 2005 the ICC unsealed arrest warrants, its historic first warrants in its historic first case, charging five of the top commanders of the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (ERA) with war crimes and crimes against humanity. (1) For two decades, Uganda north of the Nile has been ravaged by a brutal civil war between the LRA and the Ugandan government, so any possibility of productive change is to be warmly welcomed. The sanguine predictions proffered by the Ugandan government and by the ICC's supporters, however, are called into question by doubts about the court's ability to achieve peace or justice in Uganda, doubts stemming from the specific way the ICC has pursued the Ugandan case, and because of more inherent problems with the ICC as a legal institution.