Much ado hypes the proceedings at the International Criminal Court at the appearance of former Joseph Kony hatchet-man, Dominic Ongwen, marking the start of a presumed trial.
The delivery of yearned justice to victims of Kony’s immeasurable atrocities is trusted to rest on the display by the esteemed prosecutors and a constellation of erudite defense lawyers before an elegant panel of distinguished judges.
The episodes which epitomized Kony’s rebellion in northern Uganda are replete with horrendous memories.
The hand-hoe, for long the sacred implement by the poor peasants to win life for themselves out of their lands, was wielded by Kony’s cut-throats, not to open up the soils, but to dig into the leathery necks of the villages’ ageing men and women as they were beheaded, shortening their lives which they still needed for the upbringing of their young.
Children were yanked from their playing fields and marched off, part of the females to furnish the sex pleasures of the abductors while the bulk of the rest was herded into regiments for further fomenting of terror.
Never in the whole reign of our fore-bearers has bloodletting ever been driven by such purposelessness and on this massive scale. Complete senselessness typified the unrelenting ferocity of Kony’s brigandage in every corner of his reach.
Kony’s true hideous record extended, not only to beyond the boundary of Uganda’s borders, but also into the scope of social taboos and connections of our human society.
This expressed profane violation of sacred core values which founded every binding and bonding of us in communities of the human race. Our lives are premised on living with each other in cohesion and groupings called society or community. Societal pre-eminence and health are the basis of everything that individuals can propagate for themselves.
Every society is also governed by the experience of its past, the influence and culturing of its inheritance from its ancestors. In turn, the present life yields its viable fruits to sustain the generations to come. Our present world is thus a combination of what our ancestors left to us, our own efforts from the brows of our sweat and what we must plan to leave for the generations to come.
Kony’s ravages sought the destruction in toto of every past, present and future fabric of society. There were even more heinous things committed against peoples of society as a whole and the human culture.
Humans were stopped from espousing aspirations; no expression of affection, no community fellowship, family relations, humor, mourning the departure of loved ones, songs of the heart. The desecration surpassed all crimes against living people. A bird of flight deprived of the feathers of its wings ceases to be a virile one.
Correct cognition into the various depths of phenomena always requires understanding of their obtaining peculiarities. It explains why revealing the nature of action of chemistry of a substance does not mechanically presume what we notice purely in the relations of physics.
All life forms need food to survive. The required property usable as food is, however, not universal to all species. Worms of the human guts feast on materials that no humans can tolerate.
We recognize one from another by the features of our faces, but chimpanzees which are indistinguishable by their inscrutable faces know the individuality in their platoons from their behinds.
It follows that there ought to be no rigid and universal way of dealing with different categories of events. The disproportion in the ICC trials is the presupposition to perceive offences and infer judgment on a diverse spectrum of criminality only from the narrow paradigm of legal presentations.
It is thus bound to be an anti-climax in the image of blowing a crudely-crafted windpipe to countervail a gathering storm of the elements of nature. Kony’s climb to notoriety was not of his own making alone.
He rose from the obscurity of the village demagogue to a world-named demigod by the hands of powerful backers inside and outside the country. They egged and nurtured his forays by rendering valuable military training of his death machine; the supply of arms, finances and other logistics as well as the provision of political and diplomatic facelift.
Even when the feared scoundrels are largely operating outside our country, Kony’s apparition is gradually taking hold of some of the nerve-centers of our country’s life. We can detect people within ourselves, loudly professing outrage at Kony’s criminality yesteryears, who are now frolicking in Kony’s type of debauchery.
Many of our political actors conduct affairs along Kony’s posture for impunity, violence and priority to the self. Contracts are often awarded and promptly paid, not for the work executed, but for the disrepair caused to, say, roads. This is due to manifestation of Kony’s penchant for destruction of society.
Let Dominic Ongwen face his interlocutors at the ICC. His circumstances will not be worse than that of the suffering he commanded. But Ugandans should never celebrate the outcome of this showpiece as their ultimate rebuke to Kony and his confederates.
The genuine action against Kony is to bring his type to the wider tribunal of history. We must unfold the politics to reproach everything that is socially-crooked and perverse so as to rout Kony’s ways permanently from our lives.
That is the historic and befitting retribution to criminality.
The author is the publicity secretary of the NRM historical leaders’ forum.