 |
RIGHTS: Historic Court
Under the Spotlight in New Film
By
Joy Wiltermuth
NEW YORK (IPS) - The International Criminal
Court has struggled since its inception to realise
its core mandate to prosecute the world’s worst
human rights offenders, putting on trial propagators
of genocide, war crimes and the inductors of child
soldiers into civil conflict.
Yet, these crimes - evidenced by crushed humans
skulls, burnt-out villages and ravaged civilian
psyches - threaten to lay fallow in distant lands
and killing fields that tentatively grow quiet.
The world’s collective will to exact justice is the
worthy question posed by Pamela Yates’s latest film,
"The Reckoning: The Battle for the International
Criminal Court," which will headline this year’s
Human Rights Watch 20th annual international film
festival at Lincoln Centre.
Yates’s documentary diligently traces the ICC’s
creation, starting with the Nuremberg Trials, begun
in 1945, and the international community’s nascent
attempt to reestablish the rule of law and to punish
World War II-era atrocities.
Ratification of the Rome Statutes in 1998 laid the
legal basis for the court’s permanent foundation.
Yet, under its watch, the world has continued to
witness the horrors of warlords, heads of state and
paramilitaries run afoul of humanity.
Conflict since the ICC’s establishment in 2002 has
already killed nearly four million people in the
Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Colombia and
the Sudan’s Darfur region. "The Reckoning" stoically
confronts the question whether justice will ever be
served upon their perpetrators and if the
international community can muster the will to do
it.
The second question the film raises is who fears the
authority of the ICC in a time of relative impunity?
This duality of this assertion sits at the heart of
"The Reckoning", with its thinly veiled plea for the
United States to reassess its commitment to the
beleaguered international body.
To stress this point, John R. Bolton, the former
U.S. ambassador to the United Nations under George
W. Bush, is situated as the film’s foil. His stated
mission, to see the court "wither and collapse,"
elicited laughs among the audience at the film’s
pre-screening.
Perhaps with the new promise of President Barack
Obama’s leadership, the sight of Bolton stumping for
"American exceptionalism" can finally be met with
nervous relief. But the bigger question remains,
what moral authority can the U.S. lend to the human
rights arena, after its wholesale endorsement of
torture, extra-judicial renditions and the
indefinite detention of "enemy non-combatants," for
the sake of national security?
Yet, for the past seven years, the fledgling
international court has hashed out a distinct
presence without much assistance from the U.S. Thus,
the film turns to Luis Moreno-Ocampo, a lawyer from
Argentina, who is the chief engineer of the ICC’s
recent push to convict war criminals.
His is a charismatic force, and through the camera’s
concentrated gaze, seems the lifeblood of court’s
growing prominence. Moreno-Ocampo arrived at The
Hague primed for the pursuit of justice. His
confidence ripples a controlled cool, his esteem
earned through prior work as an assistant prosecutor
during the trials of Argentina’s military junta.
But as the ICC’s chief prosecutor, "The Reckoning"
follows Moreno-Ocampo for three years as he
swaggers, pleads and antagonises his way across
diplomatic channels and four continents. Under his
leadership, the court cajoles foreign governments to
hand over suspected war criminals and his team
tirelessly collects evidence of human rights abuses.
In Bogotá, Moreno-Ocampo bullies Colombia’s head
prosecutor to step up enforcement of President
Alvaro Uribe’s "Justice and Peace Law" - or to
otherwise step over. Six decades of war there pitted
the country’s paramilitary forces against civilians,
a cycle of drug war profiteering and violence in
which the ICC alleges that elected officials have
been complicit.
Urged by the ICC, Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, the alleged
leader of the Congo’s Lord’s Resistance Army, was
arrested in 2006 and handed over. Lubanga still
awaits trial in The Hague for war crimes based on
evidence that he conscripted child soldiers.
For some, the arrest of a single warlord has
produced divided results. Fear of ICC arrest is
credited with pressuring militias in the Congo and
Uganda to enter tenuous peace talks. Following
Lubanga’s capture, the LRA’s ranks splintered,
disbursing various rebel groups into the bush. One
soldier is quoted in the film saying, "Joseph Kony
is afraid of the ICC," referring to the Ugandan
group's still at large commander.
Meanwhile, armed militias continue to call for
amnesty. Villagers face intimidation at the hands of
gunmen and, while years have passed since the
killings, the international community has yet to
punish anyone.
Yet, moments captured on film can convey universal
truths. Footage of Moreno-Ocampo from 2007 shows him
prodding the U.N. Security Council to issue a
referral to the ICC, so that an arrest warrant can
be issued for Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir.
By then, well-documented accounts of rape, torture
and starvation of the civilian population in the
country’s Darfur region were known to international
community. Moreno-Ocampo addresses his speech to the
diplomatic ranks, calling upon them to drop their
veil of aversion. In his final remarks to the
world’s most powerful foreign states, he urges,
"Silence only helps the criminals."
"The Reckoning" opens the first night of the Human
Rights Watch festival, which runs from Jun. 11
through 25 at Lincoln Centre’s Walter Reade Theatre
in New York. |
|
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
