from The Bridge to the Hague
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 May 2022
The violence in Ituri also became the particular focus for international NGOs, which arrived on the scene largely after the main events had occurred. In an environment filled with intrigue and motivational obscurity, international groups sought to document serious atrocities, providing a direct source for master narratives taken up by the ICC Prosecutor. NGO reports showed their own evolution over time. At first, in covering violence across the whole eastern Congo, they laid the causes of disorder at the feet of national and regional players, with local groups merely caught in the crossfire. But the narrative changed in July 2003 when Human Rights Watch shifted to a criminological idiom. Using language from the Rome Statute, humanitarian agencies characterized the events in Ituri as crimes for which local actors should be held responsible under traditional legal paradigms. The moral battle against impunity for such crimes became a rallying cry that surrounded Hague legal proceedings with a sense of higher mission. The skeptical attack on victors’ justice was replaced with a new commitment to justice for victims, for which the ICC was the proper venue.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.