Reconciliation
During the class there were a lot of points made that were made that caught my attention and i felt i would like to talk about.
First on the case of reconciliation in Uganda after the lecture i was quiet skeptical and reconciliation efforts would be effective there giving the fact that they still have a leader like President Museveni who to me i feel his quite brutal and his not someone who will be willing to see it work. Because he has held on to power for very long time by dividing the society and ruling them and such leaders anything aimed at peace scares them of so much. And one important aspect for reconciliation working is willingness and efforts on the side on the authority
Secondly, also from the lecture the point of religion was discussed. And i think its quite effective giving the facts that most of those societies very religious and when this reconciliation is tied to religion it will be quite more effective, as in such societies people have more respect for those religious gods than government who has failed them. We get to see that people in those societies view this as a spiritual thing ritual that must be performed before they are cleansed of their wrong doings, so people are more willing to participate in this reconciliation process.
Lastly i also learnt that the reconciliation process depended or varies from societies to societies. So there shouldn’t be a universal style of doing this. E.g. as we could see in Somali Land were local clans negotiated peace agreements between societies which was far from the formal was of settling peace but it worked and brought peace for nearly decade. We could also see in Rwanda were there national identity cards no longer had ethnicities on it, it just started you were Rwandan and we could see it worked.
So my own recommendations would be that societies who engage in this reconciliations practice should have long term plan such as: sustainability plan, such as rehabilitation, education and certain contents that promote national identity should be incorporated into the educational system from primary to high education were citizens are taught.
AU AND ICC and President Al-Bashir
A question was asked if the Al-Bashir case tainted the image of the ICC on the African continent: Personally I feel the case damaged the reputation of ICC on the continent where it brought about African leaders questioning the integrity of the ICC and believing that they were ignorant about the situation in Sudan. Because Sudan is a very volatile country, just like a time bomb waiting to go off at any moment.
We could see the call for mass withdrawal from the ICC by African states, were the had this feeling of been witch hunted by the ICC, and also we could see the case were the ICC indicted virtually the whole Kenyan government and all this issues were accumulating and bringing into the minds of African leaders which of them is going to be next? So this brought a lot of distrust for the ICC on the side of African states.
We could see that most African countries no longer honor Rome Statue even thou they are still part of it. So from this we could see that the ICC was quite too ambitious and ignorant about the case of Sudan before issuing the arrest warrant.
Second question that was asked was if the African states not aware or ignorant when signing to Rome Statute? Personally I wouldn’t agree to that. At the time most of these African nations were signing this agreement, most governments were still naïve in the aspect of governance as most of them just got independence and also after gaining independence they wanted to be among communities of states that were democratic. And lastly to some extent I felt some of them could have signed up to this statute as a condition before gaining so sort of international support us aid, developmental programs etc.
And lastly as stated in the class, we could see part of their anger was the case of Security Council in which 3 of it’s member who are not parties to the ICC were deciding on matters regarding the ICC.
During the class there were a lot of points made that were made that caught my attention and i felt i would like to talk about.
First on the case of reconciliation in Uganda after the lecture i was quiet skeptical and reconciliation efforts would be effective there giving the fact that they still have a leader like President Museveni who to me i feel his quite brutal and his not someone who will be willing to see it work. Because he has held on to power for very long time by dividing the society and ruling them and such leaders anything aimed at peace scares them of so much. And one important aspect for reconciliation working is willingness and efforts on the side on the authority
Secondly, also from the lecture the point of religion was discussed. And i think its quite effective giving the facts that most of those societies very religious and when this reconciliation is tied to religion it will be quite more effective, as in such societies people have more respect for those religious gods than government who has failed them. We get to see that people in those societies view this as a spiritual thing ritual that must be performed before they are cleansed of their wrong doings, so people are more willing to participate in this reconciliation process.
Lastly i also learnt that the reconciliation process depended or varies from societies to societies. So there shouldn’t be a universal style of doing this. E.g. as we could see in Somali Land were local clans negotiated peace agreements between societies which was far from the formal was of settling peace but it worked and brought peace for nearly decade. We could also see in Rwanda were there national identity cards no longer had ethnicities on it, it just started you were Rwandan and we could see it worked.
So my own recommendations would be that societies who engage in this reconciliations practice should have long term plan such as: sustainability plan, such as rehabilitation, education and certain contents that promote national identity should be incorporated into the educational system from primary to high education were citizens are taught.
AU AND ICC and President Al-Bashir
A question was asked if the Al-Bashir case tainted the image of the ICC on the African continent: Personally I feel the case damaged the reputation of ICC on the continent where it brought about African leaders questioning the integrity of the ICC and believing that they were ignorant about the situation in Sudan. Because Sudan is a very volatile country, just like a time bomb waiting to go off at any moment.
We could see the call for mass withdrawal from the ICC by African states, were the had this feeling of been witch hunted by the ICC, and also we could see the case were the ICC indicted virtually the whole Kenyan government and all this issues were accumulating and bringing into the minds of African leaders which of them is going to be next? So this brought a lot of distrust for the ICC on the side of African states.
We could see that most African countries no longer honor Rome Statue even thou they are still part of it. So from this we could see that the ICC was quite too ambitious and ignorant about the case of Sudan before issuing the arrest warrant.
Second question that was asked was if the African states not aware or ignorant when signing to Rome Statute? Personally I wouldn’t agree to that. At the time most of these African nations were signing this agreement, most governments were still naïve in the aspect of governance as most of them just got independence and also after gaining independence they wanted to be among communities of states that were democratic. And lastly to some extent I felt some of them could have signed up to this statute as a condition before gaining so sort of international support us aid, developmental programs etc.
And lastly as stated in the class, we could see part of their anger was the case of Security Council in which 3 of it’s member who are not parties to the ICC were deciding on matters regarding the ICC.
No comments:
Post a Comment