THE HAGUE, Netherlands
The International Court of Justice on Wednesday ordered Uganda to pay $325 million in compensation to Congo for violence in a long-running conflict between the African neighbors that began in the late 1990s.
The compensation order came more than 15 years
after the U.N. court ruled in a complex, 119-page judgment that fighting by
Ugandan troops in Congo breached international law.
“The court notes that the reparation awarded to the
DRC for damage to persons and to property reflects the harm suffered by
individuals and communities as a result of Uganda’s breach of its international
obligations,” the court’s president, U.S. judge Joan E. Donoghue, said.
The sum awarded was well below the request for more
than $11 billion in damages Congo had submitted to the court.
The court broke down the compensation into
different categories of damages. It assessed $225 million for “loss of life and
other damage to persons” that included rape, conscription of child soldiers and
the displacement of up to 500,000 people.
It assessed another $40 million for damage to
property and $60 million for damage to natural resources, including the
plundering of gold, diamonds, timber and other goods by Ugandan forces or
rebels they supported.
The court ordered Uganda to pay the compensation in
annual amounts of $65 million.
Henry Oryem Okello, Uganda’s minister of state for
international affairs, was not immediately available for comment.
The case stemmed from years of bloody conflict in
Congo’s mineral-rich east. A dispute over land escalated and turned the Ituri
region into the epicenter of a regional war in which Congo’s neighbors backed
different militias in their battles for influence.
The hostilities also spread west, including to the city of Kisangani, where Donoghue said the fighting was between Ugandan and Rwandan forces.
Donoghue said the International Court of Justice’s
December 2005 judgment established that “Uganda had committed acts of killing
among the civilian population, had failed to distinguish between civilian and
military targets, had not protected the civilian population in fighting with
other combatants, and as an occupying power, had failed to take measures to
respect and ensure respect for human rights and international humanitarian law
in entry.”
The 2005 judgment also found that Congolese armed
forces violated a treaty on diplomatic relations by attacking the Ugandan
Embassy in Kinshasa and abusing Ugandan diplomats at the embassy and at an
international airport. Uganda withdrew a compensation claim against Congo
linked to those findings.
Congo originally filed the case in 1999 against
Uganda, Burundi and Rwanda, calling the African nations’ involvement in
conflict in Congo a “flagrant breach” of the United Nations charter.
Congo dropped the case against Burundi in 2001, and
the world court ruled in 2002 that it did not have jurisdiction in the case
against Rwanda.
Under Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi, who was
elected in 2019, relations between Uganda and Congo have been warm. The
neighboring countries now are security allies, with their armies jointly
pursuing rebels in a vast part of eastern Congo.
The current military campaign began in November when Uganda’s army launched air and artillery strikes against the Allied Democratic Forces rebel group.
With Tshisekedi’s authorization, Ugandan troops
then entered Congo to hunt down the rebels, who are blamed for multiple deadly
attacks on civilians inside Congo as well as a series of bomb attacks in
Uganda.
Survivors of fighting in Kisangani expressed dismay
at the Congolese government’s decision to allow Ugandan forces over the border
to hunt rebels in the Beni region and Ituri.
“We ask our brothers in Beni to be vigilant with
this Ugandan army because they came here to Kisangani to help us but they
turned on us and we lost several of our brothers,” said one survivor, Freddy
Makoba.
Uganda’s rapprochement with Congo also includes
efforts by Uganda’s government to surface more than 200 kilometers of road in
eastern Congo. Ugandan authorities believe the investment would open new
markets and boost cross-border trade.
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