The ICC’s long hard slog

From the Economist comes a report on Bosco Ntganda, a top militia commander indicted by the International Criminal Court (and no relation—I swear):

Even with an ICC indictment hanging over his head, the general freely walks around Goma. During the day he plays tennis on clay courts in the shadow of Goma’s restless volcano, Nyiragongo. At night he dines in lakeside restaurants frequented by UN and aid workers and the local elite. Outside the town, his soldiers continue to plunder and rape. On New Year’s Day Lieutenant Colonel Kibibi Mutwara, who fought with General Ntaganda’s rebels, allegedly ordered his men to attack the village of Fizi in South Kivu province in retaliation for the murder of a soldier. At least 62 women, men, and children were raped, according to hospital officials.

A report like this–and you could find similar ones about Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir and Lord’s Resistance Army commander Joseph Kony–is enough to unsettle even convinced ICC advocates.

There are some good reasons not to despair. I recall similar stories of indicted war criminals breezing through NATO checkpoints in Bosnia and living the high life in towns they had ethnically cleansed. Generating the will for action took time. But that will eventually came, and the tribunal for the former Yugoslavia now has dealt with almost all of the individuals it indicted (Ratko Mladic is the major exception).

As was pointed out by several speakers on a very good panel yesterday, the ICC is a young institution that is still building its relations with states and generating the expectation of cooperation. Just as it wouldn’t have been fair to cast judgement on the United Nations or the International Monetary Fund in the early 1950s, it’s not fair to judge the ICC a few years after it began operating. 

That’s the optimistic scenario. There is a darker one. Eventual enforcement of arrest warrants was possible in Bosnia because for several years NATO had in place an overwhelming force that none of the Bosnian factions was willing to challenge. It was only when NATO realized that it could snatch war criminals without inciting an insurgency that it began to do so regularly. The fact that the Balkans lie on the edge of the European Union and are susceptible to its considerable economic and political pull also helped immensely. There is no real equivalent to the NATO stick or the EU carrot  in Congo, Uganda, Sudan, or Kenya. That means that converting political will—even when it exists—into arrests is a much longer and harder process.

It’s comforting to take the long view and to insist that the court will eventually expand its  influence just as other international institutions have. But international organizations have had all sorts of trajectories, not all of them toward greater relevance. A slow slide toward marginalization is at least as possible as a gradual accretion of influence. The creation of the ICC was a triumphant moment for human rights. But the court is now in a long hard slog for its credibility.