What is Genocide?
"The crime of genocide is defined in international law in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide."
Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
� Killing members of the group;
� Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
� Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
� Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
� Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Article III: The following acts shall be punishable:
� Genocide;
� Conspiracy to commit genocide;
� Direct and public incitement to commit genocide;
� Attempt to commit genocide;
� Complicity in genocide.
The Genocide Convention was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 9 December 1948. The Convention entered into force on 12 January 1951. More than 130 nations have ratified the Genocide Convention and over 70 nations have made provisions for the punishment of genocide in domestic criminal law. The text of Article II of the Genocide Convention was included as a crime in Article 6 of the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
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Is the "crisis" in northern Uganda a deliberate, systematic program of genocide?
IDP camps held up to 2 million people, even though:
- there was an excess death rate of 1000 residents per week (the excess death rate is the number over the normally-expected rate)
- WHO (World Health Organization) in 2004 called for dismantling camps, citing congested, unsanitary conditions
- malaria, HIV/AIDS, violence, dysentery were leading death causes in 2004 starvation, malnutrition, tuberculosis, suicide are also current factors
Insufficient food and water
- distribution of World Food Program donated supplies is controlled by government (President Museveni's daughter heads internal agency charged with responsibility for distribution ),
- camp residents are forced to line up for period of days to receive meager quantities of water, ungrounded grain
- by government order, people are not allowed outside the camps to search for water, vegetation, other food even though the quantity and quality supplied to them is seriously inadequate. Residents have been warned they will be shot if they venture outside the camps.
Military Protection of the civilian population by the military has been weak. In many cases, the military is directly responsible for the rapes, killings, and other violence against those living in the camps. Human Rights Watch report " Uprooted and Forgotten - Impunity and Human Rights Abuses in Northern Uganda", Sept 20,2005 cites examples.
LRA has been characterized as defeated, weak, outnumbered, on-the-run, and incapable of winning in speeches made by President Museveni to press within and outside Uganda.
The government of Uganda has the ability to end the suffering in northern Uganda. Medicine Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders), Oxfam, WHO, HRW, other humanitarian agencies working in the area are increasingly speaking out. Voices of those of us living in safety outside Uganda are still needed.