'More Than Anything We Want Our Children Back. They Have Suffered So Much'

From the outside, it's an open and shut case. For 20 years, the Lord's Resistance Army murdered and mutilated. The messianic rebels abducted tens of thousands of children, turning young girls into sex slaves and boys into killers. The group inflicted horrific punishments on those who crossed it, selecting ordinary men and women for mutilation by slicing their faces to pieces or hacking off arms as a warning to all.

That is why when the fledgling international criminal court was casting around for a target for prosecution it had no trouble building a case against the LRA's leader, Joseph Kony.

In October 2005, Mr Kony and four of his commanders became the first people indicted by the ICC. Mr Kony faces 33 charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder, enslavement, rape and forcibly enlisting child soldiers.

Few question his guilt. But in Gulu, a town in northern Uganda at the heart of the atrocities and suffering, the case for prosecution is not seen nearly so clearly.

Many in the town fear that international opposition to the Ugandan government's offer of amnesty to Mr Kony if he signs a peace deal, and the ICC's insistence that it will not drop its arrest warrant, could perpetuate a war that has claimed 50,000 lives and driven close to a million people from their homes.

Beatrice Odoch is forced to mumble her views about justice for the terrible mutilations inflicted on her head because much of her mouth is missing.

The 58-year-old subsistence farmer lists her priorities. Get the abducted children back. End the war. Allow people to return to their homes. Only then does she mention justice - and that, she concludes, might be best left to God.

"More than anything we want our children back. They have suffered so much," she said. "This war has been so terrible that we do not want it to go on for another day. We can forgive those men for their crimes against us if it ends the war. They will face judgment another day."

Hostility to the ICC in Gulu is so widespread that Norbert Mao, the chief elected representative for about 300,000 people in the district around the town and a member of the opposition Democratic party, has warned the court's investigators that their lives are at risk.

"What would be the point in taking these LRA leaders to a prison in Sweden? Would that be a definition of justice for us?" he asked. "I think this is the ICC grandstanding as it's its first case. It is a demonstration of the ICC as a viable project. But we have to do what is possible to bring an end to this war."

Mr Mao accuses foreign governments of hypocrisy, saying they ignored the conflict for years and only now want to see justice to build the credibility of the international court. He said that the ICC should accept Uganda's proposal for local Acholi justice with its emphasis on apology and forgiveness.

"We don't want a situation like Argentina where the generals dictated the terms of their amnesty. We want to show there is not impunity for these people. We have in our culture some traditions we can dust off and mobilise but it's true they were never designed to deal with this massive slaughter."

Father Carlos Rodriguez, a Roman Catholic priest who has worked closely with the victims of the conflict, said that people lost faith in the ICC when they discovered it had no powers of arrest. "When it became public that the ICC would take up the case of northern Uganda, a lot of people said, we are tired of this killing and let the ICC come and arrest Kony. Then they were told the ICC doesn't have a police force or an army so then they said what's the point?"

He added: "There is also a moral dilemma about the rebels. People say they hate the rebels but then they say our sons are rebels because they were abducted. The real view is anything that stops the war. It's been going on for 20 years. People have gone through social torture. They want an end to this nightmare."

Embarrassed

Some Ugandans credit the international court with playing a role in pushing Mr Kony and the LRA to negotiate. They believe the indictments embarrassed the Sudanese government into reducing its links with the LRA, ending weapons supplies and other aid.

Mr Mao said the Ugandan government was interested in seeing the ICC warrants against the LRA quashed not just in order to buy peace. He said President Yoweri Museveni and the army were desperate to avoid a widening of the court's investigation to include crimes by government forces.

"When the ICC first came they said they would investigate both sides. In the eyes of many people the ICC is serving the interests of the Ugandan government, not justice," he said.

While the LRA's crimes have been widely exposed, the actions of the Ugandan army have not been subjected to the same scrutiny. It has been involved in wholesale forced removals, often brutally carried out, of hundreds of thousands of people from their homes to deny the rebels support. People in the area also accuse government soldiers of rape and killings.