July 29, 2004 - Ugandan Atrocities - a podcast by Stephen Hammond

International criminal court investigates Ugandan atrocities. The Republic of Uganda in east Africa has been affected by the violence of military dictatorships of one kind or another since its independence from Britain in 1962. The most infamous of all is Idi Amin Dada who came to power during a military coup in 1971. His reign of terror involved wide-spread murder, horrible abuses of human rights and the expulsion of tens of thousands of Asian residents. During a period of three months, Canada took in more than 4,400 who held British passports. After Amin fled in 1979, leading to further coups and leadership changes, President Yoweri Museveni came to power in Uganda in 1986. Although Museveni introduced democratic reforms and improved the country's human rights record, he has been unable to stop the war in northern Uganda, run by the Lord’s Resistance Army rebels. The LRA’s leader, Joseph Kony, believes himself to be semi-divine. During LRA’s reign of terror, soldiers have slaughtered tens of thousands of people and displaced more than 1.6 million to refugee camps. Kony has also abducted more than 30,000 children, forcing the boys to fight and the girls to serve as sex slaves. Anyone the LRA suspects of disloyalty has their lips and noses sliced off. Under mounting pressure to end the violence, Museveni asked the International Criminal Court to intervene – the first ICC member to make such a request since the organization’s inception in 2002. On July 29, 2004, the ICC launched an investigation into the slaughter of more than 200 people that year. Unfortunately, many fear that in the short term, the action will spark more LRA brutality against northern Ugandan peasants.

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