IJCentral: International Justice Central

The trial of Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, charged by the ICC with the war crime of recruiting child soldiers, has begun today - this is a historic moment, the first trial of the permanent and independent International Criminal Court (ICC).  One of the singular features of the ICC is the participation of victims under their own representation.  Today victims representative Carine Bapita, a Congolese attorney who appears in The Reckoning, gave an eloquent opening statement describing the generational damage that the recruitment of child soldiers does to a community - the children are drugged and sexually abused, alienated from their communities, their education stopped.  But they are taught to wield weapons, to kill, to loot and pillage and use force to get what they want, and as Ms. Bapita said, the prevalence of former child soldiers in eastern Congo has become a time bomb, a pool of young people who are psychologically damaged and predisposed to turn to crime for their survival, since they are having trouble reintegrating to communities who fear them.  The application of justice in the Lubanga case (and other accused warlords that are in ICC custody and will soon face trials) has to be followed by a plan of reparations and reintegration for the former child soldiers, to at least in some measure ameliorate the damage done by their recruitment and use as killers and sex slaves in the battlefields of the Congo resource wars.

The trial proceedings are streamed live from the ICC (usually starting at 10:00am local time in The Hague until 4:00pm local time, with a recess for lunch), and available at this link: http://livestream.xs4all.nl/icc1.asx