Daily Monitor
Wednesday February 17 2021
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On 4 February, the International Criminal Court (ICC) convicted Dominic Ongwen of 61 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, rape, torture, sexual slavery and abusing child soldiers. He was a former warlord under the Joseph Kony-led Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).
The objective of this article is to put this tragic episode in a historical context so that we learn from it.
Historical context
The story goes back to Africa’s colonisation at the Berlin Conference in 1884-85. The European imperial powers sat around a table in Berlin with a map of Africa, and chopped up Africa into bits and pieces regardless of people’s ethnic and cultural identities. We all know this.