Bosco Ntaganda, a Rwandan national and general in the Congolese military* indicted for war crimes, a particularly bad actor who\u2019s stirred up violence in a part of the world that has plenty of bad actors and violence, walked into the U.S. Embassy in Kigali, Rwanda, today and asked to be delivered to the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s according to State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, who confirmed a Rwandan foreign ministry statement from earlier today. \u201cI can confirm that Bosco Ntaganda \u2026 walked into U.S. Embassy Kigali,\u201d she said, adding that the U.S. is \u201cworking to facilitate\u201d Ntaganda\u2019s request that he be \u201ctransferred\u201d to the ICC. (This is actually trickier than it sounds for some very interesting reasons; more on this later.)<\/p>\n
Ntaganda\u2019s rap sheet is very, very dark; when you think of the most horrific stories coming out of the Democratic Republic of Congo during its wars, you\u2019re probably thinking about Ntaganda. The ICC indicted him in 2006 for, according to a summary by Human Rights Watch, \u201callegedly committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in northeastern Congo in 2002 and 2003, including recruiting and using child soldiers, murder, rape and sexual slavery, and persecution.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since 2006, Ntaganda has been a major player in Central Africa, a powerful militia leader who allegedly had a hand in such enterprises as smuggling and the illicit \u201cconflict minerals\u201d trade. He\u2019s been accused of running his corner of eastern Congo as a mafia-style fiefdom. Most recently, he helped lead a Congolese rebel movement called M23 that, this fall, briefly seized the city of Goma.<\/p>\n
The big question: Why would someone so powerful voluntarily give himself up to the ICC, which is likely to sentence him to many years in jail? We don\u2019t know the answer right now. Maybe we\u2019ll find out later today, maybe not for months, maybe not forever. But here, if for no other reason than to help understand the dynamics at play, are some of the theories being tossed around by Central Africa watchers. To be clear, these are just theories, but worth considering. Bosco Ntaganda, a Rwandan national and general in the Congolese military* indicted for war crimes, a particularly bad actor who\u2019s stirred up violence in a part of the world that has plenty of bad actors and violence, walked into the U.S. Embassy in Kigali, Rwanda, today and asked to be delivered to the International Criminal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-important-news-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34567\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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