The Solomon Islands Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) started public hearings into ethnic conflict that took place between 1998 and 2003. 100 people were killed and more than 20,000 had to flee their homes after violence broke out between rival ethnic groups from the islands of Guadalcanal and Malaita.

By Thijs Bouwknegt

Lord’s Resistance Army rebels killed over 10 people and kidnapped about 50 others in a village in the eastern Central African Republic (CAR) last weekend. The fatal attack took place in Agoumar, and there were smaller attacks in two nearby villages.

By Thijs Bouwknegt

Under the leadership of Joseph Kony, the self-proclaimed Christian guerrilla army launched an insurgency against Uganda’s government in 1986. Fighting continued in Northern Uganda for nearly two decades until the rebels were pushed into neighbouring countries in 2005.

South Korea’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), founded in 2005 as an independent agency with a broad mandate to cover a century of abuse, faces dissolution by the country’s conservative government. The TRC is likely to last another few months wrapping up investigations and then fade away, a relic of the decade of liberal leadership that began with the inauguration of President Kim Dae-jung in February 1998.

Former Ugandan Minister for Pacification Betty Bigome is one of the main negotiators between the government of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels in the north of the country. She first met LRA leader Joseph Kony in 1994 and then again a decade later. She told the IJT about her encounters with one of Africa’s most brutal warlords.