THE HAGUE: The International Criminal Court Friday ordered 297 victims of ex-Congolese warlord Germain Katanga to each receive “a symbolic” $250 in damages for a brutal 2003 attack on their village, in the tribunal’s first such award.
Awarding both individual and collective damages, the court also found that Katanga was liable for $1-million of the total material, psychological and physical damage caused, estimated by the court to stand at $3.7-million.
Katanga was sentenced by the ICC to 12 years in jail in 2014, after being convicted on five charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for the February 2003 ethnic attack on Bogoro village in troubled Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of Congo. He was accused of supplying weapons to his militia in the attack in which some 200 people were shot and hacked to death with machetes.
“The chamber has assessed the scope of the prejudice to 297 victims as $3,752,620. The chamber sets the amount to be contributed by Mr Katanga towards the reparations as $1-million,” said presiding judge Marc Perrin de Brichambaut.
He recognised however that Katanga, who watched Friday’s proceedings from jail in Kinshasa where he is on trial on other charges, was penniless or “indigent” and had no home or possessions.
The “symbolic amount of $250 to each victim of Mr Katanga ... does not make up for the totality of the crime,” Perrin de Brichambaut acknowledged.
