A former Ugandan rebel who was abducted as a child by the infamous Lord’s Resistance Army and later a commander of the militia, was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the International Criminal Court in The Hague on Thursday.
The accused, Dominic Ongwen, was a 9-year-old man on his way to his village school in the summer of 1988, when armed LRA fighters grabbed him and chased him to their camp, where they whipped and threatened him and began training him. to be a child soldier.
Now in his early forties, he faces life in prison on charges of rape, forced marriage, torture, slavery and multiple murders. His case has sparked debate among lawyers and international legal experts as the young Mr. Ongwen was a victim of the same crimes he would be accused of, including recruiting child soldiers under the age of 15.
But in their ruling, the judges did not cite his childhood experiences as a mitigating factor.
This is the first trial of a top commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a group that has been campaigning violently over Uganda and several neighboring countries since the late 1980s. The case has revealed details of how the fighters brutally and mutilated their alleged enemies. More than 4,000 people were represented by lawyers as victims of Mr. Ongwen’s crimes in the case.
When the presiding judge, Bertram Schmitt, announced the verdict, he read a long list of atrocities that he, according to Mr. Ongwen ordered it.
“He ordered the looting of food, kidnapping people, burning down the camp and the barracks,” Judge Schmitt said. “An old woman who could not carry her load was strangled and her throat cut off,” he added. “His men shot, beat and abducted civilians in the head and in the face to make sure they were dead.”
Some children were locked in a bag and beaten to death, the judge said.
“A witness saw corpses being hacked in a barbaric manner,” he added. He also said that the accused was described by his subordinates as an extremely capable commander whom they wanted to follow.
In the four-year trial, Ongwen’s lawyer argued that his client was suffering from mental disorders and confusion about his identity. He said his client was so cruel when military fighters turned him into a “fighting machine” that he never learned to distinguish right from wrong, and it made it harder for him to control his behavior.
However, the judge ruled that Ongwen “did not commit any crime under duress.”
Human Rights Watch estimates that the LRA has abducted at least 25,000 children in Uganda alone. Fighting between the rebels and government troops forced nearly two million people out of their homes in the country from 1987 to 2006.
The rebels, who were expelled from Uganda in 2006, also terrorized villagers by looting property and animals and burning houses in parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and the Central African Republic. According to a United Nations report, 450,000 people have fled their homes in those countries.
The prosecutor pointed out that Mr. Ongwen has never tried to escape his captors, unlike so many other boys and men. Instead, prosecutors said, he followed the instructions and enjoyed his role and climbed the ranks to become one of the rebels’ commander-in-chief. In addition, he refused to be investigated by the mental health experts.
He was convicted of personal attacks in which his brigade looted property and animals, set houses on fire with people in them, killed babies and abducted adults and children to use as forced labor. Boys were trained as porters and warriors, and girls were exploited as sex slaves and domestic workers.
The verdict reads a trial in which numerous witnesses – including former child soldiers and their victims – present their versions of Mr. Ongwen’s role in the rebel army’s campaigns against thousands of villagers gives what the civilians saw as supporters and enemies of the government.
“This trial is a milestone for the victims of so much brutality,” said Elise Keppler of Human Rights Watch, who has long studied the rebel group. Justice is so hard to achieve. This is the first opportunity for people to see these infamous crimes recorded and judged in court. ”
The bloody riot of the LRA and its elusive leader, Joseph Kony, has become infamous. In the region, many people admired and feared Kony, claiming to have mystical powers.
Ongwen’s fighting career lasted more than 25 years, but his trial focused on attacks on refugee camps in northern Uganda from 2002 to 2005, as prosecutors had the strongest evidence of the events.
The trial did not cover the group’s many subsequent attacks or disasters by four other countries in East and Central Africa.
The proceedings of Thursday, which were streamed from the court, were eagerly awaited at viewing sites in northern Uganda, where many communities were affected by the fighting. Some groups followed the trial regularly via special radio broadcasts.
They heard prosecutors playing recordings of radio interceptions and satellite calls by the rebels, and heard information from military logbooks and intelligence reports from the Ugandan government. Both the prosecution and the defense brought forward numerous witnesses who spoke of their experiences as former fighters or as rebels’ forced wives who gave birth to children against their will.
The presiding judge said that Mr. Ongwen was guilty of forced pregnancy, adding that it was both a war crime and a crime against humanity. He said this was the first time this crime had been considered in international court.
During the reading of the verdict, the judge elaborated on the many crimes of the rebels against women and especially by Mr. Ongwen, who personally distributed women among the fighters of his unit.
According to the judge, seven women testified that as a woman to Mr. Ongwen was appointed. The women said they were threatened with death if they tried to escape, and that they were beaten with sticks.
In the past, critics have accused the ICC of prejudice by pursuing more cases in Africa than elsewhere. But the prosecution of LRA commanders was explicitly requested by Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, whose government wanted to overthrow the rebels.
The court issued warrants for five LRA leaders, including Mr. Ongwen, issued. Three have since died, and Mr. Kony is the only one still free. The United States has offered up to $ 5 million in reward for information leading to the arrest of Mr. Kony.
Invisible Children, an activist group that promotes the activities of Mr. Kony follows, saying he remains a threat to civilians in Central and East Africa, even as his power has waned and his group has split. He was last seen in a remote region of South Sudan in 2020.
The arrival of mr. Ongwen in 2015 was an unexpected windfall for the court. He was long part of mr. Kony’s inner circle, however, apparently fell out of favor.
Mr. Ongwen was by mr. Kony was imprisoned in the Central African Republic when he escaped and surrendered to US special forces who were working with African Union troops in the area to kill Mr. Kony. Kony and his men, according to Stephen J. Rapp, a former U.S. ambassador to war crimes. These forces have Mr. Ongwen then handed over to officials from The Hague.
“He would not have been at the ICC without the help of the US government,” he said. Rapp said.