Abducted on his way to school by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), Dominic Ongwen, now 45, spent nearly thirty years in this bloodthirsty Ugandan militia, terrorizing large areas of ‘Central Africa with kidnappings of children, large-scale mutilation of civilians and enslavement of women. On the dock for five years, the International Criminal Court found him guilty this Thursday, February 4 of war crimes and crimes against humanity, found guilty of 61 charges, including that of forced pregnancy which does not had so far never been uttered by The Hague. As for the founder of the LRA, Joseph Kony, he remains nowhere to be found, but several other commanders perished or surrendered after being chased for years by African troops and US special forces.
From victim to executioner
According to the court, the frail-looking Dominic Ongwen ordered attacks on refugee camps in the early 2000s when he was one of the commanders of the LRA, then led by fugitive Joseph Kony who waged a brutal war in Uganda and three other countries in order to establish a state based on the ten commandments of the Bible. “His guilt has been established beyond a reasonable doubt”, declared the president of the court, Bertram Schmitt, pronouncing the verdict against Dominic Ongwen, nicknamed the “white ant”, tried in particular for murder, rape , sexual slavery and conscription of child soldiers. As the commander of the Sinia Brigade, Dominic Ongwen is also responsible for kidnapping girls to be servants and sex slaves, as well as boys who were to serve as soldiers, the judges said. Between 2002 and 2005, seven women were forced to be Dominic Ongwen’s “wives”, two of them giving birth to children, leading to a landmark ICC conviction for forced pregnancy.
Dominic Ongwen denied all the charges “in the name of God” and his lawyers had pleaded acquittal, pointing out that he himself had been the victim of the brutality of the rebel group who had kidnapped him at the age of ‘about nine years. “The chamber is aware that he has suffered a great deal,” Judge Schmitt said. “However, this case concerns crimes committed by Dominic Ongwen as a responsible adult and commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army. “The chamber did not find any evidence to support the defense’s claim that he suffered from a mental illness or that he committed these crimes under duress,” Bertram Schmitt said.
30 years of terror in Central Africa
The LRA was created in the second part of the 1980s to counter the takeover of power in Uganda by another rebel, Yoweri Museveni, in 1986. In the right line of armed movements led by spiritual leaders of the Acholi tribe of northern country, his men attack then shirtless, the body coated with an oily lotion, and singing hymns. Mixing religious mysticism, proven guerrilla techniques and bloodthirsty brutality, Joseph Kony wanted to free Uganda from Museveni to establish a regime based on the Ten Commandments. He subsequently added an eleventh commandment forbidding riding a bicycle, on pain of amputation. When the Acholi refuse to join his rebellion, Joseph Kony turns against them, attacking civilians, kidnapping women and children, and slaughtering entire villages. The kidnapping has also become one of the hallmarks of the LRA, which has transformed, after having kidnapped them, tens of thousands of boys into docile soldiers, like Dominic Ongwen, and young girls into sex slaves.
The LRA and the ICC
In 2005, the ICC issued arrest warrants against five LRA leaders, including Joseph Kony and Dominic Ongwen, charging them with war crimes and crimes against humanity. International pressure from the ICC contributed to Joseph Kony’s participation in peace talks the following year, which failed, however. The 2005 arrest warrants were the first issued by the ICC, which took office in 2003 in The Hague, and which was investigating in Uganda at the request of Kampala. According to the UN, the LRA has killed more than 100,000 people in 25 years, abducted between 60,000 and 100,000 children and displaced 2.5 million people.
The LRA in the sights of the United States
Following a campaign led by activists in the United States, US President Barack Obama in 2010 authorized the deployment of some 100 US special forces members to work with regional armies to track Joseph Kony. One of the activist groups, Invisible Children, published a video in 2012 denouncing the activities of the LRA and their leader. Viewed over 100 million times on the internet in a matter of days, the video has gone viral, but has also come under heavy criticism for its simplistic version of conflicts in the region. In 2017, the US military announced it was ending operations against the LRA, believing that the rebellion no longer posed a threat. That same year, Uganda in turn abandoned the hunt for the remaining LRA fighters for the same reasons. The LRA is no longer thriving and just seems to be surviving. There are only a few hundred LRA rebels scattered throughout the Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, South Sudan and Sudan. The United States and the African Union have placed the LRA and Joseph Kony on the list of “global terrorists”, although the threat is now local and limited. According to the organization Crisis Tracker, the LRA was responsible for one murder and 169 kidnappings in 2020 during attacks on remote villages near the Congolese, Central African and South Sudanese borders. The exact whereabouts of Joseph Kony remain unknown.
“Finally, justice has been served”
In Lukodi (Uganda), scene of one of the massacres, survivors, such as Mohammed Olanya who saw “15 members of (his) family killed in the attack”, victims and former rebel combatants followed. audience on a radio station provided by a local leader, before exploding their joy at the announcement of the verdict. ” Good ! Shouted Angelina Okiror, a 38-year-old resident of Lukodi. “Finally, justice has been served,” said Ann Maria Angwech, 43 years old. “Because Ongwen killed, he deserves death, because with his hand he took innocent lives and left the survivors in misery,” she said. Human Rights Watch hailed a “historic” verdict. Dominic Ongwen surrendered in early 2015 to US special forces tracking Joseph Kony in the Central African Republic, before being transferred to the ICC. The court is due to pronounce his sentence at a later date. He incurs life imprisonment.
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