A stale commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army rebels was sentenced by a court in Uganda on Friday to 40 years in prison for brutal crimes dedicated by the group during its insurgency that started in the Eighties.
The jail sentence of Thomas Kwoyelo — a baby soldier became rebel commander — applies to the most critical crimes he faced, including extra than one counts of murder, rape, pillaging, and enslavement.
In August, Kwoyelo was convicted on 44 of the 78 counts he faced for crimes dedicated during the insurgency between 1992 and 2005.
The sentence was delivered by a panel of the Excessive Court that sat in Gulu, the northern metropolis where the LRA once was active.
He can appeal the sentence.
Kwoyelo, whose trial began in 2019, had been in detention since 2009 as Ugandan authorities tried to determine out how to dispense justice in a way that was fair and credible. Human Rights Watch described his trial as “a rare alternative for justice for victims of the 2-decade war between” Ugandan troops and the LRA.
Prosecutors said Kwoyelo held the military rank of colonel within the LRA and that he ordered violent attacks on civilians, many of them displaced by the rebellion.
The LRA’s overall leader, Joseph Kony, is believed to be hiding in a vast area of ungoverned bush in central Africa. The U.S. has offered $5 million as a reward for information leading to the capture of Kony, who is also wanted by the International Criminal Court.
One of Kony’s lieutenants, Dominic Ongwen, was sentenced in 2021 by the ICC to 25 years of imprisonment for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Thousands of various rebel combatants have acquired Ugandan govt amnesty over the years, but Kwoyelo, who was captured in neighbouring Congo, was denied such reprieve. Ugandan officials have by no means explained why.
Kwoyelo, who denied the charges against him, testified that handiest Kony may maybe answer for LRA crimes, and said all people in the LRA faced death for disobeying the warlord.
The LRA, which began in Uganda as an anti-govt rebellion — and later expanded its operations to neighbouring Congo as neatly as Central African Republic — was accused of recruiting boys to combat and keeping girls as sex slaves. At the peak of its vitality, the group was a notoriously brutal outfit whose individuals for years eluded Ugandan forces in northern Uganda.
The LRA was accused of committing extra than one massacres targeting principally individuals of the Acholi ethnic group. Kony, himself an Acholi, is a self-proclaimed messiah who said early in his rebellion that he wanted to rule Uganda according to the biblical Ten Commandments.
When military tension pressured the LRA out of Uganda in 2005, the rebels scattered across parts of central Africa. The group has faded in recent years, and experiences of LRA attacks are rare.
