On Tuesday, he took a seat before the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague for the first day of a trial in which he is charged with 70 war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, rape, torture and sexual slavery, mostly committed in attacks on camps for internally displaced people.

The case is engrossing Uganda, which is desperate for delayed justice for the depredations of the LRA, as the cultish guerrilla movement led by Joseph Kony is widely known. But Ongwen’s appearance Tuesday also raised a crucial question: Was the former brigade commander a perpetrator of war crimes — or a victim himself?

Ongwen’s plea of not guilty was broadcast live on Uganda’s leading TV station. In towns across Uganda’s north, which bore the brunt of the country’s civil war, people crammed into rooms set up by the ICC to watch the opening stages of the trial.

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The ICC has long had a reputation of being “a barking dog with no teeth,” said Patricia Bako, head of the Uganda office of the international rights group Avocats Sans Frontières.

“Seeing Dominic Ongwen stand in the dock is one step forward for the victims,” she said.

But the case of Ongwen, now believed to be about 41 years old, is complicated by his past as a child soldier after being stolen from his family somewhere between the ages of 9 and 14 and forced to carry a gun for Kony. His account of being forced to join the LRA as a child has not been challenged by prosecutors.

Before the ICC on Tuesday, Ongwen argued that he was a victim of the LRA’s violence — not a perpetrator.

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“LRA committed atrocities in northern Uganda, and I am one of the people against whom the LRA committed atrocities,” he said. “But it is not me personally who is the LRA.”

Many Ugandans are sympathetic to his position. After being brainwashed as a child, the thinking goes, how can he be held responsible for the actions he later carried out?

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“This has actually polarized debate in the country, whereby there are those that think he’s a victim [and] should go through the reconciliation process,” said Sarah Kasande Kihika, head of the International Center for Transitional Justice's office in Uganda.

“But there are also others — especially when you get to the communities he allegedly attacked … who say he was vicious during the attacks, and they would like to see him face trial,” she said.

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Ongwen’s case is the first international effort for justice against the Kony-led LRA, which has been blamed for the deaths of roughly 100,000 people in Uganda and neighboring countries. An estimated 1.7 million Ugandans were forced out of their homes during the extremist group’s two-decade reign of terror.

The United States, which sent a small team of Special Operations troops to central Africa in 2011 to help find Kony, put a a $5 million bounty on Ongwen, who was picked up by Seleka rebels in the northern Central Africa Republic and handed over to U.S. forces in January 2015. At the time of his arrest, he was listed as a "brigadier general" in the LRA.

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Of the four other senior LRA figures indicted by the ICC, only Kony is believed to still be alive. He remains on the run.

In 2012, a viral YouTube video castigating Kony raised the group’s international profile and made its eradication a brief cause celebre, though the video failed to have a meaningful impact on the anti-LRA hunt. The militia, which was forced out of Uganda several years ago, is a fraction of its former self but nonetheless continues to abduct children and kill civilians along the border of South Sudan, Congo and the Central African Republic.

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Ongwen’s trial comes at an awkward time for the Ugandan government.

Three African countries have all announced plans to withdraw from the ICC, over allegations that it has unfairly targeted Africa while ignoring the abuses of Western powers including the United States.

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Uganda is not one of those nations, but President Yoweri Museveni has been one of the court’s most vocal critics in the past. This year, he praised the withdrawal plans of the three other countries: South Africa, Burundi and Gambia. Other senior Ugandan officials, including the prime minister, have suggested they will push for a mass withdrawal from the ICC at an upcoming African Union summit.

Despite those objections, the Ugandan government has been fully cooperating with the ICC during Ongwen’s trial.