Former LRA commander commences trial at The Hague saying he was a victim not a perpetrator of atrocities in Uganda

A former militia leader from northern Uganda has denied committing war crimes including rape and murder, on the opening day of his trial at the international criminal court at The Hague, saying that as a child soldier taken by force from his home by the organisation he was a victim of its atrocities, not a perpetrator.



Dominic Ongwen, once a feared commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army, told judges in a dramatic outburst that he was “one of the people against whom the LRA committed atrocities”. He said: “In the name of God, I deny all these charges.”

The trial of is one of the most momentous in the ICC’s 14-year history, and raises difficult questions of responsibility and blame. Ongwen, who is between 35 and 40 years old, is the first former child soldier to face trial at the controversial institution and the first defendant to be both alleged perpetrator and victim of the same crimes.

Ongwen was abducted by the LRA at the age of 10 when returning from school and is thought to have been forced to participate in combat and violent acts against civilians as a child. He told the court he should not be on trial.

Child soldier to war criminal: the trial of Dominic Ongwen Read more

“I am not the LRA … It is the LRA who abducted people in northern Uganda. It is the LRA who killed people,” Ongwen said, speaking through an interpreter.

A court official needed almost 20 minutes to read the 70 charges against Ongwen. They included murder, attempted murder, torture, rape, sexual slavery and, for the first time, “forced pregnancy” and “forced marriage”.

Led by Joseph Kony, a former rebel leader who claimed to be religiously inspired, the LRA waged war across five countries in east and central Africa for nearly 30 years.

The group has been blamed for the deaths of about 100,000 people and the abduction of 60,000 children. It relied on the abduction of largely defenceless villagers and refugees, including children, to provide labour and combatants. Girls were forced into sexual and domestic slavery while boys were forced to commit atrocities and conditioned to believe such acts were necessary and justified.

Most of the charges against Ongwen focus on a series of attacks on refugee camps between 2002 and 2005. One of the worst involved a four-day raid by the LRA on camps in north-eastern Congo in December 2009, in which about 350 civilians were killed and another 250, including at least 80 children, were abducted.

Defence lawyers will argue that much of the evidence against Ongwen is unreliable and say their client was brutalised and traumatised after being abducted.

“He was tortured … forced to watch people being killed, used for fighting as a child soldier. Even the prosecution have said that what he went through is a serious mitigating factor,” said Thomas Obhof, a US lawyer based in Uganda and part of the defence team.

Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda told the court that past victimisation as a child might be a mitigating factor in sentencing but was not a defence of Ongwen’s alleged decision to “wholeheartedly” embrace violence.

“Ongwen was directly involved in many attacks on civilians … He knew that the crimes he committed were part of widespread and systematic attacks … He played a crucial role in …. the abduction of children in order to maintain the fighting strength of the LRA,” she told the court.



Bensouda said eyewitnesses remembered Ongwen giving orders “to bite and stone an old man to death” and cited evidence that the majority of the children in Ongwen’s “battalion” were young teenagers who were regularly forced to participate in torture and murder “to convince them there could be no acceptance for them back in society”.

Charge number 69 against Ongwen involved the alleged conscription of children under the age of 15 into an armed group, while charge number 70 alleged the use of children as combatants in an armed group between July 2002 and December 2005.

Ledio Cakaj, the author of When the Walking Defeats You, a book that documents the experiences of a bodyguard to the LRA leader, Kony, said the trial raised “a very tricky issue”. He said: “A lot of these people of the LRA, who are considered as the bad guys, were in some sense victims in the first place … There are very interesting questions here.”

The LRA is now believed to comprise only about 100 fighters, but remains feared by civilians in remote communities and an inspiration to other militia groups, which have copied its brutal methods. Every week brings reports of continuing attacks.

Of the five senior LRA leaders indicted by the ICC 11 years ago, only Ongwen and his former leader, Kony, are still alive. Despite a $5m (£3.5m) reward for information leading to his capture, Kony remains elusive.

Africa is still wracked by militia groups and militant outfits. Cakaj said that even though the trial dealt with events that occurred a decade or more ago it would raise issues that were relevant now.

Boko Haram, the Nigeria-based Islamist extremist organisation, has abducted tens of thousands of men and women, with some taking up combat roles or even launching suicide attacks.

“The issues are important today … Any lessons can be applied to ongoing conflicts [in Africa] too,” Cakaj said.

The case is crucial for the ICC, too. Huge resources have been invested in building a case against the LRA leaders, whose arrest warrants were the first issued by the court.

The ICC, founded in 2002 to bring to justice perpetrators of crimes that local criminal systems cannot deal with, has been criticised in Africa by some who see it as a racist, imperialist institution. Nine out of the 10 cases being investigated by the ICC involve alleged crimes in Africa, and recent months have seen South Africa, the Gambia, and Burundi announce their withdrawal from the court. It is possible, however, that none will leave, especially since elections in the Gambia ousted Yahya Jammeh.

In September, the court convicted Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, who pleaded guilty to razing medieval shrines, tombs and a 15th-century mosque that formed part of the Unesco world heritage site in Timbuktu, Mali, when the city was seized by Islamic militants in 2012. Mahdi was sentenced to nine years in prison.

Defenders say the majority of the investigations have followed an explicit request or grant of jurisdiction from the government in the country where the crimes were committed, as in the case of Uganda; while others say criticism of the institution came when it started investigating acts that had been committed by current rulers or their close associates from 2009.

Thousands in Uganda are watching the Ongwen trial in The Hague on screens set up by the ICC at viewing sites in the four locations where the most significant alleged crimes were committed. The trial has been hailed by human rights campaigners.

“The ICC trial of Dominic Ongwen is a significant first on justice for LRA atrocities,” said Elise Keppler, associate international justice director at Human Rights Watch. “The LRA leadership is reviled worldwide for its brutality against Africans, but never before has an LRA commander faced trial.”