LRA Commander Thomas Kwoyelo in court
Kampala, Aug 14 – A Ugandan court sitting in Gulu, found a commander in the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), Thomas Kwoyelo, guilty of dozens of war crimes, the first time a senior member of the group has been tried by Uganda’s judiciary.
Joseph Kony formed the LRA in Uganda in late 1980s and claimed to be fighting to install a government based on the Bible’s 10 Commandments.
The group was notorious for chopping off people’s limbs and abducting children to use as soldiers and sex slaves. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced from their homes by the conflict.
The LRA first operated in northern Uganda. In around 2005 the LRA fled under military pressure to South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo and Central African Republic, where it also unleashed waves of brutal attacks against civilians.
The group has largely been wiped out. But its leader Joseph Kony, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for crimes against humanity, has never been apprehended.
Kwoyelo denied the more than 70 charges against him, which included murder, rape, enslavement, torture and kidnap.
In the courtroom in the northern Ugandan city of Gulu Tuesday August 13, he shook his head as if disagreeing with the verdict as it was read out, his arms crossed and resting on a desk.
In a dark suit and red tie, the former LRA commander showed no emotion in response to the long list of guilty verdicts.
A judge read out the names of civilians who were killed on Kwoyelo’s orders.
One notorious incident was an attack on a camp for displaced civilians at Pagak in northern Uganda in 2004. Dozens of women and children were beaten to death with wooden clubs.
Kwoyelo has spent the last 14 years in detention, which analysts partly attribute to the scale and complexity of the case.
“The verdict of this court is that the accused was found guilty,” said Justice Michael Elubu, one of a panel of four high court judges.
The Ugandan military captured Kwoyelo in 2009 in the jungles of northeastern Congo. He has been in pre-trial detention ever since, and his case has crept through the Ugandan court system.
The court found Kwoyelo guilty on 44 charges, 31 were dismissed as duplications of others, and he was acquitted on three.
The judges said next week they would begin conducting pre-sentencing hearings before setting a date for Kwoyelo’s sentencing.
LRA leader Kony is wanted by the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) but has not been caught despite several attempts to do so.
In 2021 the ICC convicted Dominic Ongwen, another senior LRA commander, of war crimes including rape, sexual enslavement, child abduction, torture and murder. He was subsequently sentenced to 25 years in jail, instead of giving him a maximum life sentence because he had been abducted as a child and groomed by rebels who had killed his parents.
Kwoyelo says he too was abducted by LRA fighters at the age of 12 while walking to school.
Thousands of former LRA members have been granted amnesty under a controversial Ugandan law, after leaving and renouncing the rebel group. But this option was not given to Kwoyelo, who is yet to be sentenced.
