Former Lord’s Resistance Army commander Thomas Kwoyelo said he was abducted and turned into a soldier by the group at the age of 12
Gulu city, October 25 — The International Crimes Division of the Ugandan High Court has sentenced a former commander in the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) to 40 years in prison following a landmark war crimes trial.
Thomas Kwoyelo was found guilty of 44 charges, including murder, rape, kidnapping and pillaging.
He denied all charges that were brought against him.
Announcing the sentence on Friday October 25, at a court in the northern Uganda city of Gulu, the lead judge in the case, Michael Elubu, said Kwoyelo had expressed remorse and was deemed to no longer pose a threat to society.
Justice Duncan Gasagwa, one of four judges on the case, said “the convict played a prominent role in the planning, strategy and actual execution of the offences of extreme gravity”.
He added that “the victims have been left with lasting physical and mental pain and suffering”.
Kwoyelo is the first commander from the terrorist rebel group to be convicted by a Ugandan court.
The trial marked the first time a member of the LRA had been tried by Uganda’s judiciary. It was also the first atrocity case to be tried under a special division of the high court that focuses on international crimes.
Founded in the late 1980s with the aim of overthrowing the government of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, the LRA brutalised Ugandans under the leadership of Joseph Kony for nearly 20 years as it battled the military from bases in northern Uganda. He claimed to be fighting to install a government based on the Bible’s 10 Commandments.
The fighters were notorious for horrific acts of cruelty, including hacking off victims’ limbs and lips and using crude instruments to bludgeon people to death. The group was known to abduct children and turn them into child soldiers or sex slaves.
The group was notorious for chopping off people’s limbs. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced from their homes by the conflict.
Former Ugandan abductees at a war rehabilitation centre in Gulu. The protracted conflict in the north led to the abduction of tens of thousands of children, some as young as six, who were forced into combat and sexual slavery
Kwoyelo, believed to be in his fifties, was a low-level commander of the LRA, tasked with caring for the group’s injured members, according to his testimony.
He says he was forced to join the LRA in 1987, after the group’s members abducted him on his way to school at age 12, at the peak of the rebel conflict. He went on to become a senior commander, using the alias Latoni, and overseeing the treatment of wounded fighters.
Kwoyelo’s trial was held in the city of Gulu in northern Uganda – the region that was terrorised by the LRA for more than two decades.
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.
The International Crimes Division of the Ugandan High Court decided not to give Kwoyelo the death sentence or life imprisonment because he was abducted by LRA fighters as a child and turned into a soldier.
The LRA operated mostly in northern Uganda at first, then shifted to the Democratic Republic of Congo where Mr Kwoyelo was arrested in 2009, and later the Central African Republic.
The group has largely been wiped out. An international effort to capture Kony failed and was later suspended after he was deemed to no longer pose a danger to Uganda.
Kwoyelo originally had 78 charges brought against him – he was acquitted of three murder charges and 31 other charges were dismissed.
The former commander will serve a total of 25 years in jail as he has already spent 15 years on remand.
His lawyers said they intend to appeal against each conviction and the court has given them 14 days to do so.
The court will hear the case on reparations for Kwoyelo’s victims separately.
The International Criminal Court in the Netherlands sentenced another LRA commander, Dominic Ongwen, to 25 years in prison, in 2021.
As in Kwoyelo’s case, Ongwen was spared a life sentence on the consideration that he was taken as a child and groomed by rebels who had killed his parents.
