Dominic Ongwen trial: War crimes perpetrator, victim or both?

Dominic Ongwen, a Ugandan commander in the LRA rebel group that is led by Joseph Kony, on his first appearance at the ICC in The Hague, the Netherlands, on January 26, 2014. PHOTO | FILE |  AFP

By DANIEL K. KALINAKI

In Summary

• By the age of 18 Ongwen had become a major. By the time he became a brigadier, in his early 20s, Ongwen had developed a reputation as a daring and fierce fighter and had become one of the top LRA commanders.

Around March 1990, a 10-year-old boy was walking to school in northern Uganda when he ran into rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Led by Joseph Kony, a former catechist in the Catholic church who had exchanged the rosary for fetishes and an AK-47 rifle, the LRA was the rump of the old army in Uganda that, since colonial times, had been dominated by people from the north.

The British considered the northern tribes to be warlike and, in typical divide-and-rule fashion, had built the repressive colonial army around them, with southerners dominating the civil service.

This northern-dominated army had taken power under Idi Amin in 1971 and ruled the political-military landscape until 1986 when Yoweri Museveni led the National Resistance Army rebels, dominated by southerners, to power.

The northerners mobilised armed responses to recapture state power but these were either defeated militarily or dismantled through peace deals and offers of amnesty.

For whatever reason, the LRA, which remained the last group standing, turned against its own people and over the next two decades carried out barbaric and grotesque acts that, in their shocking cruelty, drowned out the original political basis of the rebel group as the armed wing of disaffected northern politicians. 

To populate its fighting ranks, the LRA abducted boys and girls and turned them into fighters and sex slaves, respectively. Dominic Ongwen, the little boy who ran into the rebels that rainy morning, could easily have remained a statistic, one of the estimated 60,000 children abducted over the course of the war between the LRA and the Ugandan government.

READ: Uganda and US suspend hunt for LRA leader

Destined for infamy

However, Ongwen was destined for infamy. Initiation rites for many abductees usually involved killing those caught trying to escape, often with their bare hands or using crude weapons such as rocks and machetes.

It was a chilling example of what lay in store for those who dared to try. It also left them covered not only in the blood of their victims but also in the shame and stigma of murder.

Undeterred, some would go on and risk escape, often when sent on food-gathering errands. Many — the actual number is unknown — were killed in battle. Thousands were rescued in encounters with government forces. Somehow, Ongwen stayed in the LRA.

By the age of 18 Ongwen had become a major. By the time he became a brigadier, in his early 20s, Ongwen had developed a reputation as a daring and fierce fighter and had become one of the top LRA commanders.

In 2003, the government of Uganda took the LRA to the International Criminal Court, becoming the first state party to appeal to the new court that had just been set up to try war crimes and crimes against humanity. Ongwen was one of five LRA top commanders, including rebel leader Kony, indicted by the ICC.

Last week, Ongwen appeared before the ICC in The Hague, less than a month after he handed himself over to the Seleka rebels in the Central African Republic.