Dominic Ongwen, a Ugandan child soldier who became commander of the infamous Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), was sentenced to 25 years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court on Thursday.
Ongwen, 45, whose nom de guerre was “White Ant”, was found guilty in February of 61 charges, including murder, rape and sexual addiction during a period of terror in the early 2000s by the LRA, led by the fugitive Joseph Kony.
Prosecutors had asked for a 20-year prison sentence and said that Ongwen’s own history as a schoolboy abducted by the LRA justified a lower sentence than the maximum 30 years of life allowed by the ICC.
But on Thursday, he received a 25-year sentence from the Hague court.
The defense had sought a ten-year prison sentence for Ongwen for attacks by his soldiers on refugee camps in northern Uganda.
The victims of his crime had asked the court to impose a life sentence.
Ongwen told the court that the LRA forced him to eat beans soaked in the blood of the first people he was allowed to kill as part of a brutal initiation following his own abduction at age 9.
“I am facing this international court with so many accusations and yet I am the first victim of child abduction. What happened to me I do not even think happened to Jesus Christ,” Ongwen said.
‘The seriousness of the crime’
The LRA was founded three decades ago by the former Catholic altar boy and self-proclaimed prophet Kony, who launched a bloody uprising in northern Uganda against President Yoweri Museveni.
Its brutal campaign to establish a state based on the Bible’s Ten Commandments killed more than 100,000 people and abducted 60,000 children, eventually spreading to Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic.
Judges said in a February ruling that Ongwen personally ordered his soldiers to carry out massacres of more than 130 civilians in the Lukodi, Pajule, Odek and Abok refugee camps between 2002 and 2005.
Civilians were locked in their homes and burned to death or beaten during the massacres, while mothers were allowed to transport LRA booty and force them to abandon their infants by the roads.
Ongwen was also the first person convicted by the ICC for the crime of forced pregnancy, for abducting and raping so-called “wives”, some of whom were minors.
Prosecutor Colin Black said Ongwen’s own history as a child soldier “does not in any way diminish the seriousness of the crimes, nor does it diminish his criminal duty.”
“Nevertheless, we consider them to be exceptional individual circumstances of a kind that justify a significant reduction in the sentence,” he claimed.
Ongwen surrendered to US special forces who chased Kony in the Central African Republic in early 2015 and he was transferred to the ICC to stand trial.
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