A court docket in Uganda has sentenced Lord’s Resistance Military (LRA) commander Thomas Kwoyelo to 40 years in jail after a landmark battle crimes trial over his function within the group’s two-decade reign of violence.
The sentence was introduced on Friday by Michael Elubu, the lead decide within the case, at a court docket within the northern metropolis of Gulu.
Justice Duncan Gasagwa, one in every of 4 judges on the case, stated “the convict performed a outstanding function within the planning, technique and precise execution of the offences of utmost gravity”.
He added that “the victims have been left with lasting bodily and psychological ache and struggling”.
Kwoyelo was found guilty in August of 44 offences, together with homicide and rape, and never responsible of three counts of homicide. Thirty-one alternate offences have been dismissed.
Landmark trial
The trial marked the primary time a member of the LRA had been tried by Uganda’s judiciary. It was additionally the primary atrocity case to be tried underneath a particular division of the excessive court docket that focuses on worldwide crimes.
Based within the late Nineteen Eighties with the intention of overthrowing the federal government of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, the LRA brutalised Ugandans underneath the management of Joseph Kony for practically 20 years because it battled the navy from bases in northern Uganda.
The fighters have been infamous for horrific acts of cruelty, together with hacking off victims’ limbs and lips and utilizing crude devices to bludgeon folks to demise.
Kwoyelo, believed to be in his fifties, was a low-level commander of the LRA, tasked with caring for the group’s injured members, in keeping with his testimony.
He says he was compelled to affix the LRA in 1987, after the group’s members kidnapped him on his option to college at age 12, on the peak of the insurgent battle. He went on to turn into a senior commander, utilizing the alias Latoni, and overseeing the remedy of wounded fighters.
In 2009, Kwoyelo was captured in neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) throughout a raid by regional forces. The LRA rebels had been compelled out of northern Uganda into DRC and different neighbouring nations just a few years earlier due to the Ugandan navy’s offensives on the group.
Kwoyelo was introduced again to Uganda, having suffered a bullet wound to his abdomen.
He spent the following 14 years in jail because the prosecution put the case in opposition to him collectively.
Because of his lengthy pre-trial detention by the Ugandan authorities, some had advocated for Kwoyelo’s launch.
“Our kids are harmless as a result of they have been forcefully conscripted into fight,” Okello Okuna, a spokesperson for Ker Kwaro Acholi, a conventional kingdom in Gulu, informed Al Jazeera in February.
Rights teams, comparable to Avocats Sans Frontieres, identified that holding Kwoyelo in detention for greater than a decade muddled the case for the prosecution.
However others, together with victims, stated Kwoyelo was concerned in killings and torture, and will subsequently face justice.
“He was a impolite individual and a fighter,” a sufferer who was born in LRA captivity and recognized solely as Jaqueline informed Al Jazeera in February, including that Kwoyelo killed her father for failing to comply with orders.
Defence lead lawyer Caleb Akala had constantly pleaded Kwoyelo’s innocence, arguing that he was himself a baby sufferer of the LRA.
Nonetheless, witnesses maintained Kwoyelo led a number of LRA incursions and was concerned in killings.
Choose Gasagwa stated Kwoyelo averted the demise sentence as a result of he was recruited by the LRA at a younger age, was not one of many top-ranking commanders, and has expressed regret and a willingness to reconcile with the victims.
Hundreds of kids have been kidnapped by the group and used as intercourse slaves or little one troopers.
The LRA is designated as a terror group by the United Nations, america, the UK and the European Union.
