Uganda sentences LRA commander Thomas Kwoyelo to 40 years for war crimes

A court in Uganda has sentenced Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) commander Thomas Kwoyelo to 40 years in prison after a landmark war crimes trial over his role in the group’s two-decade reign of violence.

The sentence was announced on Friday by Michael Elubu, the lead judge in the case, at a court in the northern city of Gulu.`

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 was found guilty in August of 44 offences, including murder and rape, and not guilty of three counts of murder. Thirty-one alternate offences were dismissed.

Landmark trial

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.

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.

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.

In 2009, Kwoyelo was captured in neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) during a raid by regional forces. The LRA rebels had been forced out of northern Uganda into DRC and other neighbouring countries a few years earlier because of the Ugandan military’s offensives on the group.

Kwoyelo was brought back to Uganda, having suffered a bullet wound to his stomach.

He spent the next 14 years in prison as the prosecution put the case against him together.

Due to his long pre-trial detention by the Ugandan authorities, some had advocated for Kwoyelo’s release.

“Our children are innocent because they were forcefully conscripted into combat,” Okello Okuna, a spokesperson for Ker Kwaro Acholi, a traditional kingdom in Gulu, told Al Jazeera in February.

Rights groups, such as Avocats Sans Frontieres, pointed out that holding Kwoyelo in detention for more than a decade muddled the case for the prosecution.

But others, including victims, said Kwoyelo was involved in killings and torture, and should therefore face justice.

“He was a rude person and a fighter,” a victim who was born in LRA captivity and identified only as Jaqueline told Al Jazeera in February, adding that Kwoyelo killed her father for failing to follow orders.

Defence lead lawyer Caleb Akala had consistently pleaded Kwoyelo’s innocence, arguing that he was himself a child victim of the LRA.

However, witnesses maintained Kwoyelo led several LRA incursions and was involved in killings.

Judge Gasagwa said Kwoyelo avoided the death sentence because he was recruited by the LRA at a young age, was not one of the top-ranking commanders, and has expressed remorse and a willingness to reconcile with the victims.

Thousands of children were abducted by the group and used as sex slaves or child soldiers.

The LRA is designated as a terror group by the United Nations, the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union.