Uganda: Leader of a Extremist Militia is Founded Guilty for Crimes Against Humanity

Kwoyelo, accused of murder, rape, kidnapping, slavery, torture and looting among others, denied the more than 70 charges against him in Uganda

A Ugandan court found guilty on Tuesday of a total of 44 charges, including war crimes, against Thomas Kwoyelo, former commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group with a Christian extremist ideology.

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Kwoyelo, accused of murder, rape, kidnapping, slavery, torture and looting among others, denied the more than 70 charges against him in Uganda, which is now South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) when he was a member of the LRA.

“The verdict of this court is that the defendant has been found guilty,” said Judge Michael Elubu, in the first case of a high-ranking LRA member tried in Uganda.

The former commander was arrested in 2009 in a confrontation between the paramilitary group and the army, and accused of war crimes, including the deliberate killing of civilians, kidnapping, destruction of property and inhumane treatment.

The Uganda Division of International Crimes (ICD), a court under the Supreme Court, began its trial, the first of its kind in Uganda, in July 2011, but the Constitutional Court decided in September that year that Kwoyelo should be released because the government had not considered his application for amnesty issued in 2000.

The prosecution rejected his request for amnesty in February 2012, and in April 2015 a higher court decided that the war crimes trial should continue. However, his case has been dragging on in the Ugandan judicial system so far.

The LRA, currently very inactive, however, according to the UN, killed around 100,000 people in northern Uganda and fear of its attacks forced about 1.8 million to leave their homes,