A court in Uganda has sentenced Former 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.
