The Extraordinary Trial of the Child Soldier Who Became a Brutal Rebel Commander
Kidnapped at 9 by Joseph Kony’s notorious guerilla army, Dominic Ongwen was groomed to kill. Is he a lost soul deserving of mercy, or a cold-blooded war criminal who must face justice?
He didn’t look at her for a long time. He stared at the edge of the table in front of him, holding his hands in his lap as if he was praying, visibly tense as this small woman with dark blonde hair spoke in a confident, cool, posh English accent. It was March 19, 2018, as Gillian Mezey testified before the International Criminal Court in The Hague in the trial of Dominic Ongwen, a former commander of the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army, the LRA, one of Africa’s oldest and cruelest rebel groups. Mezey, a professor of psychiatry in London, was testifying because nothing was more important and more controversial in this trial than the mental state of the accused, a former child soldier.
Ongwen sat between two grim-faced guards. His skin had become lighter after more than three years in prison in Scheveningen, a suburb of The Hague. He had gained weight, but you could still see his handsome high cheekbones, square face, and a deep frown between the eyes that got deeper and deeper the longer Mezey held forth.
Mezey didn’t believe him. She didn’t believe that he had been severely mentally ill, as his lawyers claimed. Ongwen, she said, had “been in control of himself and the men under his command.” All the evidence, she said, suggested that he was malingering, that he was faking his illness.
Ongwen listened to this psychiatrist, who had never personally met him, talk about his mental state for almost three hours. But he lost his composure shortly after lunch break. He got up. He pressed the button that turned on his microphone, got tangled up in his headphones and ripped them off his head in a quick, fluent motion. In Acholi, his mother tongue, he said: “Your honor, I don’t want to listen to the witness anymore. Thank you, madam witness. You’re the one who does all the talking. But were you in the LRA?”
He raised his voice more and more with every sentence. The guards on his left and right jumped up and grabbed his arms. His lawyers turned around, trying to calm him down. Then the green curtain of the visitor gallery closed. Muffled screams could be heard through the glass. And then the sound of something heavy being thrown to the floor.
Dominic Ongwen spent 27 years of his life with the LRA, before defecting from the rebel group at the end of 2014. When he appeared out of the thick vegetation near Obo, in the Central African Republic, the only thing he had on him was a Bible. He surrendered to a local rebel group. They handed him over to the American Special Forces, not knowing who he was.
The Americans were trying to hunt down Joseph Kony, the despotic, unpredictable leader of the LRA. The U.S. soldiers came and picked Ongwen up by helicopter and revealed who he really was: one of five LRA commanders who were wanted for war crimes and crimes against humanity with a warrant from the International Criminal Court. The warrant for his arrest was almost 10 years old. No one had expected him to turn up just like that.
In the months before, his relationship with his boss had collapsed. Joseph Kony had thrown him in prison and threatened him with execution. Ongwen claimed that he had managed to escape with the help of one of Kony’s own bodyguards. He said that he had wandered around in the wilderness alone, for more than a month, surviving, among other things, an attack by a pack of lions. He seemed to believe that a higher power had helped him. A cloud, he said, had guided him on his way. He was obviously happy to be alive at all. His body bore the scars of 11 bullet wounds.
After eight days, the Americans brought him to a Ugandan army camp, where the officers gave him fresh clothes — a blue shirt, light trousers. He watched soccer matches, slept in an officers’ tent, and was told, wrongly, by a translator, that he would be brought home, to northern Uganda. Instead, after 10 days in Obo he was extradited to The Hague.
The French-American author Jonathan Littell happened to be filming a movie in Obo on the day that Ongwen was extradited. Ongwen gave him a rare 30-minute interview before he was put on a plane. “It was too short. I got nowhere with him,” Littell told me. But Ongwen did reveal something in that short conversation. He said: “For me, the thing I knew best in this world was using guns. This was the only thing in this world.”
Ten days later, on a cold January day, he appeared for the first time before a judge in The Hague. The first words he spoke in the courtroom were: “First of all, I would like to thank God for creating Heaven and Earth together with everybody that’s on Earth.” He looked young, slim and handsome. He had nervous eyes. He was wearing a suit for the first time in his life. Someone had helped him put in a checkered tie.
It is hard to imagine how strange, odd and inscrutable the world must have felt to him during those first days in The Hague: his aseptic cell, his fellow inmates and guards, none of whom spoke his language. He understood neither English nor French, only a few words in Swahili, which one other inmate spoke. He was as alone as a person can be.
It was a cool morning, sunny, with a light breeze, when I visited Coorom. A few days later, the heat would return with the dry season. Fields would be scorched, streams would disappear, green would turn to yellow and brown. A small group of huts emerged as we approached in our car, just behind a high field of sorghum only days away from harvest. The compound where Ongwen was born is a quiet place. His uncle and aunt still live there, as does one of his cousins.
His relatives were polite and reserved. The compound had been swept just before I arrived. A tall papaya tree, with big green fruits, stood in the middle. His uncle, Odong Johnson, has the same, somewhat angular face as his nephew. He is missing three teeth in the top row and four in the bottom. At 67, he looked frail, melancholy, his body transformed by a life of hard work, war, displacement and loss.
Johnson told me that, when Ongwen surrendered in 2015, they had just started arranging a funeral for him. They had all thought he was long dead. It had taken them a long time to save enough money for the burial.
As a boy, Ongwen had been the best in his school of more than a hundred children, Johnson said. He had always learned quickly and easily. And he had been eager to please. He never complained about his household chores: fetching water from the river half a mile away, tethering the goats in the evening, lighting the fire for the night.
Ongwen’s father was a catechist, a Catholic lay priest and teacher, a deeply pious man, who was eager to provide his son with a good education. Ongwen often stayed overnight with his grandfather, who lived in a hut surrounded by mango, banana and orange trees a short distance away from the others. In the evenings by the fire, Ongwen told jokes and riddles that his uncle still remembered more than three decades later.
In 1980, about two years after Ongwen’s birth, two factions began fighting for power in Uganda, following the demise of the brutal dictatorship of Idi Amin. The violence was triggered, among other things, by a rigged election. The ex-president Milton Obote took power. Obote was from the north. The man who emerged as his biggest rival, Yoweri Museveni, came from the south. The new conflict divided the country, plotting the north against the south.
Many of the troops who fought for Obote belonged to Ongwen’s ethnic group, the Acholi. They fought for the losing side. In January 1986, Museveni’s troops conquered the capital, Kampala. Thousands of defeated Acholi soldiers fled north, trying to hide in their home villages. The new government’s troops followed soon afterward. Ongwen was about 8 years old when the war arrived in his district.
Acholi land was enemy territory for the soldiers from the south, and they behaved accordingly. Thousands of ordinary Acholi who had nothing to do with Obote’s army were arrested. Hundreds were summarily executed. As a reaction to the violence from the government troops, several rebel groups emerged. One of them was the Lord’s Resistance Army, the LRA. Their founder, Joseph Kony, was an ajwaka, a witch doctor.
Spirit worship remains widespread in northern Uganda to this day. Witch doctors get in touch with an invisible, transcendent world, which often serves to explain what cannot be explained: illnesses, deaths, bad harvests. The Acholi also believe that spirits haunt those who have killed. They call this phenomenon, which we might describe as post-traumatic stress disorder, cen.
The hill in Uganda where Joseph Kony said he communicated with spirits that ordered him to found the Lords Resistance Army (LRA) and overthrow the government.
Kony, however, invented spiritual beliefs and practices that went far beyond Acholi tradition. He claimed to be in contact with powerful new spirits. When Kony communicated with these spirits, he went into a trance. His voice changed. The ghosts, he said, ordered him to overthrow the government. These weren’t the traditional ghosts meant for farmers and herdsmen. They were ghosts for a rebel leader.
Kony left his home village, Odek, in spring 1987, with only a handful of followers. Shortly afterward, he was joined by a group of soldiers from Obote’s old army. The soldiers taught this strange new prophet how to wage a guerrilla war. The LRA became a hybrid between an army and a religious cult.
What the LRA lacked, initially, were soldiers. Too few volunteered. The belief system of the LRA was too foreign, too strange, too radical to attract widespread support. So Kony soon reverted to an old strategy, one that had been used in the civil war in Angola, by other military groups that lacked public support: He started kidnapping children.
Children were more malleable than adults. They didn’t ask for wages, and when forcibly recruited, they didn’t run away as often as adults did.
Only one of the two eyewitnesses to Ongwen’s kidnapping is still alive. Joe Kakanyero, one of Ongwen’s cousins, is a delicate man with fine facial features. When I visited his home, the table in his hut had been set with an embroidered white blanket. A Bible lay open on top. The worn pages and frayed seams suggested that it had been read over and over again. Kakanyero had been reading the Gospel of John, the pages about the first appearance of Jesus Christ.
“The soldiers waited for us on our way back from school,” Kakanyero recalled. “They were hiding at the side of the road. They had guns. They ordered us to follow them into the bush.” Kakanyero remembered that on their first day with the soldiers, he and his cousin marched until dark. “We kept changing directions. We moved like blind people, here and there,” he said. Their school uniforms, the white shirt, the dark blue trousers, were torn up by tree branches, bushes and thorns. They wouldn’t take them off for four months.
In the evening, the rebels smeared shea butter, a creamy, light oil, on their chest and back, he recalled. They had been told the paste was sacred. In the LRA, many believed that shea butter, mixed with water, protected them from material and metaphysical threats alike —bullets and evil spirits.
Diptych – Left, Geoffrey Opiyo was abducted at the age of 10 by the LRA. Right, Opiyo’s leg has shrapnel wounds he suffered during a battle; it never completely healed due to lack of medical treatment.
At some point in the first three days, the rebels caught an abductee who had tried to escape. “They tied his hands behind his back,” Kakanyero said. The soldiers had called the children together — “they put him on his stomach” — and forced them to watch. “They hit his head with the blunt side of the axe until his brain was no more.” None of the children started crying. Kakanyero remembered the total silence afterward. “I realized that if I didn’t do what they wanted me to do, they would kill me,” he said. “If I wanted to survive, I had to obey.”
It was a lesson that Ongwen would internalize more than anybody else.
Three and a half months later, the cousins were separated by the LRA. Kakanyero said that he managed to escape from the rebel group after four years. The two cousins would only see each other again more than three decades later, in 2018, in a courtroom in The Hague.
The International Criminal Court was established on July 1, 2002, and its very first warrant of arrest, in 2005, was for five LRA commanders. Of those five, only two are still alive: Kony and Ongwen.
The prosecutors in The Hague knew of Ongwen’s past. They knew that he had been a child soldier, but “it didn’t matter,” former chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo told me in a phone conservation. “We considered Ongwen responsible for the decisions he made as an adult.”
Once he was in The Hague, the prosecutors charged him with 70 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The charges included murder, torture, robbery, kidnapping of children and adults to turn them into soldiers, crimes against human dignity, and rape and enslavement of young women and girls. The list of charges is so long that it took the court clerk more than 26 minutes to read them out at the beginning of the trial.
The court would have to decide whether to believe the excuses that Ongwen’s lawyers presented. Bad childhood experiences alone, though, no matter how horrific, would not be enough to spare him. At the beginning of the proceedings, Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda made clear that in most courts you meet perpetrators who have been victims at some point in their lives: “Having suffered victimization in the past is not a justification, nor an excuse, to victimize others,” she said. Then she added: “Each human being must be considered to be endowed with moral responsibility for their actions.”
Dominic Ongwen’s case, however, is a unique one. He is the only former child abductee who has ever been tried in the International Criminal Court.
On the day that Ongwen was taken, his mother was killed, according to his uncle and aunt. She had run after the rebels to reclaim her child, they told me. The family tried to hold her back, but she could not be dissuaded. The next morning, the family found her body on the riverbank. She had been beaten to death with bricks.
It’s less clear what happened to Ongwen’s father. There are no direct eyewitnesses to his death, but all family members said that he was shot by government soldiers sometime after Ongwen’s abduction.
Ongwen found out about their deaths, at the very latest, a year after his abduction when one of his cousins, Lily Atong, who was slightly younger than him, was also kidnapped. They met and she told him everything. He may have already suspected it, but at this moment it fully dawned on him that he was an orphan, hardly 10 years old, completely abandoned in a cruel, indifferent world that did not seem to care whether he lived or died.
“He was one of the bravest soldiers I’ve ever had,” said Caesar Achellam, a former major general in the LRA, who met Ongwen for the first time in 1991 when Ongwen was about 13 years old. Achellam walks with a limp, the result of an old bullet wound. He is tall, thin, and straight as a stick. He speaks English with a slight lisp, which makes him seem more innocent than he is. Achellam was for a long time the third in command in the LRA, their chief diplomat and organizer. In 2012 he surrendered to the Ugandan army. He has never been indicted by the International Criminal Court. Instead, he received amnesty from the Ugandan government. In recent years, he has been living in a small village just outside of Gulu, the largest city in northern Uganda.
“When he became my bodyguard, he was very young,” Achellam says of Ongwen. “He had had three other commanders before. They all died. He was loyal, obedient, disciplined. I protected him like my younger brother. He carried my rifle, my chair, my mattress” — the typical duties of a bodyguard in the LRA — “I took him with me when I went into battle. Our strategy was based on surprise attacks, on ambushes. We often sustained heavy casualties. I have seen many men who faltered in these situations. People who were much older than him and who turned out to be cowards. Not him.”
In the early 1990s, the LRA withdrew from Uganda and escaped north across the border into Sudan. The Sudanese government, under the dictator Umar Al-Bashir, permitted Joseph Kony to set up camps near the border and also procured weapons and rations for the Ugandan rebels. Small troops of fighters set off regularly to kidnap more children in Uganda and bring them back to the bases in Sudan. At one point, these camps housed about 5,000 abductees, many of them adolescents. The LRA trained them for an invasion into Uganda to overthrow President Museveni. But that invasion never happened.
Former fighters who went on raids with Ongwen into Uganda in the 1990s remember him as a young man whose fearlessness had an almost suicidal edge. He was shot several times, in the chest and leg; he survived a cholera epidemic in the Sudanese camp that killed hundreds, and a famine that lasted for months. At one point, people started eating soil and grass. Ongwen told his psychiatrists in prison that sometimes he only ate 10 bean seeds a day.
Ongwen was made an officer at the age of about 19, said Achellam. “He was already a very experienced soldier by then.”
Ongwen’s face looked bloated during the last weeks of the trial in early 2020, possibly a result of the drugs he had been taking to treat depression and sleeplessness. He had shaved off his hair. As the trial neared its conclusion, his depression seemed to deepen week by week. His movements got slower and slower, until they looked like a video in slow motion.
He told his doctors that he felt that God hated him. Once, he asked the prison staff to perform Acholi cleansing rituals on him, to lift the curse that had been put upon him.
Ongwen’s lawyer is Krispus Ayena Odongo, a Ugandan opposition politician and former parliamentarian. Ayena told me that Ongwen had tried to take his own life more than once in prison. In one instance, he drank laundry detergent. Another time he bashed his head against a bare wall. He also started a hunger strike, which he broke off after just five days.
On the first day of the main trial, Ongwen declared: “It was the LRA who abducted people in northern Uganda. The LRA killed people in northern Uganda. The LRA committed atrocities in northern Uganda, and I’m one of the people against whom the LRA committed atrocities. But it’s not me, Dominic Ongwen, personally, who is the LRA.”
Those words are all he has ever said on the question of his guilt, or his responsibility.
Ongwen was a young man, between 24 and 27 years old, when he allegedly committed the crimes for which he is now in prison. During the early 2000s, the war in northern Uganda entered its final, most brutal phase. The LRA had been driven out of Sudan in 2002 by the Ugandan army. Instead of surrendering, thousands of LRA fighters infiltrated Uganda. LRA members started a new wave of kidnappings, far worse than what they had done before that. In 2003, the LRA abducted 6,500 people, most of them between 11 and 17 years old.
It was during this period that Ongwen distinguished himself as an officer. From summer 2002 to autumn 2005, he was responsible for at least 28 attacks, according to the records of the Ugandan intelligence service and the army, who intercepted radio calls by the LRA. He set ambushes, attacked army patrols, overran remote barracks, burned down entire villages, raided Catholic missions to steal their radios, and was an unrelenting kidnapper.
He was always on the move, often marching in a group of 50 fighters, all of whom spread out around him within shouting distance. Wherever he went, former LRA members said, he had bodyguards with him, many of them minors. At night they slept in a circle around his tent. “He was never afraid,” one of his former fighters told me. “His whole mind was set on war,” said another.
The village of Odek, the birthplace of Joseph Kony, is set in a flat, fertile landscape, by a small river. Like most tyrants, Kony loved grand, dramatic gestures. In 2004 he ordered his fighters to attack the refugee camp that had sprung up there, in the place where he grew up. As commander for this mission, he selected Dominic Ongwen.
Three former LRA fighters testified in court that they saw how Dominic Ongwen gave instructions for the attack. According to one of them, at the meeting before the attack, he said that it was time to “go to work.” Another said that Ongwen told them to “exterminate everything that you see.”
The fighters arrived at the edge of the camp just before sunset. It was April 29, 2004. About 3,000 people were living in Odek at that time, most of them refugees who had been forcibly displaced by the Ugandan government during their war with the LRA.
The massacre barely lasted an hour. The court transcripts give the impression that the main purpose was not necessarily to inflict as much harm as possible, or to kill everyone in sight, but that the violence was deliberately chaotic, to spread the kind of fear that would stay with the survivors for the rest of their lives. One LRA soldier led a schoolboy through the camp on a rope. The schoolboy later testified in court that “every time we came to a house, he would open the door and shoot at people, just to demonstrate that if we try to flee, he was going to shoot us.” They also set fire to a number of huts, usually with frightened people still hiding inside. They fired through closed doors. They tore babies out of their mothers’ arms and killed them.
The next day, Ongwen got on the radio and reported back to Joseph Kony. The call was intercepted both by the Ugandan army and intelligence services.
Kony said, “Did you clean up the backside of my mother?”
Ongwen replied: “Kici kici,” meaning “completely.”
Around 60 people died in the attack on Odek. On the morning after, an elderly couple was found lying in a pool of blood in front of their little shop; a newly married man was discovered dead with a bullet wound in his back, executed, like many others, at close range. A young mother had fallen, her face buried in the mud, her baby still alive, tied to her back.
Why didn’t Ongwen defect much earlier, like so many others? There were many times when he was hundreds of miles away from Kony, alone with his troops in the bush. There were times when Kony could not reach him over the radio for weeks on end. At what point did it become his own decision to stay? Did it ever really?
Whatever drove him, Ongwen was steadfast in his loyalty to Kony for many years. He was the last LRA commander to leave Uganda after the group retreated in the face of mounting military pressure from the Ugandan army. He crossed over the Nile into the Democratic Republic of Congo. Later, he moved with a small number of troops through the Central African Republic and Sudan. He committed further, even more violent massacres.
The people that were with him during that time told me that he became desperate and hopeless, that he spoke with increasing frequency and openness about defecting.
But he only left after his relationship with Kony broke down. Kony was notoriously paranoid — always anxious that his commanders might betray him. According to former LRA soldiers, Ongwen openly contradicted Kony on several occasions — something almost unheard of in the strictly hierarchical LRA. He was eventually placed under arrest. It seemed only a matter of time before he would be executed, like so many commanders before him.
After his surrender in the Central African Republic, he agreed to record a message addressing his former fighters. He called on them to defect: “You all know how brave I was. If even I decide to come out of the bush, what are you still doing there?”
It is not easy to reconcile the accounts that different witnesses have provided about Ongwen. They seem incongruent — full of conflicting, contrasting character traits. Ongwen himself provided an explanation that might seem like a solution, but possibly one that is too convenient. He told his two Ugandan psychiatrists, Dickens Akena and Emilio Ovuga, who testified on his behalf in court, that two distinct personalities inside him are constantly fighting for control. He calls them Dominic A and Dominic B. One is good, friendly, helpful. The other one is angry and aggressive.
He claims that when he was still with the LRA, he suffered hour-long blackouts; that he couldn’t remember what happened while his dark alter ego, Dominic B, went into combat.
Ongwen’s account of his two personalities has varied. At times he has claimed he has complete amnesia about the actions of his dark self, that he couldn’t remember anything that he did in those hours. At other times he has described Dominic B as somebody who walked next to him or pushed him forward into battle, preventing him from retreating. Ongwen has even said that he could sometimes see Dominic B, his angry self, alongside him.
Several of the women whom Dominic Ongwen once called his wives live just a few hundred yards apart on the outskirts of Gulu. They have built small thatched huts in a tightly packed settlement. Most of them have no land on which to grow vegetables. There is no running water. Malaria is common. They live here because they have no other place to go.
Acholi women who marry and bear children usually leave their family and move to their husband’s village, and their children belong to the husband’s clan, not the mother’s. But for these women, traditional customs do not apply. Their children were conceived in the LRA, under the constant threat of force. The father of their children is in prison, and many of the women do not see Ongwen as their legitimate husband anyway, but as their tormentor. Others, however, still say that they love him.
Dillish Abang, 26 years old, has seven children with Ongwen. Her youngest son was conceived in The Hague (conjugal visits are permitted in Dutch prisons) and is now 2 years old. He is a healthy boy with a round face, and he sat patiently on his mother’s lap for almost an hour while she talked to me. Abang said that she speaks to Ongwen almost every week. He tells her about his nightmares in prison, his new friends — all fellow inmates also accused of war crimes — and his hobbies: He has learned to play the piano and developed a passion for baking in the prison kitchen. According to Abang, he is a loyal, caring, attentive father, eager to find out how his children are doing in school. She told me that he has always treated her well.
Irene Fatuma Lakica, 30, lives less than a 15-minute walk from Abang. When I met her, she was wearing a green T-shirt with winged horses on it. She cried briefly, two or three tears, which she wiped away quickly, while she talked about Ongwen and how he had raped her, once every few weeks. How he had threatened her with a machete if she refused.
Six women have described similar attacks in court in The Hague. One said that she was about 10 years old when Ongwen told her he wanted to have sex with her. That she was beaten every day for a week by his bodyguards until she could not resist anymore. That she had been so small that she had to be lifted onto his bed because it was so high. That he bragged about it the next day to his bodyguards, telling them that he had “torn a plastic bag.” Not even his own lawyers have denied that he is a rapist. They merely claim that he wasn’t responsible for his actions.
And yet, while the women have agreed on little else about him, their perspectives converge on one issue: None of them think that he was insane.
Emilio Ovuga, professor of psychiatry in Gulu, is a small, gray-haired man. When he testified on November 22, 2019, it was a cold day, and he was wearing a coat over his suit, even in the courtroom. He spoke slowly, with a frail voice and dry wit. Ovuga was the last witness in the trial. He was also, perhaps, the most important.
The lead prosecutor in the case, Benjamin Gumpert, took on the cross-examination. Gumpert is a 57-year-old Brit, educated in Cambridge. He has a scar on his chin, and dark, dense hair that makes him look much more boyish than his age would suggest. Gumpert is a tough, aggressive interrogator, whose only weakness on the stand seems to be that he sometimes enjoys his work a bit too much.
The question that day was a difficult one: How exactly did Ovuga come up with the unusual diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (previously called multiple personality disorder)? Many psychiatrists say the illness is extremely rare. Some even believe that it doesn’t exist at all, at least not in its most extreme manifestation — as several completely separate personalities.
“Doctor,” said Gumpert, “if you have two distinct personalities, one of which is nice, kind, reasonable, fair; the other of which is vicious, violent and angry; and you are alternating between those personalities, as Mr. Ongwen told you he was as often as three times a week — ordinary people, even lawyers, people who work in other fields, not doctors, are going to notice, aren’t they? It’s only common sense.”
“It is not common sense,” said Ovuga. “And common sense does not apply to everybody. People who do not suffer from severe mental illness cope with their disability, so that those around them will not notice that something is wrong. In most cases they will not notice it.”
“So let’s just try and understand the mechanism,” the prosecutor continued. “Dominic’s with his soldiers and the women he regards as his wives. The other Dominic, the Dominic B, the nasty, vicious, angry, violent one, comes upon him, but Dominic A is able, by coping, to disguise to the outside world Dominic B’s true personality and to pretend still to be Dominic A. Is that what’s happening?”
“Yes.”
“Professor, I suggest that that is — ”
“Not correct?”
“Nonsense.”
Gumpert later had to apologize for that last, discourteous word. But he was not alone in his assessment. After the cross-examination, German professor of psychology Roland Weierstall-Pust wrote a comprehensive, withering assessment of Ovuga’s work, declaring that Ovuga’s psychiatric evaluation of Ongwen was “insufficient, unfounded, contradictory and sloppy in almost every aspect and does not fulfill the criteria of a professional forensic report according to the current state-of-the-art.”
On the last day of closing statements, Krispus Ayena Odongo, Ongwen’s lawyer, arrived unprepared. It was March 12, 2020. Ayena was standing behind his desk, in socks, his feet sticking out from under his black robe. Ongwen’s lawyer has a deep and powerful voice. He is capable of delivering points forcefully. But now, when he tried to speak freely, at this decisive moment, he couldn’t. He could not remember the words. He had to stop, again and again. Several times he went quiet midsentence, not remembering the end.
Ayena had already started to look out of his depth during the last months of trial. He had dozed off multiple times while his colleagues were questioning key witnesses, including some of the psychiatric experts.
In the last half hour of his plea, Ayena finally stopped looking at his notes altogether and went into a freewheeling, stream-of-consciousness oration, in which he suggested that the judges should think “out of the box.” He joked that Colin Black, one of the prosecutors, was not black at all, but white. He gave a brief lecture on the Nuremberg trials and explained to the presiding judge, Bertram Schmitt, a German, that the Wehrmacht during World War II was a regular army “which knew the laws of war,” unlike the LRA.
In the rows behind Ayena, his colleagues on the defense team started collecting their documents and putting them in their bags. Ongwen, meanwhile, just sat there, as he did so often, with his hands folded in his lap, while his lawyer came up with his last, simple plea for mercy: “Give Ongwen a chance to go home after 32 years. Whatever verdict you come up with, the sentence should be so mild. I mean, of course, I know that we have been reading from the same page … and we pray that you acquit him. But in case he’s not acquitted, our prayers remain that you give him a mild sentence.”
Ongwen remained still, almost motionless, while Schmitt read out the verdict. He wore a dark suit, a blue shirt with a gray tie, and a surgical face mask. Only his eyes were blinking constantly, quickly and nervously. The presiding judge took his time. Schmitt went over each of the attacks, named victims one by one, described events in detail: the murder, the pillaging, the rape, the abductions. And then Schmitt said: “The chamber is aware that he suffered much. However, this case is about crimes committed by Dominic Ongwen as a responsible adult.” Schmitt then went through the 70 counts, one by one:
Guilty of war crimes, guilty of crimes against humanity, guilty of murder, guilty of pillaging, guilty of rape, guilty of torture, guilty of forcing women to marry him, guilty of forcing them to have his children, guilty of conscripting children into an armed group, guilty, guilty, guilty.
In the end, Schmitt had convicted him on 61 of the 70 counts. The only thing left to decide was the prison sentence, which will be announced at a later date, in a separate hearing. The maximum sentence at the International Criminal Court is 30 years.
The judges left quickly. Dominic Ongwen, however, lingered for a moment. Then he limped toward the door, his body looking heavy, burdened. He exited into a brightly lit hallway.
Johannes Böhme is a journalist based in Berlin, Germany. His work has been published in Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin, Die Zeit, The Believer and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Robin Hinsch is an Artist and Photographer based in Hamburg, Germany.
Brendan Spiegel is the Editorial Director and co-founder of Narratively.