Ugandan warlord’s defence to open at ICC

THE HAGUE: Notorious Lord’s Resistance Army commander Dominic Ongwen’s lawyers open their defence at the International Criminal Court on Tuesday, where their client is charged with conducting a reign of terror in northern Uganda in the early 2000s.

Known as the “White Ant”, Ongwen faces 70 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity for his role from 2002 to 2005 in the sinister LRA rebel group, led by its fugitive chief Joseph Kony.

Ongwen is also the first accused before The Haguebased ICC to face the very same charges of which he is also a victim.

Born in 1975, Ongwen was abducted as a young boy while walking to school and was soon trained as a child soldier within the LRA.

Prosecutors said he grew up to become a “ferocious” senior LRA commander in charge of Kony’s infamous Sinai brigade – which among many crimes committed also abducted young girls and women to serve as domestic workers and sex slaves.

Ongwen was “enthusiastic in adopting the LRA’s violent methods and eager to show he could be more active and more brutal” than others, prosecutors said as his trial opened in January 2016.

ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda at the time played a gruesome video depicting the aftermath of an LRA attack on a refugee camp, shocking the courtroom with images of disembowelled children and charred bodies of babies in shallow graves.

In another attack against the Odek refugee camp in 2004, Ongwen instructed his troops that “nothing should be left alive,” prosecutors said.

Ongwen, now around 43, has denied the charges, insisting it was the LRA, not him, who murdered defenceless refugees.