Congo warlord sentenced to 30 years for war crimes

■ Bosco ‘Terminator’ guilty of murder, sexual slavery

The Hague: International Criminal Court judges handed Congolese rebel chief Bosco “Terminator” Ntaganda a 30-year jail term for war crimes on Thursday, the highest ever sentence passed down by the tribunal in The Hague.

Ntaganda was convicted in July of crimes including murder, persecution and sexual slavery for a series of massacres of civilians in Democratic Republic of Congo’s volatile, mineral-rich Ituri region in 2002 and 2003.

Condemning Rwandanborn Ntaganda’s “multiplicity of crimes”, judge Robert Flemr told him, “The overall sentence imposed on you shall, therefore, be 30 years of imprisonment. Murder was committed on a large scale,” Flemr said as he

◗ Ntaganda was the ruthless driver of ethnic Tutsi revolts amid the wars that convulsed the DRC after the 1994 genocide

passed sentence, saying that they had taken the “particular cruelty” of some of Ntaganda’s crimes. The judges gave him the maximum possible sentence allowed by the ICC in terms of the number of years, but said his crimes did not justify a full-life prison term, which is reserved for the

◗ 46-year-old warlord was convicted in July of crimes including murder, persecution and sexual slavery for a series of massacres of civilians in Democratic Republic of Congo’s volatile, mineral-rich Ituri region in 2002 and 2003

gravest offences.

Ntaganda, dressed in a blue suit and shirt and wearing a red tie, stood motionless in the highsecurity courtroom as he listened through headphones while the judgement was readout. An ICC spokesman confirmed that it was the heaviest ever penalty handed down by the court, which was set up in 2002 to try the worst crimes.

Judges said 46-year-old Ntaganda was the ruthless driver of ethnic Tutsi revolts amid the wars that convulsed the DRC after the 1994 genocide of Tutsis in neighbouring Rwanda. They said Ntaganda was a “key leader” of the Union of Congolese Patriots rebel group and its military wing, the Patriotic Forces for the Liberation of Congo.

Most of the charges related to two bloody operations by Ntaganda’s soldiers against civilians in rival villages in 2002 and 2003. The court heard fearful villagers dubbed him “Terminator” after the Arnold Schwarzenegger film about a merciless robotic killer.