Ex-commander of a Ugandan rebel group has been sentenced to 40 years in prison

A former commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army rebels was sentenced by a court in Uganda on Friday to 40 years in prison for brutal crimes committed by the group during its insurgency that started in the 1980s.

Thomas Kwoyelo — a former child soldier who later became a rebel commander — will serve only 25 years in jail as he has been in government custody for 15 years, the court ruled.

Kwoyelo's jail sentence applies to the most serious crimes he faced, including multiple counts of murder, rape, pillaging, and enslavement. The sentence was delivered by a panel of the High Court that sat in Gulu, the northern city where the LRA was once active. Kwoyelo can appeal.

Grace Apio, a Ugandan victim of the LRA insurgency, told The Associated Press that she felt the sentence was lenient.

The sentence “is very little for us, the victims,” she said. “We feel very bad ... This sentence will encourage other people who want to start a war that in Uganda, after committing these atrocities, you will end up with a light sentence and then you come back to society and start your life again.”

Kwoyelo was convicted in August on 44 of the 78 counts he faced for crimes committed during the insurgency between 1992 and 2005.

Kwoyelo, whose trial began in 2019, had been in detention since 2009 as Ugandan authorities tried to figure out how to dispense justice in a way that was fair and credible. Human Rights Watch described his trial as “a rare opportunity for justice for victims of the two-decade war between” Ugandan troops and the LRA.

Prosecutors said Kwoyelo held the military rank of colonel within the LRA and that he ordered violent attacks on civilians, many of them displaced by the rebellion.

The LRA’s overall leader, Joseph Kony, is believed to be hiding in a vast area of ungoverned bush in central Africa. The U.S. has offered $5 million as a reward for information leading to the capture of Kony, who is also wanted by the International Criminal Court.

One of Kony’s lieutenants, Dominic Ongwen, was sentenced in 2021 by the ICC to 25 years of imprisonment for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Thousands of other rebel combatants have received Ugandan government amnesty over the years, but Kwoyelo, who was captured in neighboring Congo, was denied such reprieve. Ugandan officials have never explained why.

Kwoyelo, who denied the charges against him, testified that only Kony could answer for LRA crimes, and said everyone in the LRA faced death for disobeying the warlord.

The LRA, which began in Uganda as an anti-government rebellion — and later expanded its operations to neighboring Congo as well as Central African Republic — was accused of recruiting boys to fight and keeping girls as sex slaves. At the peak of its power, the group was a notoriously brutal outfit whose members for years eluded Ugandan forces in northern Uganda.

The LRA was accused of committing multiple massacres targeting mostly members of the Acholi ethnic group. Kony, himself an Acholi, is a self-proclaimed messiah who said early in his rebellion that he wanted to rule Uganda according to the biblical Ten Commandments.

When military pressure forced the LRA out of Uganda in 2005, the rebels scattered across parts of central Africa. The group has faded in recent years, and reports of LRA attacks are rare.