AFP
© STUART PRICE via AFP
Ugandan army commandos have destroyed camps belonging to Joseph Kony, the fugitive leader of the feared Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in the Central African Republic, Uganda’s military said on Tuesday.
The operation was carried out jointly with armed forces from South Sudan and CAR against three camps east of Sam Ouandja near the Sudan border, said the Uganda Peoples’ Defence Forces (UPDF).
“All camps were destroyed, and equipment was captured,” the UPDF said in a statement on X, formerly Twitter.
Kony has been wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) since 2005 for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity over the LRA’s three-decade reign of terror across several African nations.
“Remnants of the LRA still taking refuge in CAR or elsewhere on the African continent will be hunted down. Unless they surrender to the authorities for proper processing and rehabilitation, they will continue to be considered criminals,” it added.
The Ugandan army post featured a picture of a building in flames, but did not mention if there were casualties during the raids, nor say if Kony was there at the time.
Kony, a former altar boy turned warlord, founded the LRA in the 1980s with the aim of setting up a regime based on his version of the Ten Commandments, launching a rebellion against Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni that spread to the CAR, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan.
He has been accused by the Hague-based ICC of murder, cruel treatment, enslavement, rape, and attacks against civilian populations.
The militia killed more than 100,000 people and abducted 60,000 children who were forced to become sex slaves, soldiers and porters.
– Landmark Uganda trial –
A Ugandan court last week found a former LRA commander guilty of multiple counts of crimes against humanity in the first such trial in the East African country.
Thomas Kwoyelo was convicted of 44 offences including murder, rape, torture, pillaging, abduction and the destruction of settlements for internally displaced people.
Kwoyelo, who had been waiting for years behind bars for a verdict in the landmark case, had denied all the charges against him. He was cleared of three counts of murder while 31 “alternate offences” were dismissed.
The court will hold hearings in October to confirm charges against the 62-year-old Kony.
It will be the first time the tribunal — which opened its doors in 2002 to try the world’s worst crimes — will hold a hearing to see if an absent suspect should be sent to trial.
Although suspects cannot be tried in absentia at the ICC, it is possible to hold confirmation hearings while they are still fugitives to speed up the process.
In 2021, Dominic Ongwen, a Ugandan child soldier who became a top LRA commander, was sentenced by the ICC to 25 years in prison for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The court threw out his appeal in December 2022.