The International Criminal Court will from Tuesday hear war crimes charges against fugitive Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, accused of spearheading a brutal reign of terror that killed tens of thousands.
Judges will hear 39 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity against Kony, including murder, torture, rape, sexual slavery and pillaging at the ICC’s first-ever in absentia hearing.
A former Catholic altar boy and self-styled prophet, Kony founded and led Uganda’s most vicious rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), in the 1980s.
The LRA rebellion against President Yoweri Museveni saw at least 100,000 killed, according to UN estimates, and 60,000 children abducted in a campaign that spread to several neighbouring countries.
Kony’s stated aim was to establish a nation based on the Bible’s 10 commandments but those who escaped told harrowing tales of the group’s brutality.
Children were forced to hack family members to death or bite other children until they died. Abducted girls became sex slaves, including for Kony himself.
Ex-detainees have also described gruesome rituals such as drinking victim’s blood and punitive amputations.
The group rampaged through refugee camps, decapitating civilians and burning people alive in their houses, while kidnapping children to serve as soldiers or slaves.
Among the allegations in the charge sheet, prosecutors said LRA fighters snatched a baby girl from one abductee, threw the infant into a river, and then set about the kidnapped woman with a machete.
Thought to be hiding in dense Central African jungle, Kony has not been seen in public for nearly two decades despite concerted efforts to capture him.
He attracted global attention in 2012 when a campaign to bring him to justice published a viral YouTube video that got more than 100 million views in a few days.
The then US president Barack Obama deployed around 100 special forces to work with regional armies to hunt him down, but the mission wrapped up in 2017 with no trace of Kony.
The threat posed by the LRA has since dramatically decreased.
Once counting several thousand fighters, it now has just a handful, dispersed across Sudan, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Central African Republic.
– ‘No benefit at all’ –
After the three days of hearings at the ICC, based in The Hague, judges will decide whether the accusations are sufficiently credible to proceed to a trial.
However, the court’s rules forbid any trial in absentia, meaning the case will not come to trial unless Kony is found and brought to The Hague.
Defence counsel for Kony has called for the hearing to be scrapped, describing it as an “enormous expense of time, money and effort for no benefit at all”.
But prosecutors have argued that holding the so-called confirmation of charges hearing would expedite any potential trial if Kony were arrested.
They also argue that hearing the accusations against Kony in the global court will bring some sense of justice for the victims.
Kony, who the court says was born in September 1961, has rarely met outsiders but said in a 2006 interview with a western journalist that he was “not a terrorist”.
He said reports of LRA atrocities were “not true” and “just propaganda”, also denying that his group abducted children.
The arrest warrant against Kony in 2005 was the first ever issued by the ICC, set up to try the world’s worst crimes.
In April, the court confirmed the award of 52 million euros to victims of Dominic Ongwen, a top LRA commander serving a 25-year jail sentence.
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