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<\/div>\nThe Americans were trying to hunt down Joseph\u00a0Kony, the despotic, unpredictable leader of the LRA. The U.S. soldiers came and picked\u00a0Ongwen\u00a0up by helicopter and revealed who he really was: one of five LRA commanders who were wanted for\u00a0war\u00a0crimes and\u00a0crimes against\u00a0humanity with a warrant from the International Criminal Court. The warrant for his arrest was almost\u00a010\u00a0years old. No one had expected him to turn up just like that.<\/p>\n
In the\u00a0months\u00a0before, his relationship with his boss had collapsed. Joseph\u00a0Kony\u00a0had thrown him in prison and threatened him with execution.\u00a0Ongwen\u00a0claimed that he had managed to escape with the help of one of\u00a0Kony\u2019s\u00a0own bodyguards.\u00a0He said that he had wandered around in the wilderness alone, for more than a month, surviving, among other things, an attack by a pack of lions. He seemed to believe that a higher power had helped him. A cloud, he said, had guided him on his way. He was obviously happy to be alive at all. His body bore the scars of\u00a011\u00a0bullet wounds.<\/p>\n
After\u00a0eight days, the Americans brought him to a Ugandan army camp, where the officers gave him fresh clothes\u00a0\u2014\u00a0a blue shirt, light trousers. He watched\u00a0soccer\u00a0matches, slept in an officers\u2019\u00a0tent,\u00a0and was told, wrongly, by a translator, that he would be brought home, to\u00a0northern Uganda. Instead, after\u00a010\u00a0days in Obo he was extradited to\u00a0The Hague.<\/p>\n
The French-American author Jonathan Littell happened to be\u00a0filming a movie\u00a0in Obo\u00a0on\u00a0the day that\u00a0Ongwen\u00a0was\u00a0extradited.\u00a0
Ten days later, on a cold January day, he appeared for the first time before a judge in\u00a0The Hague. The first words he spoke in the courtroom were:\u00a0\u201cFirst of all, I would like to thank God for creating Heaven and Earth together with everybody that\u2019s on Earth.\u201d\u00a0He looked young, slim and handsome. He had nervous eyes. He was wearing a suit for the first time in his life. Someone had helped him put in a checkered tie.<\/p>\n
It is hard to imagine how strange, odd and inscrutable the world must have felt to him during those first days in\u00a0The Hague: his aseptic cell, his fellow inmates and guards, none of whom spoke his language. He understood neither English nor French, only a few words in Swahili, which one other inmate spoke. He was as alone as a person can be.<\/p>\n
It was a cool morning, sunny, with a light breeze, when I visited Coorom. A few days later, the heat would return with the dry season. Fields would be scorched, streams would disappear, green would turn to yellow and brown. A small group of huts emerged as we approached in our car, just behind a high field of sorghum only days away from harvest. The compound where Ongwen was born is a quiet place. His uncle and aunt still live there, as does one of his cousins.<\/p>\n His relatives were polite and reserved. The compound had been swept just before I arrived. A tall papaya tree, with big green fruits, stood in the middle. His uncle, Odong Johnson, has the same, somewhat angular face as his nephew. He is missing three teeth in the top row and four in the bottom. At 67, he looked frail, melancholy, his body transformed by a life of hard work, war, displacement and loss.<\/p>\n Johnson told me that, when\u00a0Ongwen\u00a0surrendered in 2015, they had just started arranging a funeral for him. They had all thought he was long dead. It had taken them a long time to save enough money for the burial.<\/p>\n As a boy,\u00a0Ongwen\u00a0had been the best in his school of more than a hundred children, Johnson said. He had always learned quickly and easily. And he had been eager to please. He never complained about his household chores: fetching water from the river half a mile away, tethering the goats in the evening, lighting the fire for the night.<\/p>\n Ongwen\u2019s\u00a0father was a catechist, a Catholic lay priest and teacher, a deeply pious man, who was eager to provide his son with a good education.\u00a0Ongwen\u00a0often stayed overnight with his grandfather, who lived in a hut surrounded by mango, banana and orange trees a short distance away from the others. In the evenings by the fire,\u00a0Ongwen\u00a0told jokes and riddles that his uncle still remembered more than three decades later.<\/p>\n Many of the troops who fought for Obote belonged to\u00a0Ongwen\u2019s\u00a0ethnic group, the Acholi. They fought for the losing side. In January 1986, Museveni\u2019s troops conquered the capital, Kampala. Thousands of defeated Acholi soldiers fled north, trying to hide in their home villages. The new government\u2019s troops followed soon afterward.\u00a0Ongwen\u00a0was about\u00a08\u00a0years old when the war arrived in his district.<\/p>\n Acholi\u00a0land was enemy territory for the soldiers from the\u00a0south,\u00a0and they behaved accordingly. Thousands of ordinary Acholi who had nothing to do with Obote\u2019s army were arrested. Hundreds were summarily executed. As a reaction to the violence from the government troops, several rebel groups emerged. One of them was the Lord\u2019s Resistance Army, the LRA. Their founder, Joseph\u00a0Kony, was an\u00a0ajwaka<\/em>, a witch doctor.<\/p>\n Spirit\u00a0worship\u00a0remains\u00a0 Kony, however, invented spiritual beliefs and practices that went far beyond Acholi tradition. He claimed to be in contact with powerful\u00a0new\u00a0spirits. When\u00a0Kony\u00a0communicated with these spirits,\u00a0he\u00a0went into a trance. His voice changed. The ghosts, he said, ordered him to overthrow the government. These weren\u2019t the traditional ghosts meant for farmers and herdsmen. They were ghosts for a rebel leader.<\/p>\n Kony\u00a0left his home village, Odek, in spring 1987, with only a handful of followers. Shortly afterward,\u00a0he was joined by a group of soldiers from Obote\u2019s old army. The soldiers taught this strange new prophet how to wage a guerrilla war. The LRA became a hybrid between an army and a religious cult.<\/p>\n What the LRA lacked, initially, were soldiers. Too few volunteered. The belief\u00a0system of the LRA was too foreign, too strange, too radical to attract widespread support. So\u00a0Kony\u00a0soon reverted to an old strategy, one that had been used in the civil war in Angola, by other military groups that lacked public support:\u00a0He started kidnapping children.<\/p>\n Children were more malleable than adults.\u00a0They didn\u2019t ask for wages,\u00a0and when forcibly recruited, they didn\u2019t run away as often as adults did.<\/p>\n Only one of the two eyewitnesses to Ongwen\u2019s kidnapping is still alive. Joe Kakanyero,\u00a0one of Ongwen\u2019s\u00a0cousins,\u00a0is a delicate man with fine facial features. When I visited his home,\u00a0the table in his hut had been set with an embroidered white blanket. A Bible lay open on top. The worn pages and frayed seams suggested that it had been read over and over again. Kakanyero had been reading the Gospel of John, the pages about the first appearance of Jesus Christ.<\/p>\n \u201cThe soldiers waited for us on our way back from school,\u201d Kakanyero recalled. \u201cThey were hiding at the side of the road. They had guns. They ordered us to follow them into the bush.\u201d Kakanyero remembered that on their first day with the soldiers, he and his cousin marched until dark. \u201cWe kept changing directions. We moved like blind people, here and there,\u201d he said. Their school uniforms, the white shirt, the dark blue trousers, were torn up by tree branches, bushes and thorns. They wouldn\u2019t take them off for four months.<\/p>\n In the evening, the rebels smeared shea butter, a creamy, light oil, on their chest and back, he recalled. They had been told the paste was sacred. In the LRA, many believed that shea butter, mixed with water, protected them from material and metaphysical threats alike \u2014bullets and evil spirits.<\/p>\n At some point in the first three days, the rebels caught an abductee who had tried to escape.\u00a0\u201cThey tied his hands behind his back,\u201d\u00a0Kakanyero\u00a0said. The soldiers had called the children together\u00a0\u2014 \u201cthey put him on his stomach\u201d\u00a0\u2014\u00a0and forced them to watch.\u00a0\u201cThey hit\u00a0his head with the blunt side of the axe until his brain was no more.\u201d\u00a0None of the children started crying. Kakanyero remembered the total silence afterward.\u00a0\u201cI realized that if I didn\u2019t do what they wanted me to do, they would kill me,\u201d\u00a0he said.\u00a0\u201cIf I wanted to survive, I had to obey.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u00a0was\u00a0a lesson that\u00a0Ongwen\u00a0would\u00a0internalize more than\u00a0anybody else.<\/p>\n Three and a half months later,\u00a0the cousins were separated by the LRA. Kakanyero\u00a0said that he\u00a0managed to escape from the rebel group after\u00a0four years. The two cousins would only see each other again more than three decades later, in 2018, in a courtroom in\u00a0The Hague.<\/p>\n The International Criminal Court was established on July 1, 2002, and its very first warrant of arrest, in 2005, was for five LRA commanders. Of those five, only two are still alive: Kony and Ongwen.<\/p>\n The prosecutors in\u00a0The Hague\u00a0knew of Ongwen\u2019s past. They\u00a0knew that he\u00a0had been\u00a0a child soldier, but\u00a0\u201cit didn\u2019t matter,\u201d\u00a0former chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo\u00a0told me\u00a0in a phone\u00a0conservation.\u00a0\u201cWe considered Ongwen responsible for the decisions he made as an adult.\u201d<\/p>\n Once he was in\u00a0The Hague,\u00a0the prosecutors charged him with 70 counts of\u00a0war\u00a0crimes and\u00a0crimes against\u00a0humanity. The charges included murder, torture, robbery, kidnapping of children and adults to turn them into soldiers, crimes against human dignity,\u00a0and\u00a0rape and enslavement of young women and girls. The list of charges is so long that it took the court clerk more than 26 minutes to read them out at the beginning of the trial.<\/p>\n The court would have to decide whether to believe the excuses that Ongwen\u2019s lawyers presented. Bad childhood experiences alone,\u00a0though, no matter how horrific, would not be enough to spare him. At the beginning of the proceedings, Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda made clear that in most courts you meet perpetrators who have been victims at some point in their lives:\u00a0\u201cHaving\u00a0suffered victimization in the past is not a justification, nor an excuse,\u00a0to victimize others,\u201d\u00a0she said.\u00a0Then she added:\u00a0\u201cEach human being must be considered to be endowed with moral responsibility for their actions.\u201d<\/p>\n Dominic Ongwen\u2019s case, however, is\u00a0a unique\u00a0one. He is the only former child abductee who has ever been tried\u00a0in\u00a0the International Criminal Court.<\/p>\n On the day that Ongwen was taken, his mother was killed, according to his uncle and aunt. She had run after the rebels to reclaim her child, they told me. The family tried to hold her back, but she could not be dissuaded. The next morning, the family found her body on the riverbank. She had been beaten to death with bricks.<\/p>\n It\u2019s less clear what happened to Ongwen\u2019s father. There are no direct eyewitnesses to his death, but all family members said that he was shot by government soldiers sometime after Ongwen\u2019s abduction.<\/p>\n Ongwen found out about their deaths, at the very latest, a year after his abduction when one of his cousins, Lily Atong, who was slightly younger than him, was also kidnapped. They met and she told him everything. He may have already suspected it,\u00a0but at this moment it fully dawned on him that he was an orphan, hardly 10 years old, completely abandoned in a cruel, indifferent world that did not seem to\u00a0care whether he lived or died.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was one of the bravest soldiers I\u2019ve ever had,\u201d said Caesar Achellam, a former major general in the LRA, who met Ongwen for the first time in 1991 when Ongwen was about 13 years old. Achellam walks with a limp, the result of an old bullet wound. He is tall, thin, and straight as a stick. He speaks English with a slight lisp, which makes him seem more innocent than he is. Achellam was for a long time the third in command in the LRA, their chief diplomat and organizer. In 2012 he surrendered to the Ugandan army. He has never been indicted by the International Criminal Court. Instead, he received amnesty from the Ugandan government. In recent years, he has been living in a small village just outside of Gulu, the largest city in northern Uganda<\/p>\n \u201cWhen he became my bodyguard, he was very young,\u201d Achellam says of Ongwen. \u201cHe had had three other commanders before. They all died. He was loyal, obedient, disciplined. I protected him like my younger brother. He carried my rifle, my chair, my mattress\u201d \u2014 the typical duties of a bodyguard in the LRA \u2014 \u201cI took him with me when I went into battle. Our strategy was based on surprise attacks, on ambushes. We often sustained heavy casualties. I have seen many men who faltered in these situations. People who were much older than him and who turned out to be cowards. Not him.\u201d<\/p>\n Chapter 3<\/p>\n In the early 1990s, the LRA withdrew from Uganda and escaped north across the border into Sudan. The Sudanese government, under the dictator Umar Al-Bashir, permitted Joseph Kony to set up camps near the border and also procured weapons and rations for the Ugandan rebels. Small troops of fighters set off regularly to kidnap more children in Uganda and bring them back to the bases in Sudan. At one point, these camps housed about 5,000 abductees, many of them adolescents. The LRA trained them for an invasion into Uganda to overthrow President Museveni. But that invasion never happened.<\/p>\n Former fighters who went on raids with\u00a0Ongwen\u00a0into Uganda in the 1990s remember\u00a0him\u00a0as a young man whose fearlessness had an almost suicidal edge. He was shot several times, in the chest and leg; he survived a cholera epidemic in the Sudanese camp that killed hundreds, and a famine that lasted for months. At one point,\u00a0people started eating soil and grass. Ongwen told his psychiatrists in prison that sometimes he only ate\u00a010\u00a0bean seeds a day.<\/p>\n Ongwen was made an officer at the age of about 19, said Achellam.\u00a0\u201cHe was already a very experienced soldier by then.\u201d<\/p>\n Ongwen\u2019s face looked bloated during the last weeks of the trial in early 2020, possibly a result of the drugs he had been taking to treat depression and sleeplessness. He had shaved off his hair. As the trial neared its conclusion, his depression seemed to deepen week by week. His movements got slower and slower, until they looked like a video in slow motion.<\/p>\n He told his doctors that he felt that God hated him. Once, he asked the prison staff to perform Acholi cleansing rituals on him, to lift the curse that had been put upon him.<\/p>\n Ongwen\u2019s lawyer is Krispus Ayena Odongo, a Ugandan opposition politician and former parliamentarian. Ayena told me that Ongwen had tried to take his own life\u00a0more than once\u00a0in prison. In one instance, he drank laundry\u00a0detergent. Another time he bashed his head against a bare wall.\u00a0He also started a hunger strike, which he broke off after just five days.<\/p>\n On the first day of the main trial,\u00a0Ongwen declared:\u00a0\u201cIt was the LRA who abducted people in\u00a0northern Uganda. The LRA killed people in northern Uganda. The LRA committed atrocities in northern Uganda, and I\u2019m one of the people against whom the LRA committed atrocities. But it\u2019s not me, Dominic Ongwen, personally, who is the LRA.\u201d<\/p>\n Those words are all he has\u00a0ever said on the question of his guilt, or\u00a0his responsibility.<\/p>\n Ongwen was a young man, between 24 and 27 years old, when he allegedly committed the crimes for which he is now in prison. During the early 2000s, the war in northern Uganda entered its final, most brutal phase. The LRA had been driven out of Sudan in 2002 by the Ugandan army. Instead of surrendering, thousands of LRA fighters infiltrated Uganda. LRA members started a new wave of kidnappings, far worse than what they had done before that. In 2003, the LRA abducted 6,500 people, most of them between 11 and 17 years old.<\/p>\n It was during this period that Ongwen distinguished himself as an officer. From summer 2002 to autumn 2005, he was responsible for at least 28 attacks, according to the records of the Ugandan intelligence service and the army, who intercepted radio calls by the LRA. He set ambushes, attacked army patrols, overran remote barracks, burned down entire villages, raided Catholic missions to steal their radios, and was an unrelenting kidnapper.<\/p>\n He was always on the move, often marching in a group of 50 fighters, all of whom spread out around him within shouting distance. Wherever he went, former LRA members said, he had bodyguards with him, many of them\u00a0minors. At night they slept in a circle around his tent.\u00a0\u201cHe was never afraid,\u201d\u00a0one of his former fighters told me.\u00a0\u201cHis whole mind was set on war,\u201d\u00a0said another.<\/p>\n The village of Odek, the birthplace of Joseph Kony, is set in a flat, fertile landscape, by a small river. Like most tyrants, Kony loved grand, dramatic gestures. In 2004 he ordered his fighters to attack the refugee camp that had sprung up there, in the place where he grew up. As commander for this mission, he selected Dominic Ongwen.<\/p>\n Three former LRA fighters testified in court that they saw how Dominic Ongwen gave instructions for the attack. According to one of them, at the meeting before the attack, he said that it was time to\u00a0\u201cgo to work.\u201d\u00a0Another said\u00a0that\u00a0Ongwen told them to\u00a0\u201cexterminate everything that you see.\u201d<\/p>\n The fighters arrived at the edge of the camp just before sunset. It was April 29, 2004. About 3,000 people were living in Odek at that time, most of them refugees who had been forcibly displaced by the Ugandan government\u00a0during\u00a0their war with the LRA.<\/p>\n The massacre barely\u00a0lasted\u00a0an hour. The court transcripts give the impression that the main purpose was not necessarily to inflict as much harm as possible,\u00a0or\u00a0to kill everyone in sight, but that the violence was deliberately chaotic, to spread\u00a0the\u00a0kind of fear that would stay with the survivors for the rest of their lives. One LRA soldier led a schoolboy through the camp on a rope. The schoolboy later testified in court that\u00a0\u201cevery time we came to a house, he would open the door and shoot at people, just to demonstrate that if we try to flee, he was going to shoot us.\u201d\u00a0They also set fire to a number of huts, usually with frightened people still hiding inside. They fired through closed doors. They tore babies out of their mothers\u2019\u00a0arms and killed them.<\/p>\n The next day,\u00a0Ongwen got on the radio and reported back to Joseph Kony. The call was intercepted both by the Ugandan army and intelligence services.<\/p>\n Kony said,\u00a0\u201cDid you clean up the backside of my mother?\u201d<\/p>\n Ongwen replied:\u00a0\u201cKici kici<\/em>,\u201d\u00a0meaning\u00a0\u201ccompletely.\u201d<\/p>\n Around 60 people died in the attack on Odek. On the morning after, an elderly couple was found lying in a pool of blood\u00a0in front of their little shop; a newly married man was discovered dead with a bullet wound in his back, executed,\u00a0like many others,\u00a0at close range. A young mother had fallen, her face buried in the mud, her baby still alive, tied\u00a0to\u00a0her back.<\/p>\n Why didn\u2019t Ongwen defect much earlier, like so many others? There were many times when he was hundreds of miles away from Kony, alone with his troops in the bush. There were times when Kony could not reach him over the radio for weeks on end. At what point did it become his own decision to stay? Did it ever really?<\/p>\n Whatever drove him, Ongwen was steadfast in his loyalty to Kony for many years. He was the last LRA commander to leave Uganda after the group retreated in the face of mounting military pressure from the Ugandan army. He crossed over the Nile into the Democratic Republic of Congo. Later, he moved with a small number of troops through the Central African Republic and Sudan. He committed further, even more violent massacres.<\/p>\n The people that were with him during that time told me that he became desperate and hopeless, that he spoke with increasing frequency and openness about defecting.<\/p>\n But he only left after his relationship with Kony broke down. Kony was notoriously paranoid\u00a0\u2014\u00a0always anxious that his commanders might betray him. According to former LRA soldiers,\u00a0Ongwen openly contradicted Kony on several occasions\u00a0\u2014\u00a0something almost unheard of in the strictly hierarchical LRA. He was eventually placed under arrest. It seemed only a matter of time before he would be executed, like so many commanders before him.<\/p>\n After his surrender in the Central African Republic, he agreed to record a message addressing his former fighters. He called on them to defect:\u00a0\u201cYou all know how brave I was. If even I decide to come out of the bush, what are you still doing there?\u201d<\/p>\n It is not easy to reconcile the accounts that different witnesses have provided about Ongwen. They seem incongruent \u2014 full of conflicting, contrasting character traits. Ongwen himself provided an explanation that might seem like a solution, but possibly one that is too convenient. He told his two Ugandan psychiatrists, Dickens Akena and Emilio Ovuga, who testified on his behalf in court, that two distinct personalities inside him are constantly fighting for control. He calls them Dominic A and Dominic B. One is good, friendly, helpful. The other one is angry and aggressive.<\/p>\n He claims that when he was still with the LRA, he suffered hour-long blackouts; that he couldn\u2019t remember what happened while his dark alter\u00a0ego, Dominic B, went into combat.<\/p>\n Ongwen\u2019s account of his two personalities has varied. At times he has claimed he has complete amnesia about the actions of his dark self, that he couldn\u2019t remember anything that he did in those hours. At other times he has described Dominic B as somebody who walked next to him or pushed him forward into battle, preventing him from retreating. Ongwen\u00a0has\u00a0even said that he could sometimes see Dominic B, his angry self, alongside him.<\/p>\n Several of the women whom Dominic Ongwen once called his wives live just a few hundred yards apart on the outskirts of Gulu. They have built small thatched huts in a tightly packed settlement. Most of them have no land on which to grow vegetables. There is no running water. Malaria is common. They live here because they have no other place to go.<\/p>\n Acholi women who marry and bear children usually leave their family and move to their husband\u2019s village, and their children belong to the husband\u2019s clan, not the mother\u2019s. But for these women, traditional customs do not apply. Their children were conceived in the LRA, under the constant threat of force. The father of their children is in prison, and many of the women do not see Ongwen as their legitimate husband anyway, but as their tormentor. Others, however, still say that they love him.<\/p>\n Dillish Abang, 26 years old, has seven children with Ongwen. Her youngest son was conceived in The Hague (conjugal visits are permitted in Dutch prisons) and is now 2 years old. He is a healthy boy with a round face, and he sat patiently on his mother\u2019s lap for almost an hour while she talked to me. Abang said that she speaks to Ongwen almost every week. He tells her about his nightmares in prison, his new friends \u2014 all fellow inmates also accused of war crimes \u2014 and his hobbies: He has learned to play the piano and developed a passion for baking in the prison kitchen. According to Abang, he is a loyal, caring, attentive father, eager to find out how his children are doing in school. She told me that he has always treated her well.<\/p>\n Irene Fatuma Lakica, 30, lives less than a 15-minute walk from Abang. When I met her, she was wearing a green T-shirt with winged horses on it. She cried briefly, two or three tears, which she wiped away quickly, while she talked about Ongwen and how he had raped her, once every few weeks. How he had threatened her with a machete if she refused.<\/p>\n Six women have described similar attacks in court in\u00a0The Hague. One said that she was about 10 years old when Ongwen told her he wanted to have sex with her. That she was beaten every day for a week by his bodyguards until she could not resist anymore. That she had been so small that she had to be lifted onto his bed because it was so high. That he bragged about it the next day to his bodyguards, telling them that he had\u00a0\u201ctorn a plastic bag.\u201d\u00a0Not even his own lawyers have denied that he is a rapist. They merely claim that he wasn\u2019t\u00a0responsible<\/em>\u00a0for his actions.<\/p>\n And yet, while the women have agreed on little else about him, their perspectives converge on one issue:\u00a0None of them\u00a0think\u00a0that\u00a0he\u00a0was\u00a0insane.<\/p>\n Emilio Ovuga, professor of psychiatry in Gulu, is a small, gray-haired man. When he testified on November 22, 2019, it was a cold day, and he was wearing a coat over his suit, even in the courtroom. He spoke slowly, with a frail voice and dry wit. Ovuga was the last witness in the trial. He was also, perhaps, the most important.<\/p>\n The lead prosecutor in the case, Benjamin Gumpert, took on the cross-examination. Gumpert is a 57-year-old Brit, educated in Cambridge. He has a scar on his chin,\u00a0and dark, dense hair\u00a0that\u00a0makes him look much more boyish than his age would suggest. Gumpert is a tough, aggressive interrogator, whose only weakness on\u00a0the stand seems to be that he sometimes enjoys\u00a0his work a bit too much.<\/p>\n The question that day was a difficult one:\u00a0How exactly did Ovuga come up with the unusual diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder (previously called multiple personality disorder)? Many psychiatrists say the illness is extremely rare. Some even believe that it doesn\u2019t exist at all, at least\u00a0not\u00a0in its most extreme manifestation\u00a0\u2014\u00a0as several completely separate personalities.<\/p>\n \u201cDoctor,\u201d\u00a0said Gumpert,\u00a0\u201cif you have two distinct personalities, one of which is nice, kind, reasonable, fair; the other of which is vicious, violent and angry;\u00a0and you are alternating between those personalities, as Mr. Ongwen told you he was as often as three times a week\u00a0\u2014\u00a0ordinary people, even lawyers, people who work in other fields, not doctors, are going to notice, aren\u2019t they? It\u2019s only common sense.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt is not common\u00a0sense,\u201d\u00a0said Ovuga.\u00a0\u201cAnd common\u00a0sense does not apply to everybody.\u00a0People who do not suffer from severe mental illness cope with their disability, so that those around them will not notice that something is wrong. In most cases they will not notice it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSo let\u2019s just try and understand the mechanism,\u201d\u00a0the prosecutor continued.\u00a0\u201cDominic\u2019s with his soldiers and the women he regards as his wives. The other Dominic, the Dominic B, the nasty, vicious, angry, violent one, comes upon him, but Dominic A is able, by coping, to disguise to the outside world Dominic B\u2019s true personality and to pretend still to be Dominic A. Is that what\u2019s happening?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYes.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cProfessor, I suggest that that is\u00a0\u2014\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNot correct?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNonsense.\u201d<\/p>\n Gumpert later had to apologize for that last, discourteous word. But he was not alone in his assessment. After the cross-examination, German professor of psychology Roland Weierstall-Pust wrote a\u00a0comprehensive,\u00a0withering assessment of Ovuga\u2019s work, declaring that Ovuga\u2019s psychiatric evaluation of Ongwen was\u00a0\u201cinsufficient, unfounded, contradictory and sloppy in almost every aspect and does not fulfill the criteria of a professional forensic report according to the current state-of-the-art.\u201d<\/p>\n On the last day of closing statements, Krispus Ayena Odongo, Ongwen\u2019s lawyer, arrived unprepared. It was March 12, 2020. Ayena was standing behind his desk, in socks, his feet sticking out from under his black robe. Ongwen\u2019s lawyer has a deep and powerful voice. He is capable of delivering points forcefully. But now, when he tried to speak freely, at this decisive moment, he couldn\u2019t. He could not remember the words. He had to stop, again and again. Several times he went quiet midsentence, not remembering the end.<\/p>\n Ayena had already started to look out of his depth during the last months of trial. He had dozed off multiple times while his colleagues were questioning key witnesses, including some of the psychiatric experts.<\/p>\n In the last half\u00a0hour of his plea, Ayena finally stopped looking at his notes altogether and went into a freewheeling, stream-of-consciousness oration, in which he suggested that the judges should think\u00a0\u201cout of the box.\u201d\u00a0He joked that Colin Black, one of the prosecutors, was not black at all, but white. He gave a brief lecture on the Nuremberg trials and explained to the presiding judge, Bertram Schmitt, a German, that the Wehrmacht during World War II was a regular army\u00a0\u201cwhich knew the laws of war,\u201d\u00a0unlike the LRA.<\/p>\n In the rows behind Ayena, his colleagues on the defense team started collecting their documents and putting them in their bags. Ongwen, meanwhile, just sat there, as he did so often, with his hands folded in his lap, while his lawyer came up with his last, simple plea for mercy:\u00a0\u201cGive Ongwen a chance to go home after 32 years. Whatever verdict you come up with, the sentence should be so mild. I mean, of course, I know that we have been reading from the same page\u00a0\u2026 and we pray that you acquit him. But in case he\u2019s not acquitted, our prayers remain that you give him a mild sentence.\u201d<\/p>\n Ongwen remained still, almost motionless, while Schmitt read out the verdict. He wore a dark suit, a blue shirt with a gray tie, and a surgical face mask. Only his eyes were blinking constantly, quickly and nervously. The presiding judge took his time. Schmitt went over each of the attacks, named victims one by one, described events in detail: the murder, the pillaging, the rape, the abductions. And then Schmitt said: \u201cThe chamber is aware that he suffered much. However, this case is about crimes committed by Dominic Ongwen as a responsible adult.\u201d Schmitt then went through the 70 counts, one by one:<\/p>\n Guilty of war crimes, guilty of crimes against humanity, guilty of murder, guilty of pillaging, guilty of rape, guilty of torture, guilty of forcing women to marry him, guilty of forcing them to have his children, guilty of conscripting children into an armed group, guilty, guilty, guilty.<\/p>\n In the end, Schmitt had convicted him on 61 of the 70 counts. The only thing left to decide was the prison sentence, which will be announced at a later date, in a separate hearing. The maximum sentence at the International Criminal Court is 30 years.<\/p>\n The judges left quickly. Dominic Ongwen, however, lingered for a moment. Then he limped toward the door, his body looking heavy, burdened. He exited into a brightly lit hallway.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dominic Ongwen Kidnapped at 9 by Joseph Kony\u2019s notorious guerilla army.\u00a0 Dominic Ongwen was groomed to kill. Is he a lost soul deserving of mercy, or a cold-blooded war criminal who must face justice? He didn\u2019t look at her for a long time. He stared at the edge of the table in front of him, Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1923,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[39,52,40,5,51,1],"tags":[817,818,819,816],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1916"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1916"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1922,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1916\/revisions\/1922"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Chapter](\"https:\/\/ci3.googleusercontent.com\/proxy\/WA7HNNyIi1lnXFeeD7jV-TFqnmnFxrxFTG_jONBS_Af6uRMQGcZMPy5diVSkdq1MDk4G9Eyji9GkBma4DsmWbhH324VXtOUabbt-IiIk_-KG-OAmcrzYdg8B=s0-d-e1-ft#https:\/\/narratively.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/part-02-1320x185.png\")
<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n![\"Chapter](\"https:\/\/ci3.googleusercontent.com\/proxy\/XXn7C7HhpYW84ChGBkMObQV_0K00_JyashmDa4wuOaWBPju-NZ2DqK0Td7YUpIVD9tp2nTJLBpYt0E4kXxF_AJhQHc4p2GLnK-WXL6RO_d1Dx_v0U-u5A2wd=s0-d-e1-ft#https:\/\/narratively.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/part-04-1320x185.png\")
<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n![\"Chapter](\"https:\/\/ci3.googleusercontent.com\/proxy\/w6RrPaNtmmMFkk7h8T8Op7dXAEiJUiwCXCn2M2-KZb09eXNo0tIhs3a5uc-Q1wrNm6MUIUK316qR3NCDSidLSpuIqcmrukkAOPdMRzfOeEVCsrTqqQx6oe5H=s0-d-e1-ft#https:\/\/narratively.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/part-05-1320x184.png\")
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