Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Congo Warlord Called ‘the Terminator’ Is Convicted of War Crimes by I.C.C.

The Congolese militia commander Bosco Ntaganda at the International Criminal Court in the Hague on Monday.Credit...Pool photo by Eva Plevier

DAKAR, Senegal — His army conscripted children and outfitted them with ill-fitting uniforms and AK-47s. Female fighters, some underaged, were made sex slaves.

He personally shot and killed an elderly Catholic priest, and was responsible for the massacre of a village, not sparing women or babies.

A Congolese warlord known as “the Terminator” carried out those and other atrocities in a reign of terror against civilians in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which convicted him on Monday of 13 counts of war crimes and five counts of crimes against humanity, committed in the 2002-2003 ethnic conflict between Lendu and Hema in Congo’s Ituri region.

The warlord, Bosco Ntaganda, 45, was convicted by a three-judge panel of charges including murder, rape, sexual slavery, intentionally directing attacks against civilians, ordering the displacement of the civilian population, and conscripting children into an armed group.

He has not yet been sentenced, and has 30 days to appeal. He could face life in prison.

But the verdict, against a man whose power had made him seem invulnerable, sends a strong warning to other abusive commanders, analysts said.

“When warlords see these convictions, they know they can be prosecuted,” said Kathryn Sikkink, a professor of human rights policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

She said the conviction of Mr. Ntaganda was important, partly because it showed what the court can do if the court’s own members — the 122 states that are party to the treaty that created the court — fail to act on their own.

And rights experts said the verdict represented an important victory for the court’s chief prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, who was appointed seven years ago and has faced repeated frustrations and setbacks in several high-profile cases. In light of those failures, critics of the court have increasingly raised basic questions about the court’s effectiveness.

In 2014, amid accusations that the Kenyan government had harassed potential witnesses, Ms. Bensouda dropped charges of crimes against humanity against President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya, saying she lacked enough evidence to proceed.

Last year, appeals judges at the court overturned a war-crimes conviction for Jean-Pierre Bemba, a former vice president of the Democratic Republic of Congo. And this year, a former president of Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo, and one of his aides, were acquitted of crimes against humanity.

Burundi and the Philippines, outraged over Ms. Bensouda’s investigations of their leaders, have quit the court. And the United States, which is not a member of the court, revoked Ms. Bensouda’s visa a few months ago over her effort to investigate allegations of war crimes committed in Afghanistan — including any that may have been perpetrated by American forces.

“The past few months, and even last year, have been filled with disappointments and setbacks for the I.C.C.,” said Amal Nassar, The Hague representative for the International Federation for Human Rights, a Paris-based advocacy group.

Still, Ms. Nassar expressed hope that the guilty verdict in Mr. Ntaganda’s case, should it stand up on appeal, “somehow restores hope and confidence in the court.”

Known for his pencil mustache and luxury lifestyle, Mr. Ntaganda was the chief of military operations for the Union of Congolese Patriots, a rebel group, and its armed faction, the Patriotic Forces for the Liberation of Congo, in a conflict over control of land, trading routes and gold mines. Civilians were caught in the middle.

Mr. Ntaganda was first indicted in 2006 but only stood trial years later, after turning himself in at the United States Embassy in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, in March 2013. Experts suspect that he surrendered because he feared for his life: There had been a split in the latest rebel group he had formed, M23, and it appeared that he had lost the support of his Rwandan backers.

During the trial, Mr. Ntaganda told the court that he was “not a criminal” but a “trained officer” who always protected civilians.

“I ask you to make a distinction between a revolutionary rebel and a criminal,” Mr. Ntaganda said at his trial, which lasted from September 2015 until last August.

After the international court issued the warrant in 2006, Mr. Ntaganda evaded justice for seven years, going from one armed group to another and even serving as a general in the Congolese Army, said Ida Sawyer, deputy Africa director at Human Rights Watch.

The court said Mr. Ntaganda gave “direct orders to target and kill civilians.”

His forces drove a significant part of the civilian population into the bush. In the village of Kobu in 2003, the court said, at least 49 villagers were rounded up in a banana field and killed with batons, knives and machetes. Some were disemboweled or had their heads crushed in.

The court said Mr. Ntaganda was responsible for recruiting child soldiers, and for turning female soldiers into sex slaves.

For a time after the warrant for his arrest, he was based in Goma, the main city of eastern Congo, eating at expensive restaurants and playing tennis in plain view of diplomats and United Nations peacekeepers, “seemingly having no fear in the world,” Ms. Sawyer said.

“There really was a sense that he was too powerful and too protected by Congolese officials and his backers in Rwanda, and many people thought that he would never face justice,” she said.

The verdict was announced by the presiding judge, Robert Fremr, as well as Judges Kuniko Ozaki and Chang-ho Chung.

Mr. Ntaganda is the fourth person to be prosecuted for atrocities in the Ituri region. His boss, Thomas Lubanga, was convicted by the court in 2012.

Rick Gladstone contributed reporting from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘The Terminator’ of Congo Is Convicted of War Atrocities. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT