THE HAGUE: International Criminal Court judges handed Congolese rebel chief Bosco “Terminator” Ntaganda a 30-year jail term for war crimes on Thursday, the highest ever sentence passed down by the tribunal in The Hague.
Ntaganda was convicted in July of crimes including murder, persecution and sexual slavery for a series of massacres of civilians in Democratic Republic of Congo’s volatile, mineral-rich Ituri region in 2002 and 2003.
Condemning Rwandan-born Ntaganda’s “multiplicity of crimes”, judge Robert Flemr told him “the overall sentence imposed on you shall therefore be 30 years of imprisonment.”
An ICC spokesman confirmed it was the heaviest ever penalty handed down by the court, which was set up in 2002 to try the world’s worst crimes.Judges said 46-year-old Ntaganda was the ruthless driver of ethnic Tutsi revolts amid the wars that convulsed the DRC after the 1994 genocide of Tutsis in neighbouring Rwanda.
They said Ntaganda was a “key leader” of the Union of Congolese Patriots rebel group and its military wing, the Patriotic Forces for the Liberation of Congo (FPLC).Most of the charges related to two bloody operations by Ntaganda’s soldiers against civilians in rival villages in 2002 and 2003. The court heard fearful villagers dubbed him “Terminator” after the Arnold Schwarzenegger film about a merciless robotic killer.
In total he was convicted on 13 counts of war crimes and five of crimes against humanity, becoming the first to be convicted by the ICC of sexual enslavement.He was also the first-ever suspect to voluntarily surrender to the ICC, having walked into the US embassy in the Rwandan capital Kigali in 2013 and asked to be sent to the court in the Netherlands.
The ICC judges heard separately from victims and witnesses in September to help them decide on the sentence.Fighters loyal to him carried out atrocities such as a massacre in a banana field behind a village in which at least 49 people including children and babies were dis-embowelled or had their heads smashed in.Ntaganda was also responsible for the rape and sexual slavery of underage girls, and of recruiting troops under the age of 15.
Ntaganda is one of five Congolese warlords to have been brought before the ICC, which was set up in 2002 as an independent international body to prosecute those accused of the world’s worst crimes. It has also been criticised for mainly trying African suspects so far.
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