NEWS ABOUT DOMINIC ONGWEN

DOMINIC ONGWEN AND THE IRREGULAR GROUP

 

Dominic Ongwen, is a wanted man with the blood of many people on his hands. Many people spent years investigating the horrors perpetrated by the LRA in central Africa,  Uganda, Congo , and South Sudan. They  gathered evidence at massacre sites, wooden clubs covered in dried blood, rubber strips from bicycle tires used to tie up the victims, and freshly dug graves and spoke to hundreds of boys and girls forced to fight for his army or held captive as sex slaves. Its forces, currently thought to number 150-300 fighters plus hundreds of captive civilians, left Uganda in 2005 and now operate in remote areas of Congo, South Sudan and the CAR, leaving a trail of death and destruction among all those in its path. 

KONY AND ONGWEN

 

Last week an American filmmaker's 29-minute documentary about a campaign to bring a Ugandan warlord to justice stopped the planet. Jason Russell's provocative and divisive KONY 2012 captured global attention, sparking a viral social media movement and attracting the eyes and ears of media outlets everywhere. At time of writing, the film that aims to make Joseph Kony and Dominic Ongwen famous, has drawn 72.9 million views on YouTube and 16.3 million on Vimeo. So essentially the world now knows all about Kony and Ongwen, the outlawed leaders of the Lord's Resistance Army, a guerilla group responsible for the abduction, enslavement and rape of tens of thousands of children. Dominic one of the first  men indicted by the ICC and the other nine names on this list round out the first 10 targets of the Hague-based justice body.

THE INVISIBLE CHILDREN

 

Dominic Ongwen is a war criminal, but the Ugandan government currently in power also came to power through the use of kadogo (child soldiers) and fought alongside militias employing child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, something that Invisible Children seem wilfully ignorant of. This movement, directed by Alice Auma, an Acholi who claimed to be acting on guidance from the spirit Lakwena, brought a mystical belief in their own invincibility that the soldiers of the Kampala-based government at first found terrifying: Holy Spirit Movement devotees walked headlong into blazing gunfire singing songs and holding stones they believed would turn into grenades. The movement succeeded in reaching Jinja, just 80 km from the capital Kampala, before being decimated by Museveni's forces.Out of this slaughter was born the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), led by Joseph Kony, a distant relative of Alice Auma. Kony added an additional element of targeting civilian Acholi to his schismatic blend of Christianity, frequently kidnapping children and adolescents to serve in his rebel movement. The Museveni government responded by viewing all Acholi as potential collaborators, rounding them up into camps euphemistically called "protected villages", where they were vulnerable to disease and social ills, and had few ways to carry on their traditional farming. In October 2011, U.S. President Barack Obama announced that he was sending 100 Special Forces soldiers to help the Ugandans hunt down Kony and Dominic Ongwen. By the end of the year, the Ugandan army confirmed that the troops had moved along with the Ugandan army to Obo in the Central African Republic and Nzara in South Sudan.