The Extraordinary Trial of the Child Soldier Who Became a Brutal Rebel Commander

Kidnapped at 9 by Joseph Kony’s notorious guerilla army, Dominic Ongwen was groomed to kill. Is he a lost soul deserving of mercy, or a cold-blooded war criminal who must face justice?

Photos by Robin Hinsch | Edited by Brendan Spiegel

He didn’t look at her for a long time. He stared at the edge of the table in front of him, holding his hands in his lap as if he was praying, visibly tense as this small woman with dark blonde hair spoke in a confident, cool, posh English accent. It was March 19, 2018, as Gillian Mezey testified before the International Criminal Court in The Hague in the trial of Dominic Ongwen, a former commander of the Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army, the LRA, one of Africa’s oldest and cruelest rebel groups. Mezey, a professor of psychiatry in London, was testifying because nothing was more important and more controversial in this trial than the mental state of the accused, a former child soldier.

Ongwen sat between two grim-faced guards. His skin had become lighter after more than three years in prison in Scheveningen, a suburb of The Hague. He had gained weight, but you could still see his handsome high cheekbones, square face, and a deep frown between the eyes that got deeper and deeper the longer Mezey held forth.

Mezey didn’t believe him. She didn’t believe that he had been severely mentally ill, as his lawyers claimed. Ongwen, she said, had “been in control of himself and the men under his command.” All the evidence, she said, suggested that he was malingering, that he was faking his illness.

Dominic Ongwen during his first appearance hearing at the International Criminal Court in The Hague in January, 2015. (This photo and header image courtesy of ICC.)

Ongwen listened to this psychiatrist, who had never personally met him, talk about his mental state for almost three hours. But he lost his composure shortly after lunch break. He got up. He pressed the button that turned on his microphone, got tangled up in his headphones and ripped them off his head in a quick, fluent motion. In Acholi, his mother tongue, he said: “Your honor, I don’t want to listen to the witness anymore. Thank you, madam witness. You’re the one who does all the talking. But were you in the LRA?”

He raised his voice more and more with every sentence. The guards on his left and right jumped up and grabbed his arms. His lawyers turned around, trying to calm him down. Then the green curtain of the visitor gallery closed. Muffled screams could be heard through the glass. And then the sound of something heavy being thrown to the floor.