Bosco Ntaganda, alias Terminator, for his brutality, former chief of militia rebels in Rwanda, and a former member of the forces of the Government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has been sentenced to 30 years in prison by the International Criminal Court (ICC). He was accused of 18 charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, rape, slavery, sexual and have recruited child soldiers in Ituri, a mining region in northeastern congo. The judges have imposed the penalty highest determined to date by the Court. Ntaganda is the fourth to be sentenced since the opening of the institution, and the first to be convicted of using female sex-slaves.
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last July, Ntaganda was found guilty of conducting massacres against congolese civilians in the own Ituri between 2002 and 2003, and the Court considered proven the charges by the Prosecutor’s office. During the trial, the prosecution has presented to you as a leader ruthless and bloodthirsty that it became, according to corroborated now by the ruling, “a key figure in the operations of rebels and military, carried out in Rwanda and the Congo, respectively.” Among the crimes shown figure the massacre of civilians in the village of Kobu in northeastern congo, where they perished close to 50 people, including children and babies, “which were gutted and their heads shattered; the bodies of all the men, women, and children were scattered about the field.” Human Rights Watch has branded the sentence a “hard message for all those who consider untouchable, because it will one day be brought to account”. For victims, the NGO has had these words: “Nothing can erase your pain, but they can be consoled in part seeing that justice prevails”.
After his time as a rebel in Rwanda, Ntaganda joined the congolese Army, and reached the rank of general between 2007 and 2012. A member of the tutsi ethnic group, the ICC called for his arrest in 2006 because it had recruited child soldiers for the Liberation Forces of the Congo. Formed by community members of the hema, were the armed wing of the Union des Patriotes Congolais, opposed to the rival group, the lendu. Terminator is a nickname that has disturbed you a lot to Ntaganda, and during the trial, when he made his closing argument, said it was a mistake. “I do not recognise myself as well. I am not,” he said. In his opinion, the Prosecutor was mistaken to accuse him of atrocities against civilians, because he has said: “I am a revolutionary, not a criminal, and he was protecting”. However, during the trial, Fatou Bensouda, prosecutor in chief, stated that he “ordered his men to rape the women to keep morale high”.
Born in Rwanda in 1973, Ntaganda fled to the Congo when he was a teenager to escape the attacks against the tutsi community, to which it belongs. According to the biography compiled by the office of the prosecutor of the ICC, began to fight towards 17 years old, and he alternated periods as a rebel and as a soldier in both countries. Between 2002 and 2003, he was already a chief of militia in Ituri, just at the time that they had the facts tried by the Court. Indicted in 2006 for recruiting child soldiers in the own Ituri, in 2008 it reappeared at the command of the troops that killed 150 people in Kiwanji (Democratic Republic of the Congo). Came to general in the congolese Army and surrendered at the U.s. embassy in Kigali, in Rwanda, in 2013. The Criminal Court lacking its own police force, and also imposes a penalty of death, and the Prosecution assumes that Ntaganda reappeared because a process for similar offences in another place it could have resulted in the death penalty
