The defection of one of the Lord’s Resistance Army’s top commanders Dominic Ongwen in January, his custody and pre-trial appearance at the International Criminal Court could have a double-edged impact on the campaign to end the violence in the region, organisations tracking activities of the rebel group fear.

This follows a recorded message that was broadcast on Radio Zereda in Central African Republic in which Mr Ongwen claimed that he had been granted full amnesty by the president, and encouraged other LRA fighters to defect. 

While releasing the State of the LRA in 2015 report in Kampala last week, officials of Invisible Children said that Mr Ongwen’s message has presented them with a conundrum.  

“It is a high stakes defection. But how do we now encourage combatants to defect if Ongwen is not free and the recorded message that he had obtained amnesty proved false?” asked Lisa Dougan, the director of international programmes and policy advisor at Invisible Children.

Defections have proved to be an effective way of peacefully dismantling the LRA from within, and there are reports that more rebels are keen to defect but are held back by lack of information on what became of Ongwen after abandoning rebellion.

“It’s very much up to the international community to show that he is unharmed. The longer they are silent about his fate, the more vacuum it creates [within LRA] that he was killed,” said Ms Dougan.

Moreover, LRA’s command structure has been in upheaval since 2012, with at least a dozen senior officers having defected or been killed in combat by the Uganda Peoples’ Defence Forces or executed at the orders of LRA leader Joseph Kony.

American-based NGOs Invisible Children and the Resolve LRA Crisis Initiative report that LRA’s core fighting capacity has been reduced to approximately 150 combatants — down from 200 in 2013, and over 2,000 at the peak of the from LRA rebellion in the late 1990s.

This drop, though welcome, has created another challenge: Forcing LRA into a transition, with leadership moving to second generation LRA commanders. 

“The challenge is how to get these out of rebellion because they were born in the bush. Hence messages of defection may not be effective to this group,” said Ms Dougan.

Of the five people that the ICC indicted in 2005 for war crimes and crimes against humanity, Ongwen was the only surviving LRA commander besides the group’s leader Joseph Kony.

The other indictees were former Kony deputy Vincent Otti, who was executed at the orders of his boss in 2007, as well as commanders Raska Lukwiya and Okot Odhiambo, killed by the UPDF in August 2006 and December 2013 respectively. 

Several other senior commanders defected or were executed by Kony or killed in combat with the UPDF.  To compensate for the losses at the top, the State of the LRA in 2015 reveals that Kony has promoted his two oldest sons Ali and Salim, whom he has given key roles in planning operations and tracking the LRA’s finances generated from trafficking of ivory and minerals. Kony has also elevated young loyalists who were once his bodyguards.

“These are mostly children born in captivity; they know nothing about normal life out of the bush. They may even be more dangerous unfortunately, there is no consensus on whether they should also be indicted because they were born in captivity,” said Patrick Munduga, the Invisible Children regional head of office in Kampala.

‘No dilemma over crimes’

Meanwhile, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Fatou Bensouda, while on a five-day official visit on February 26 to Uganda to gather more evidence to use against Mr Ongwen, said the court faces no dilemma over culpability for the crimes he committed.

Since his transfer to The Hague for trial and custody, debate has centred on whether Mr Ongwen, who was abducted as a child, is a perpetrator or victim of the LRA violence in northern Uganda.

Mr Ongwen and the four LRA commanders are accused of mass killings, mutilation of civilians, abduction of tens of thousands of children, sexual enslavement and rape of girls.

“The crimes he is being tried for are only those he committed as an adult. We do not prosecute child soldiers for crimes committed under the age of 18. This is a strict requirement of the Rome Statute,” said Ms Bensouda.

Mr Ongwen has already played the abduction card to plead his innocence and thwart the Prosecutor’s case against him.

“I was abducted in 1988 and I was taken to the bush when I was 14 years old,” Mr Ongwen told the court during his pre-trial chamber II appearance on January 26.

The ICC prosecutor told journalists in Kampala, that her office is now “revisiting the file for a complete assessment to include other crimes, not just in northern Uganda”.

While in Uganda, Ms Bensouda met government officials, law makers and judicial officers, AND also visited the areas mostly affected by LRA violence and insurgency in the 1990s and 2000s in Acholi and Lango sub-regions of northern Uganda, as well as Teso sub-region in the northEast.