The International Criminal Court on Tuesday sentenced a Congolese warlord to 14 years in jail for using child soldiers -- a punishment meant to bring justice for his victims, to signal a warning to others and to act as a potential landmark in the struggle to protect children entangled in wars.
Thomas Lubanga was found guilty in March of recruiting, kidnapping and abusing children in his Union of Congolese Patriots militia -- sending them to kill and be killed during tribal fighting over land and resources in Congo's northeast Ituri region in 2002-2003.
Lubanga's was the first guilty judgment passed down in the court's decade-old existence; Tuesday's announcement was the first time the tribunal sentenced a convicted war criminal.
Otherwise the mustachioed Lubanga, who cried when he was put on a plane from Congo to The Hague in 2006, is a small player among Congo's many belligerents.
Lubanga's case this year has brought increasing pressure for the arrest of his much more infamous partner in crime, renegade Congolese army General Bosco Ntaganda. Ntaganda had moved on from being a militia leader in Ituri to being the No. 2 leader in a tribal-based rebellion in 2006, when the ICC indicted both men for war crimes involving child soldiers.
In late 2008, when the rebels reached the outskirts of the eastern provincial capital of Goma, Congo's government was forced to negotiate. A 2009 peace deal saw Ntaganda wearing the stripes of a general as he integrated his fighters into the Congolese army. President Joseph Kabila dismissed calls for his arrest under the ICC warrant, until recently, arguing that Ntaganda's cooperation was essential to keeping the peace in Congo's troubled east. U.N. peacekeepers in Congo who should have been arresting Ntaganda were forced to work with soldiers under his command.
Sensing the end of the road this year, the veteran warlord took off and now is accused of orchestrating a new rebellion that erupted in April with the defections of hundreds of the former rebels whom he had integrated into Congo's army.
Ntaganda denies any part in the mutiny, and the new 23 March Movement denies that Ntaganda is its leader. But a U.N. experts' report that accuses Rwanda of helping create and arm the rebellion says Ntaganda is behind it and that new recruits from Rwanda are bedded and fed at a hotel Ntaganda owns on Congo's border with Rwanda.
In May, Human Rights Watch accused Ntaganda of again press-ganging children -- this time for the M23 rebellion. The New York-based body charged Ntaganda had forcibly recruited at least 149 boys and young men in the first month of the rebellion.
Earlier in May, the ICC prosecutor had filed a request for a new arrest warrant against Ntaganda on additional charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity for murder, rape, sexual slavery and pillaging in an attempt to "ethnically cleanse" Ituri in 2002-2003.
