The war crimes trial of Congolese politician Jean-Pierre Bemba opened on Monday at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, with prosecutors building the case that a militia under his command conducted a devastating campaign of rape, murder and torture in the Central African Republic in 2002 and 2003.
Bemba is the most senior government official to be tried before the court, which opened in 2002 to deal with large-scale atrocities.
A millionaire businessman and the scion of a prominent family, Bemba served as a vice president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) before going into exile after being defeated in a 2006 election. However, he remains the leader of a political party and still has a large following in the area around Kinshasa.
Two other trials involving Congolese warlords are going on at the court, one of them involving militia leader Thomas Lubanga, who arrived in The Hague in 2006 and is charged with conscripting children. His trial has been fraught with missteps but is now drawing a to close.
Bemba’s case has caused considerable commotion in the DR Congo. Many there had regarded him as untouchable and were stunned when he was arrested in 2008 during a visit to Belgium. Bemba brandished a passport and tried to claim immunity.
On Monday, through his lawyers, he pleaded not guilty to two counts of crimes against humanity and three counts of war crimes.
Prosecutors say that Bemba used 1,500 members of his own militia in the DR Congo to create an expeditionary force that he sent into the neighboring Central African Republic, in late 2002 and early 2003, to help put down a military coup there.
The charges against Bemba are linked to the crimes by this force, as the fighters went on a rampage around villages, raping, looting and killing civilians.
Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor, told reporters before the proceedings that the case is one of command responsibility.
“Normally, the difficulty in such a case is to prove that the commander has real authority and control,” he said. “In this case it is easy. Jean-Pierre Bemba himself created the army to gain money and power.”
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