A military court of the People’s Republic of Congo today sentenced former President Joseph Campila to death, judging him guilty of a series of crimes, including war crimes.

Lieutenant General Joseph Mutobo Catalay, who presented the military court in Kinshasa, announced that the former president was sentenced to crimes such as betrayal, crimes against humanity, homicide, sexual assault, torture and rebellion.

Cambilla remained in power for almost two decades and resigned only after violent demonstrations broke out against him. Since the end of 2023 he has lived primarily in South Africa, though he appeared last May in the city of Goma, Eastern Congo, controlled by the rebels.

The 54-year-old son of Loran-Dazarei Campila, the guerrilla who overturned dictator Mobutu Sesi Seko, inherited the power of the Congo after his father’s murder in January 2001. He was only 29 years old, and with his “healing”. Ribruk in a reference book on Congo.

In 2019, after completing two terms, Joseph Campila handed over the presidency to today’s President Felix Chiskendi, maintaining a lifelong senator and having parliamentary immunity. In 2023 he abandoned the country and occasionally appeared in South Afia or Namibia.

After staying on the sidelines for several years, at the end of May he reappeared in Goma, a city controlled by the anti -government guerrillas of Organization M23. A few days later, in a rare speech, he said that “the dictatorship must end” in the Congo LD and that he was ready to assume his obligations.

This brief return worried Kinshasa amidst volatility due to conflicts in the eastern part of the country. At the request of the government, his immunity was lifted and referred to the military court in absentia for the ultimate betrayal.

Kabilla was born in 1971 in southern Kivou and lived exiled from the age of 5. Almost all his childhood and adolescence spent in Tanzania. He joined his father in September 1996, when the first war in the Congo LD broke out. He left China to attend military training, but returned very quickly when the Congo Second War broke out in 1998. Then he joined the army.

With the death of his father, Joseph Campila inherited a country, which would expire in 2003. The central authority had only one part of the western and southern Congo of the Congo, one of the poorest countries in the world in the world.

Joseph Campila speaks English and Swahili, is not comfortably expressed in French, the official language of the country, and does not know Lingala, the local dialect of Kinshasa. Because of this linguistic gap and the fact that he was born in the eastern Congo and raised in Tanzania, many considered him “foreign”.

Slowly, however, his political abilities surprised foreign diplomats who considered him a mere pawn in the hands of his father’s “old guard”, which he gradually removed. Following the difficult post -war, transitional period, where he was forced to coexist with four Vice -Presidents, he was elected President in 2006 in the country’s first free elections after its independence from Belgium in 1960.

The grace period didn’t last long. In 2011, after the elections marked by mass irregularities, Campila secured a second term, with a relative majority. In Kinshasa, the big city of 17 million inhabitants, who never considered it her own, garnered only 16.5%.

His victory was challenged by most of the opposition and plunged the country into a political crisis. In 2015, the plan to change the electoral law to remain in power for a third term, in addition to the two allowed by the Constitution, caused massive demonstrations. Dozens of people were killed in the riots and eventually Campila did not run in the 2018 elections.

The lonely and distant former president was never comfortable in official ceremonies. It was only happy when driving tractor or other heavy machinery, at various inauguration. According to a diplomat who met him many times, it seems that what he really likes is video games and cars.