Three killed in weekend LRA attack

The Uganda People's Defence Forces (UPDF) has confirmed that a weekend ambush by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) on a commercial pick-up truck in northern Uganda caused the loss of three lives, AFP news agency reported on Tuesday. "We have been pressing the rebels out of their enclaves and so they desperately ambushed that vehicle to divert our troops," it quoted the local Ugandan army commander, Geoffrey Muheesi, as saying. Among the three deceased was the Sudanese priest, Fr Peter Obore Oromo, who was on his way from the Ugandan capital, Kampala, back to his parish of Loa/Nimule in the Diocese of Torit, southern Sudan, when the attack occurred between Atiak and Bibia on Saturday afternoon, the diocese reported on Monday. The pick-up vehicle was reportedly set ablaze by the LRA after the attack, it added. Led by the self-proclaimed mystic, Joseph Kony, the LRA has been fighting a guerilla-style war against Ugandan government forces since the late 1980s, ostensibly in a desire to have Uganda ruled according to the Ten Commandments of the Bible. It has become increasingly isolated in recent months, as Ugandan-Sudanese relations have taken important steps forward - including the exchange of envoys by Kampala and Khartoum. Reported splits between LRA commanders, with the LRA command in southern Sudan largely cut off from several units operating in northern Uganda, had further weakened the rebel movement, and meant that LRA soldiers on the Uganda side were having to loot villages and abduct adolescents for forced labour as their supply lines dried up, according to humanitarian sources. Tighter control of the Sudan-Uganda border by the Uganda People's Defence Forces (UPDF) and the withdrawal in August by the Sudanese government of support for Kony had also contributed to a change in the LRA's pattern of abductions, the US-based Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children (WCRWC) reported on 9 November, citing research conducted in May and July in Gulu, Kitgum and Pader. Most young people who had recently returned from LRA captivity reported shorter abduction periods, focused mostly on forced labour and banditry, rather than forced movement across the border to Sudan for military training, it said. "The insecurity of armed conflict, where adolescents are principal targets for murder, abduction, forced recruitment and sexual enslavement", is the top concern of Ugandan and Sudanese young people in northern Uganda, according to the report. Abduction, murder and insecurity caused by the LRA was the principal fear, it added.