The 18-year old war that refuses to go away

For 18 years, a familiar scene has repeated itself in northern Uganda. Hours after nightfall and without any warning, rebels armed with AK-47 assault rifles march into a village, round everyone up, loot food and burn the village down. It all happens so quickly that none of the rebels’ sleepy-eyed victims know quite what to do. But mostly they are simply terrified: they’ve heard plenty of gruesome stories about the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). They know this is one of Africa’s cruellest guerrilla movements, and they know that some of them won’t get out of this alive. The LRA fighters are particularly vicious. They don’t waste any bullets, preferring to select a few people at random, then bludgeon or hack them to death with clubs and machetes. When the killing is over and they are satisfied that they’ve cleared out every scrap of food from the village’s granaries - food being mostly what they’re after because it has become scarce in this war-ravished region - they then kidnap as many people as they can to help them carry the loot. Those kidnapped are mostly children – and they have a long night ahead of them. They will be forced to carry heavy loads for hours on end, and when they reach their destination, the unlucky abductees will experience one of three possibilities: they are abandoned, they are killed on the spot, or they are forcibly recruited as LRA fighters. ORIGINS OF THE LRA Northern Uganda’s war is spearheaded by a bizarre cult that wants to topple the government of President Yoweri Museveni and rule the country according to the Biblical Ten Commandments. The LRA are in many ways unique. Led by a mystic recluse, Joseph Kony, the rebels rarely talk to the media, making it almost impossible to figure out what they want. Unlike other rebel groups, they have no administrative organs, control no territory and seem to have no political programme. They live a nomadic existence, wandering through northern Uganda’s thick scrubland, sporadically attacking villages and trading centres or ambushing vehicles, before disappearing into the bush. Yet the LRA began as a popular uprising in the north, shortly after Museveni’s National Resistance Movement/Army, which was dominated by southerners, seized power in a military coup in 1986. The uprising was popular because of hostilities between the north and the south that had built up in Uganda ever since the British protectorate was created in 1894. The colonial policies concentrated wealth in the south and drew on cheap labour from the north for military and security purposes. This scenario persisted up until Museveni’s coup. But that year, in protest against the economic neglect of the north by the wealthier south, a group of ethnic Acholis and remnants of the former regimes of Idi Amin and Milton Obote formed the Uganda People’s Democratic Army (UPDA) and took up arms against the newly installed military government. In 1988, the UPDA group split when some of its leaders signed a peace deal with the government. But a splinter group led by the enigmatic Alice Lakwena decided to continue fighting. Lakwena imbued the UPDA cause with a unique brand of Christian mysticism, claiming to be in possession of water infused with the Holy Spirit that made her invincible to bullets. Later that year, after Lakwena’s group, known as the Holy Spirit Movement, was defeated at Magamaga, near Jinja, she fled to neighbouring Kenya, and her nephew, Joseph Kony, a former catechist who proclaimed himself to be a messianic prophet, took over. It was he who then renamed the group the LRA. But the rebellion quickly lost popular support and, under pressure from both the Uganda People's Defence Forces (UPDF) and local resistance, Kony fled to southern Sudan. In frustration, the LRA started focusing their attacks from bases in Sudan on Acholi civilians. That was also when they started abducting children. OPERATION IRON FIST Sustained attacks by the LRA in the mid-1990s forced the bulk of the ethnic Acholi population to flee their homes in the northern districts of Gulu and Kitgum, but by the late 1990s, things were calming down, and the displaced began resettling. Then, in March 2002, the UPDF launched "Operation Iron Fist", asserting their determination to crush the LRA once and for all. With the consent of the Sudanese government, the UPDF were allowed into Sudan to root out LRA bases in the country’s lawless southern regions. The results were catastrophic for civilians in northern Uganda. The rebels were forced out of their hideouts and flooded with a vengeance back into Uganda. Tired, hungry and homeless, they vented their wrath on the civilian population – sharply escalating attacks on villages and trading centres, killing hundreds of civilians and kidnapping thousands of children. The government claims it has scored significant successes in its operations against the LRA in Sudan, particularly by destroying LRA bases around the Imotong mountains, north of Kitgum, allegedly the lifeline of the insurgency. But according to the Acholi Religious Leaders’ Peace Initiative (ARLPI) – a group trying to initiate dialogue to end the war – the humanitarian cost of Iron Fist and the LRA’s retaliation has been staggering. "Iron Fist was the biggest mistake of this government. It has more than doubled the numbers of displaced, and security is worse than ever," an ARLPI official, Father Carlos Rodriguez, told IRIN. SITUATION DETERIORATES IN 2003 The situation in northern Uganda worsened in 2003, stakeholders said. The LRA expanded to the southeast, away from its traditional area of attack in the Acholi districts of Kitgum, Gulu and Pader, and into Lira and Apac, and launched a series of attacks on civilians in the five districts of the Teso region from June. The attacks in Teso in particular caught both the UPDF army and the local population totally by surprise. The United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimates that the number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) fleeing LRA terror rose from around 800,000 to at least 1.2 million. Most of the IDPs live in squalid makeshift camps, or "protected villages". Populated largely by malnourished children, the camps lack adequate food or water, sanitation is nonexistent and there’s no medicine. The risk of being attacked still prevents people from cultivating the fertile land around the camps, whose residents consequently have to rely almost entirely on World Food Programme hand-outs. But even the camps themselves are unsafe. In spite of last year’s reinforced presence of trained local defence units, LRA attacks remain common, especially when the rebels come in search of food. In mid-January they attacked a camp in Lira District, killing 17 people, according to UPDF sources. The year 2003 also witnessed a record increase in the number of child abductions. The United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that a staggering 8,500 children were abducted by the rebels last year. Most have not been seen since then. As abductions increased, swelling the LRA's ranks, the rebel attacks became bolder, creeping closer to the north’s better-fortified urban areas. As a consequence, the major towns there started experiencing nightly influxes of IDPs – the so-called "night commuters", who sleep rough, huddled on shop verandas or bus shelters, and then go home in the morning, secure in the knowledge that the risk of daylight attacks is much lower. In a sign of growing frustration at the government’s failure to prevent the rebels from terrorising the countryside, some militia groups began being formed to fight the LRA. Sources said the militias – such as the Arrow Group in Teso region – had been more effective against the rebels: lighter on their feet than the UPDF and more willing to pursue the rebels on foot. Last June, the government supplied the Arrow Group with more weapons, thereby, raising some concerns over long-term security, especially since many of the members of these groups had themselves once been part of the Uganda People’s Army – a rebellion in Teso between 1987 and 1993 which also tried to bring down the current government. However, the UPDF spokesman, Maj Shaban Bantariza, told IRIN that the Arrow Group were now fully under government control. "We have helped them mobilise and we will ensure they demobilise when we have helped them rid eastern Uganda of the terrorists," he told IRIN. The Arrow Group, with help from the UPDF, managed to expel the LRA from Teso around November. But the rebels retreated into Lira District only to launch a fresh spate of vicious attacks there. Up to 100 people were reportedly butchered in LRA onslaughts and tens of thousands were displaced. For parliamentarians representing the northern and eastern constituencies, the attack on Lira was the last straw. They stormed out of parliament at the end of November and stayed out for a month, demanding in protest that "this government show it is serious about protecting its people". "Where were the soldiers?," asked the coalition’s leader, the Kitgum MP, Zachary Olum. "If the army cannot protect people, then what is it there for?" Museveni retorted in a public statement that, on the contrary, the UPDF were close to crushing the LRA and that they would already have done so, had it not been for the secret support the LRA was receiving from "political forces" in the north. In so saying, he was hinting at a popular view that the LRA are secretly supported by the Acholi people, in spite of the fact that the Acholi are the group’s main victims. An NGO, World Vision, said this dangerous opinion had been the cause of misdirected vigilantism, as innocent Acholis, including LRA abductees, had been beaten up or killed by angry mobs in non-Acholi districts. By the close of 2003, northern MPs were continuing to blame the government for failing to protect their constituents from the LRA’s wanton attacks, while Museveni and his senior ministers persisted in blaming the LRA's "political sympathisers" in the north. A PEACEFUL OPTION? With the deteriorating situation, last year saw an unprecedented rise in international interest in Uganda’s war as donors and senior diplomatic figures became increasingly vocal in their opposition to the government’s military approach. High-profile visits to the north, such as those of the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, Jan Egeland, and Dutch Development Minister Agnes van Ardenne, helped to boost momentum towards a more extensive humanitarian intervention in Uganda’s trouble spots, with the UN pledging US $128 million towards emergency relief for IDPs. Both high-profile visitors intimated that they believed that peaceful negotiation was the only way forward, however difficult that might seem, commenting that "the military solution is evidently not working". Their remarks echoed those of other diplomats, such as The Netherlands' ambassador to Uganda, Matthew Peters, and of the ARLPI, which has been campaigning hard for a negotiated settlement for several years. All parties recognise that the task is a tough one. "I have not heard of anyone in government having direct contact with Kony, [who] seems to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to reach," the head of the EC delegation in Uganda, Sigurd Illing, conceded in October. A UN official said: "This insurgency is unique, because they [the LRA] don’t seem to want anything negotiable. Kony consults the spirits on a daily basis to dictate the battle. How do you negotiate with spirits?" But the ARLPI insists that dialogue is the only way forward, and the chaos of 2003 certainly seems to support that view. It points out that since around 90 percent of the LRA fighters were themselves abducted children, tackling the LRA militarily is also an assault on the victims. "How would you feel if it was your child? You don’t want your child killed; you want him to come back home," Rodriguez stressed. True to their words, ARPLI members have gone to great lengths - at serious personal risk - to establish contact with the LRA. At the beginning of last year, those efforts seemed to have borne fruit when the government declared a limited ceasefire to enable a presidential peace team, led by Museveni’s brother, Salim Saleh, to meet the rebels. But the talks failed to materialise when the LRA did not turn up at an agreed venue. The government said this had happened because "they were never serious about talks". The ARPLI, on the other hand, said it was because the UPDF had violated the ceasefire on a number of occasions, using it to contain the rebel commanders and then ambush them, thereby destroying whatever trust the LRA might have had. In January this year, the government extended an amnesty for LRA rebels wishing to surrender, but at the same time said it intended to scrap the amnesty for senior LRA commanders. The ARPLI says this will simply make it impossible for the LRA to stop the war. As 2004 gets going, peace through negotiated settlement seems more distant than it did a year ago, but that hasn’t stopped groups like the ARPLI from trying. WHY IT JUST GOES ON Ultimately, the reason the government has failed to stop the LRA may just be because an insurgency of this nature is such a hard one to fight, according to analysts. The LRA have no "positions" that can be captured, and their sporadic, low-intensity warfare makes it hard to tell where they will strike next. Moreover, the government asserted that during the last half of 2003 it amassed a wealth of evidence indicating that some elements within the Sudanese army were still offering support to the LRA, thereby reneging on a peace deal signed between the two governments in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, in 1999. The ARLPI agreed, asserting that after talking to former LRA fighters whom they helped to defect, they "systematically verified" reports that the Sudanese army was providing the LRA with a "constant supply of arms, ammunition and other items". Sudan vehemently denied the claims, calling them "baseless accusations", and adding that Uganda was free to communicate with Khartoum through the appropriate mechanisms set up when the two governments signed the Nairobi protocol. Whether or not the claims are true, a successful peace process in Sudan will make it harder for Kony to continue using southern Sudan as a rear base. If Kony is forced out of Sudan, he might face a choice between being killed by the UPDF and opting for negotiations. Peace in northern Uganda in 2004, although unlikely, could perhaps then become possible.