Lord's Resistance Army

From Hobson's Choice

Photo: Bruno Stevens

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From 1986 to 2006, Uganda suffered a particularly cruel insurgency in the north. As with many civil wars in Africa, this war was mainly an ethnic conflict pitting the Acholi against the central government. The insurgent group that waged this war is the soi-dissant Lord's Resistance Army.

1 Context
2 Violence Against Children
3 Is the Insurgency 'Useful' to the State?
4 Notes
5 External Links

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Context

My rose, asleep now lie.
The horse is starting to cry.
His poor hooves were bleeding,
his long mane was frozen,
and deep in his eyes stuck a silvery dagger.
Down he went to the river,
Oh, down he went down
"Lullaby," Blood Wedding, Lorca

The article is written for maximum thematic effect; it is heart-rending:

They walked with thousands of other children, all rushing away from the danger of nighttime rebel raids on their villages and toward the safety of the town center to sleep. Tiny boys in tattered clothing, girls with chubby cheeks clutching ragged dolls, others with foam mattresses balanced on their heads, others with nothing at all were walking. Jennifer and Susan sang a marching song. "People in Gulu are suffering. Education is poor. Communication is poor. There are no more virgins in Gulu," the girls sang sweetly in English. "They were all raped. Hear us now: There are no more virgins in Gulu."
[Emily Wax, "In Uganda, Terror Forces Children's Nightly Flight" Washington Post (13 Feb 2004)]

The war began as a tribal struggle between the Achole people of the northwest against the urbanized state, as well as four distinct other rebellions in the north.

Beginning in 1986 when Museveni captured power from General Tito Okello Lutwa, the northern war was initially a popular revolt by Okello's ousted army troops and their numerous civilian supporters who formed the Uganda People's Democratic Army (UPDA). Both these rebels and their successors, who came together to form the Holy Spirit Movement (HSM) of Alice Auma “Lakwena”, received massive popular support in the north and thus seemed to act on behalf of an Acholi population that was both alarmed by and angry at the new Museveni regime. Fear of national marginalisation by a government they perceived to be dominated by western Ugandans, as well as resentment against what they believed were NRM sponsored atrocities and devastating cattle raids, were at the heart of the early insurgencies.

In 1986 Joseph Kony launched the LRA, while Alice Aruna Lakwena founded another cult-army, "The Holy Spirit Movement" (HSM). The HSM was defeated soon after, and survived in the bush as a kidnap-driven cult before running out of steam. The LRA borrowed its methods and became perhaps the most horrific bush insurgency in Africa. It sharply increased its deadliness and threat to Kampala after the 2002 government offensive. This, shortly after Uganda withdrew its troops from the Congolese Civil War.

The leader of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, is a westerner who seized power after breaking a truce in 1986 (prior to that time the Uganda Civil War had been locked in a stalemate. After taking power, he dramatically reformed the political and civil management of the country so that it became a developmental "success story." Uganda later made common cause with the Tutsi exile community and helped their armed wing, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), capture control of the country from les genocidaires of Habyaramana's collapsing regime (1994). Rwanda's genocide is believed to have killed around 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Subsequently, both Uganda and Rwanda deployed effective fighting units in Congo to repress insurgents that had been operating from lawless Congo. In '97 or so relations between Rwanda and Uganda took a turn for the worse as proxy militia battled for control of Kisangani, Congo-Kinshasa.

Since then both countries have withdrawn their forces and patched up relations. But the scale of terror leveled against the Northern Ugandans is unimaginable.

It is estimated that between 20,000 and 25,000 children, including girls used as both commanders’ wives and fighters, have been kidnapped since the LRA began operations. Indeed, the group is one of the most brutal across the globe, forcing young children to kill and torture soon after capture, making them massacre their own communities to create a “clean break” with the past, and coercing abductees to walk for miles with their hands tied together with rope. The LRA, which originally consisted of 200 core fighters, is currently comprised of approximately 3,000 child combatants most of whom are not allowed to carry a gun, and 150-200 armed commanders.^[1]

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Violence Against Children

The LRA seems to prey mainly on children in order to remain in existence, kidnapping in order to enslave the children of the frontier. The UPDF seems to be aware of the problem, but is less than enthusiastic about stopping it:

The LRA continues to commit crimes of an atrocious nature. It almost exclusively targets civilians, who it kills, beats, mutilates and abducts for use as child soldiers or sex slaves. These attacks against more than 1.5 million civilians confined to displaced persons camps in northern Uganda—and many others in villages in northern Uganda and southern Sudan—continue to kill and terrify the victims and destroy and loot their property. The Ugandan army, which is deployed in or near every displaced persons camp in northern Uganda, is charged with protecting civilians. It has failed to live up to this responsibility. What’s worse, instead of effectively protecting civilians from the LRA’s vicious assaults, UPDF soldiers have engaged in abuses of their own, often beating, raping and even killing civilians with near total impunity. The government of Uganda dismissed these allegations by stating that "most complaints are fronted by opposition Members of Parliament to malign the UPDF." No effective structure exists in the camps or in the system of government to hold the army accountable for its crimes, despite government assurances to the contrary. The UPDF rarely investigates or prosecutes its personnel. The police are few and far between in rural northern Uganda; the criminal justice system is understaffed and under-resourced and like other civilian institutions in the north is hesitant about acting against allegations of army abuses. [...] Human Rights Watch documented violations committed by soldiers of the 11th Battalion of the UPDF while stationed at Cwero and Awach camps in Gulu district. The 11th Battalion, rather than protecting civilians from the LRA, treated them in a callous and brutal manner, by killing, beating to death and torturing camp residents, in some cases because they were out past curfew.

About the same time that HRW released the above press release, it also published this in-depth report. The LRA originally was formed by Alice Lakwena to defend the Acholi people of Northern Uganda from the revolutionary government of Yoweri Museveni. However, it has essentially done this by kidnapping Acholi children, while receiving armed support from the government of Sudan. The LRA uses this ferocious combination of mass terror and indoctrination to replace its losses, which are understandably huge (LRA leader Joseph Kony's methods of devising strategy are based on a rather silly form of sorcery). According to a USAID study of the conflict,^[2] the Acholi have a venerable martial tradition:

According to several Acholi elders, the pre-Colonial history of the Acholi people includes a warrior tradition which included combat with their eastern (Karamojong), southern (Langi) and western (Madi) neighbors, as well as frequent conflict among the Acholi clans themselves. During the Colonial period, the British Government recruited heavily among the Acholi for the uniformed services (army, police and prison guards). Acholi soldiers participated with the British in World War II in combat theaters throughout the world. Acholi people generally hold the view that the colonizers exploited them for the uniformed services and for unskilled labor, leaving them at the margins of Uganda’s development, while central Ugandans, such as the Baganda, were the beneficiaries of more durable commercial and educational activities. [...] In his 1987 publication, Politics and the Military in Uganda 1890 - 1985, Amii Omara Otunnu notes that:
"The African sector of the Army was not very representative of the ethnic composition of the country as a whole. The largest contingent was recruited from the north, especially from the people of Acholi…By 1914, Acholi had become the main recruiting ground for the KAR [King's Africa Rifles], a pattern which was continued in the post-colonial period."

After independence, Pres. Obote accepted the Acholi pe-imminence in the Ugandan Army; Idi Amin Dada, however, launched a deadly purge of the Acholi. He replaced the Acholi slain with members of his own Kakwa people as well as recent migrants of Sudan. While Obote and the Tanzanian military leaned heavily on Acholi to form the anti-Amin, Obote-restorationist army (the UNLA), this soon resulted in a new struggle against the Acholi by the National Resistance Army of Yoweri Museveni. Museveni's war with the Obote UNLA movement was extremely bloody; in 1986, it finally culminated in Museveni's total monopoly on political power.

"...the UNLA conducted its operations with little regard for the rules of warfare. As a result, terrible human rights abuses occurred against pro-NRA communities in the Luwero Triangle. In January 1983, Obote launched "Operation Bonanza" in this area, during which UNLA troops destroyed small towns, villages, and farms and killed or displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians...After the war ended in 1986, the International Committee of the Red Cross claimed that at least 300,000 people had died in the Luwero Triangle and that officials had failed to account for half to a third of the region’s population."
UNLA forces in Luwero were sometimes referred to as "the Acholis," because of the large number of Acholis who comprised its officer and enlisted corps.

[p.14, Gersony]

The vast majority of Acholi civilians in Gulu and Kitgum participated in no way, were remote from events in Luwero, and had no immediate reason to be concerned about them at the time.

[p.16, Gersony]

Initially, Gersony says, the NRA behaved quite well in the areas it had captured. However, the organized basis for yet another insurgency, this time directed against the new Museveni regime in Kampala, was well under way in Sudan. In late 1986, the war began with a series of guerrilla attacks on NRA outposts, leading (naturally) to a ruthless government response.

During certain stages of the 1986 - 1991 period, its conduct included the execution of suspected collaborators and prisoners and the killing of groups of victims, harsh beating during questioning, widespread destruction of granaries, mass detentions and other such practices.* Rape was also a frequent complaint. As a result, particularly during the 1986 -1988 period, relief workers report that civilians fleeing army operations frequently sought protection in rural areas under predominant UPDA control. However, nothing learned during this assessment suggests that the frequency and magnitude of these periodic NRA abuses were in any way comparable to the large-scale mass murder and brutality that characterized UNLA operations in the Luwero Triangle in 1983/1984.
[p.28, Gersony]

The UPDA (Acholi) guerrilla movement was nearly wiped out, but for the arrival of the charismatic Alice Auma, who took the name "Lakwena" (prophet). Initially, she lead a fairly successful campaign with her spiritual ideology; soon, though, her forces were encircled and captured, and she escaped to Kenya. The UPDA itself lost many more forces to an amnesty initiative launched by the Museveni government. This time, the Sudanese government adopted the movement. Also, Gersony points out, early in the war, the Acholi lost 98% of their cattle (i.e., virtually all of their wealth) when their historic rivals the Karamojong, emboldened by the complete disappearance of police protection in the area, stole them.

After the near-elimination of Alice Lakwena's movement, her nephew, Joseph Kony, took over and changed the name to the "Lord's Resistance Army" (LRA), perpetuating many of the weirder strictures and introducing new ones. I'm reluctant to spell these out because, stripped of the Acholi context, they will seem merely bizarre. In some respects, I believe Kony's appeals to foreign (chiefly Sudanese) donors and the extreme destitution now suffered by the Acholi has led to the movement taking on the traits of a cargo cult. Again, while the LRA incorporates extreme pietistic imagery from Christianity (like enshrining the 10 commandments and fundamentalist indoctrination), it also includes a lot of witchcraft; Kony, for example, determines the outcome of battles by arranging plastic toy guns around a clearing and setting them fire; or wearing women's clothing and channeling Alice (or other people). Likewise, Kony has dabbled in incorporating Muslim rituals. I get the impression that the Christianity is supposedly just a source of spirit-power; so is Islam, in Kony's mind. He dangles the hope of mass conversion to his Sudanese guests, who presume this is an naïve effort at public relations. Everyone understands that he really believes in the power of mystique and coercive terror. Finally, the hypocritical injunction against witchcraft: Kony wants a monopoly on spirit-power, and we should expect this (just as the US government should like to have a monopoly on nuclear weapons). Finally, there is the extreme Acholi chauvinism; Kony embodies the worst disaster to befall the Acholi, bar none, but his ideology is founded on a professed loathing of non-Acholi things, or Acholi who "betray" the Acholi people. This is hardly surprising; most horrid leaders are exactly the same.

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Is the Insurgency 'Useful' to the State?

Explaining the rotten character of the LRA is one thing; explaining the success it has "enjoyed" perpetuating itself over the last two decades is quite another. In 1991 the UPDF launched Operation North against the LRA, with devastating results on the insurgency:

Operation North and other factors appear to have had considerable impact on the LRA. Some observers who resided in the north at the time assert that its forces were reduced to a fraction of their original strength and that their movements were circumscribed. One of the enduring questions from this period – a source of concern to Acholi and non-Acholi alike – is why the NRA did not pursue these remnants and destroy the LRA when it appeared to have the chance. Detractors of the government insist that its armed forces chose not to do so in order to justify continued receipt of operational allowances and to continue to engage in corrupt practices. Some allege that the LRA conflict provides a convenient "smokescreen" for delivery by Uganda of military supplies to the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), an armed anti-Sudan government insurgency based in southern Sudan. They also allege that the war provides a convenient justification for defense expenditures which Uganda’s donors would otherwise not accept. Government sources assert that a lack of technical competence in the correct deployment of air and ground resources prevented a complete victory in 1991. One expatriate military expert asserts that in the final phases of such conflicts local military commanders hesitate to risk the lives of their soldiers. Instead, they typically rely on indirect fire and other ineffective means to combat the remaining enemy troops. Finally, some observers asserted that Ugandan participation in military operations in neighboring countries other than Sudan has not appeared to require a "smokescreen."

In 1994, after the near-annihilation of the LRA, peace talks were attempted; many in Uganda thought the war was over. However, while Kony was clearly playing for time in the hopes that Sudanese assistance would come through, Museveni and his aides thought they could crush the remnants militarily. Hence, in February the talks fell through and the war resumed. Sudanese aid was decisive, but UPDF was reluctant or nonexistent (p.44, Gersony). One gets the impression that the UPDF is not terribly interested in defeating the LRA, when it can allow it to permanently alienate the Acholi people whom it is supposed to represent.

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