The LRA: A Never Ending Struggle?
| May 6, 2010 | Posted by Lotte under Uncategorized |
The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) originated in Northern Ugandan in 1987, where the rebel group started fighting the Ugandan army over the marginalisation of the Northern region. During its violent struggle the LRA has committed gross human rights violations, including murder, mutilations, and sexual enslavement. As a result the LRA lost support from the Northern Ugandan population and started abducting children to strengthen their forces. The consequence: the LRA abducted over 55,000 child soldiers and estimates claim that 60 to 80% of the group consists of children.
Over the last couple of years the LRA has become a severe problem in Central Africa. After being chased out of Northern Uganda the LRA has spread its forces through Sudan, the Democratic Republic Congo (DRC), and the Central African Republic (CAR). They survived by targeting civilians; small groups of LRA fighters attack unprotected villages to capture new recruits and loot the food and clothes they need.
In December 2008 Operation Lightning Thunder was launched: a joint initiative of the Ugandan, Congolese, and Southern Sudanese governments to defeat the rebels. The operation was supposed to crush the LRA by bombing its bases, killing rebel leader Joseph Kony, and capturing its fighters. But Operation Lightning Thunder failed, largely. The LRA splintered again, exploited the inability of the three countries to control their borders, and is hence still active throughout the region.
In December 2009 the rebels killed at least 321 people in DRC, and abducted 80 children. This indicates the LRA has not been “crushed” at all and is still able to terrorize the entire region. The International Crisis Group attempted to analyze the causes of the ongoing problems and came with recommendations in a report last week: “National security forces are too weak to protect their own people, while the Ugandan army, with U.S. support, is focused on hunting Joseph Kony, the group’s leader. The Ugandans have eroded the LRA’s numbers and made its communications more difficult. But LRA fighters, though disorganised, remain a terrible danger to civilians in this mostly ungoverned frontier zone. National armies, the UN and civilians themselves need to pool intelligence and coordinate their efforts in new ways if they are to end the LRA once and for all”.
Yet, how is this to be done? Intelligence reports claimed Kony was in southern Darfur last month, trying to get renewed support from the Sudanese government in Khartoum. Meanwhile, most of his forces are widely scattered across CAR, making it impossible to pin down their exact numerical strength and whereabouts. In addition, the group has been in survival mode for years but still manages to spread their strategy of terror, and time after time escapes its own destruction. This indicates that a new approach is needed to defeat the LRA.
The International Crisis Group argues that civilian protection should be prioritized in this new strategy. And this may well be part of a lasting solution; knowing that the LRA’s survival mainly depends on targeting civilians in order to get access to food, medication, and new recruits, cutting out this option will drain the group’s capacity to carry on its struggle. Let’s hope that the UN, together with its missions present in the area, the involved governments and their security forces, plús the local populations, will manage to establish a beneficial cooperation that will lead to a better and more peaceful future for this suffering region and its people.
To find out more about the International Crisis Group’s recommendations, read the full report here. To find out more about the LRA and its use of child soldiers download this report. If you’d like to listen to some radio interviews I gave on the LRA, you can find them here.
For an in-depth look at Joseph Kony and the LRA, see the book, First Kill Your Family: Child Soldiers of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army.