Christian extremist Lord’s Resistance Army still enslaving children in Africa

Middle East Online - August 30, 2009

Christian extremist LRA still enslaving children

Many child victims fail to escape Christian extremism of LRA amid terror that reaches south Sudan.

Former LRA child soldier: 'They made me their slave'

JUBA, Sudan - The boys were fishing when the rebel fighters struck, dragging them off for a slave life in one of the world’s most notorious guerrilla armies.

"I thought they would kill me," said 16-year old Genekpio Kumbayo, seized in December from the farming village of Faraj, in north-eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). "I was so terrified, I couldn't talk."

Kumbayo was captured by the Christian extremist Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a Ugandan-led rebel group, whose two-decades-long campaign of guerrilla raids continues to terrorise a vast swathe of land across several nations in the region.

"For five months they forced me to carry all their equipment," Kumbayo said quietly.

"I had no choice, they made me their slave - they kept us moving through the forests, always hard at work."

Unlike others, Kumbayo was relatively lucky.

He escaped into neighbouring southern Sudan in April when Ugandan troops attacked the Christian extremist rebels, but was shot in the leg in the crossfire.

Ugandan soldiers began a military operation in December on remote rebel bases in the DR Congo after peace talks failed -- triggering a wave of brutal attacks as Christian extremist LRA fighters scattered, carrying out reprisal raids.

More than 230,000 people have fled their homes in south Sudan since late 2008 as a result of the Christian militant LRA, according to UN estimates.

In addition, more than 25,000 refugees from the DR Congo and the Central African Republic (CAR) have arrived seeking shelter.

But the attacks continue.

Since late July, more than 180 people have been killed in radical LRA attacks in south Sudan and the numbers of refugees and displaced are rising, said Lise Grande, the UN’s top humanitarian official for southern Sudan.

"The LRA continues to wreak havoc" she said.

"The picture does not look very good. Violence is continuing in the DR Congo and CAR, raising the concern of future displacements and increased numbers of refugees," she added.

Aid workers and UN staff were even forced to evacuate by helicopter in early August from Ezo, on Sudan’s border with DR Congo, after LRA extremist rebels attacked the remote settlement.

The rebels appear to have timed their raid for when the community was gathered for a church service, looting stores and abducting 17 people, including several children.

Many fear that after a period of relative calm the Christian extremist rebels are regrouping, attacking to secure fresh recruits and to replenish supplies.

The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) has warned of an "unprecedented" wave of attacks in the DR Congo -- with 55 attacks in July alone in the north-eastern Orientale province.

"Some 360,000 Congolese have been uprooted in successive LRA attacks in the Orientale province in north-eastern DR Congo," according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

"The levels of fear are incredibly high," said Katharine Derderian, a humanitarian advisor for the aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) just back from an assessment in DR Congo.

"People are too scared to even send their children to school, because they fear the LRA will attack.

"It’s a fragile situation. People are being forced into urban areas where resources are stretched in terms of medical services, education and food."

LRA rebel chief Joseph Kony, who began his battle over 20 years ago, is said to have named one of his sons “George Bush” in 2006.

The guerrilla group aims to establish a theocratic government in Uganda, based on the Christian Bible and the Ten Commandments.

Their ferocious attacks, with rebels chopping off the limbs and lips of their victims, were often aimed more at the civilians they said they fought for than at the military.

The LRA's top Christian leaders -- fugitives from the International Criminal Court -- are accused of having forcibly enlisted child soldiers and sex slaves, and of slaughtering tens of thousands of people.

"They continue to threaten our people," said Colonel Joseph Ngere Paciko, deputy state governor of Western Equatoria. Bordering DR Congo, it is the Sudanese region hit hardest by the radical LRA.

Southern Sudanese troops are working closely with Ugandan forces based in Sudan, who cross into DR Congo to chase the rebels.

"Our patrols are ready, and eventually we will get them," added Paciko.

But analysts warn there will be no easy solution.

"A few LRA fighters can paralyse and scare an entire population," said Louise Khabure, of the International Crisis Group think tank.

"They continue to do so in DR Congo, Sudan and CAR for now, and it does not preclude Uganda in future."

Khabure was critical of current military operations against them, which she said were "inappropriate for handling guerrilla operations".

With oil-rich south Sudan due to vote on independence in 2011, some fear the LRA may resume its role as a proxy force for those keen to block the emergence of a fully autonomous south.

"The fact that Kony does not seem cornered is very telling, he is not calling anyone for talks. They surely are being harboured somewhere," said Khabure.

But those in the affected areas simply want the fighting to stop.

"I just want to go home," Kumbayo said softly, sitting quietly on a bed in a packed surgery ward in the southern Sudanese capital Juba, where he is being supported by the UN children’s fund, UNICEF.

The gunshot wound to his leg has healed, but he is still searching for his parents. His home village was also attacked by the rebels.

"There is no news from my family," he adds sadly. "I just want to see my mother again."

Some 125,000 flee east DR Congo rebel attacks

At least 125,000 people have fled their homes in eastern DR Congo over the past three weeks amid "large scale destruction" by Ugandan rebels, the UN refugee agency said Friday.

"The Ugandan rebel group, the so-called Lord's Resistance Army, continues to cause large scale destruction and displacement in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo," said Andrej Mahecic, spokesman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

"At least 125,000 people are known to have been driven out of their villages in Haut Uele district of Orientale province by the LRA in the last three weeks alone," he added.

Some 1,270 people have been killed and over half a million people uprooted from the province by the violence since September 2008.

"The rebel group is accused of widespread killings, kidnappings of civilians and raping of women," said Mahecic.

The UNHCR also lamented that the insecurity and impassable roads were hampering relief agencies' ability to access the needy.

The DR Congo, Ugandan and South Sudanese armies had launched a major joint military operation against the LRA from the end of 2008 to March 2009, but failed to quell the rebel force, which has long battled in north Uganda and retreated across the DRC border.

This article was found at:

http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=33967

Cult of Combat - The Lord's Resistance Army

Newsweek - August 21, 2007

As Uganda’s peace talks stutter along, children forced to fight for a messianic militia are trying to rebuild their broken lives.

by Andrew Ehrenkranz | Newsweek Web Exclusive

Some of the children have yet to reach puberty. But they are fluent in rattling off the acronyms of war (RPG, LMG, SAM, SMG) and explaining just how these weapons work. Ranging in age from 7 to 18, they acquired their grim expertise as a result of being kidnapped and forced to serve as soldiers and sex slaves for the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda. Still, says a social worker who identifies himself only as Tom, these are the lucky ones.
The children are among the few who have managed to escape captivity and seek a new start at rehabilitation clinics like this one, the Rachele Center, in the northern town of Lira. The war they were forced to fight in is complex, political, tribal and extraordinarily brutal even by African standards, led by a mystical rebel who inflicts grotesque carnage in the name of Jesus Christ and for the cause of the Ten Commandments. Over the last 20 years, the LRA has played a role in one of the continent's longest and least-known conflicts. The fighting has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced as many as 1.7 million, about the same as in the more talked-about hostilities between a fundamentalist Muslim government and tribal rebels in the Sudanese region of Darfur. But the particular horror in Uganda's war lies in the fact that children are both victims and perpetrators of atrocity.
Among them is Nancy, who was 9 when she and her sister were kidnapped by the LRA from their home in the Gulu district of northern Uganda in December 2002. She was beaten, tied and given a heavy load to carry on her head. In her 20 months in captivity, she was rubbed with shea-butter oil. Her captors told her two things about this supposedly magical concoction: it would stop bullets and it would prevent her from finding her way home if she tried to escape. Nancy was taught to shoot and dismantle a machine gun and forced to fight against the Ugandan Army (UDPF). Every order was a do-or-die ultimatum. She was made to loot, abduct other children and burn down houses in displacement camps. In an ambush by the Ugandan Army, Nancy was rescued, but her sister was left behind in the south Sudanese bush.
It's impossible to purge such a past, but to start the process of healing, scarred children need to open up and tell their stories. "If it makes them or us vomit, it's all got to come out somehow," said the Rachele Center's Belgian founder, Els De Temmerman. Her book, "The Aboke Girls," whose profits have helped fund the center, chronicles the abduction of 137 girls from a Ugandan boarding school and the daring rescue efforts of the school's principal, Sister Rachele—the center's namesake. For some of these kids, expressing their experiences through drawings comes more easily than talking. It's a way to begin a dialogue with outsiders and also within their own minds. Their images scratch through the savage surface of this complex crisis.
The conflict they have fled is rooted in a colonial-era divide, when the British chose the bulk of their civil servants from Uganda's south and most of its soldiers from the tribes of Uganda's north. The Acholi and Langi, the dominant tribes in the north, comprised the country's military elite. When current Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni came to power in 1986, the Acholi in the north feared retribution and a loss of influence without their traditional power base in the military. The Lord’s Resistance Army, led by an illiterate former altar boy and self-professed fundamentalist Christian "prophet" named Joseph Kony, soon became one of the many armed militias and rebels fighting in Uganda. Lieutenants from the regimes of the dictatorial Idi Amin and his successor, Milton Obote, provided the military experience and firepower to make Kony's ragtag rebels a capable and cruel insurgent force.
In waging its guerrilla war, the LRA found children useful as pliant slaves in camp and remorseless fighters in the field. More than 30,000 have been abducted since the late 1980s. In the Ugandan countryside, fear of LRA raids after sunset forced thousands of besieged children to make "night commutes" from rural villages and internal displacement camps to bigger towns in hopes of finding safe shelter. In recent months, however, the prospects for an end to what residents of Ugandan's calm capital Kampala see as the war in the north have improved. The LRA once counted on the backing of the Sudanese government, which was fighting a war in southern Sudan, near the Ugandan border, against rebels of Sudan People's Liberation Army. In the cynical calculus of unconventional warfare, Kampala would back Sudanese rebels while Khartoum supported Ugandan ones. But the long-running war in southern Sudan ended with a peace settlement in 2005, even as the war waged by other groups in the west of the country—Darfur—heated up.
At the same time, the Sudanese government, under increasing pressure on other fronts, started to find its alliance with the LRA in Uganda a liability. The group's bizarre and horrifying zeal massacring the very people it claimed it was fighting to protect became known to the outside world. Sympathy for its cause among the northern tribes of Uganda dwindled, eventually leading to peace talks between the LRA and the Kampala government in the southern Sudanese city of Juba last year. Inevitably, the road to a lasting ceasefire has not been easy. The ongoing Juba discussions stalled and remained at an impasse until last month, when an agreement was reached to extend a truce forged last August and return to the negotiating table. However, sticking points remain, among them the LRA's insistence that the International Criminal Court drop outstanding charges against Kony and his commanders.
While the negotiations stop and start, the children at the Rachele Center are enjoying their chance to act like kids again. Social workers try to remove some of the most tangible reminders by encouraging the children to turn their backs symbolically on the past by throwing their clothes into a bonfire. Their painfully innocent drawings were also on the way to the trash until case workers casually showed them to a visitor during an office clean out. Though critical to therapy, most are discarded after the child starts to function again. Yet some, like one 15-year-old who had his fingers chopped off for refusing an order to kill while captive, have begun to dream of more idyllic pictures. Heralded as Rachele's most talented artist, the lanky boy stands proudly amongst a few of his colorful canvases outside of his dormitory, his smile revealing not a shred of self-pity. He's safe, free and able to go to school—and he knows that this indeed makes him one of the lucky ones.
This article was found at:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/34687

Canada accused of undermining international court

Canwest News Service - June 26, 2008

Could set back the whole basic movement of rules of law against crimes against humanity, including child soldiers

by Kathryn May

OTTAWA - In a bid to bring a peace deal to war-torn Northern Uganda, Canada may end up undermining the very credibility of the International Criminal Court that has been a key piece of this country's foreign policy.
International justice advocates say Canada appears to be quietly promoting a proposal to drop charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity against notorious rebel leader Joseph Kony, head of the Lord's Resistance Army, to help seal a peace deal that could end the brutal war that has ravaged Northern Uganda for more than 20 years.
A copy of an unclassified document that Canadian officials are said to have circulated to member countries of the UN Security Council says Canada is open "in principle" to the idea of Uganda asking the security council to defer the indictments against Kony and his band of commanders. Canada played an instrumental role in creating the court, based in The Hague, and the indictments against Kony are among the first it issued. Its president is Canadian Judge Phillip Kirsch.
Lloyd Axworthy, a former foreign minister for the Jean Chretien government, said such a move undermines Canada's leadership in international justice and the "human security" approach to global issues. He argued it opens the door to impunity for Kony, who in his violent fight to bring in a government based on the Ten Commandments, kidnapped thousands of children and terrorized them to fight as soldiers in the war. Axworthy was a panellist here Thursday, discussing Canada's role in international justice at the official launch of the Canadian Centre for International Justice.
"If we let him and his chief commanders off the hook we will have set back the whole basic movement of rules of law against crimes against humanity, including child soldiers," Axworthy said.
"Using the judicial systems as a form of sanction and deterrent is a very powerful tool and I think that if the Uganda government and the Security Council give in to blackmail, they will set the cause of international justice back to where it was before (General Augusto) Pinochet or Idi Amin," said Axworthy.
Axworthy argued the proposal trades justice for a quick peace deal, but lasting peace will be impossible without justice for those who raped, mutilated, kidnapped and killed so many.
The peace negotiations in Uganda have been marked by a highly divisive debate over how to mete justice to Kony and his rebel leaders. Many have argued the ICC indictments have stood in the way of reaching a peace agreement. Thousands of people, displaced by the war, are still living in squalid camps and don't want to return to their homes until Kony signs the peace deal. They feel Kony will never surrender unless the ICC indictments are dropped.
Robert Fowler, a longtime diplomat who served as Canada's ambassador to the UN and personal representative for Africa for former prime ministers Chretien and Paul Martin, and current leader Stephen Harper, said Canada and the rest of the international community face a "Hobson's choice" in resolving the Uganda conflict.
"It's not easy. This is not a black-and-white situation. Neither choice is a good one," he said.
This article was found at:
http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=39c1b9f1-1d01-4ba9-aafb-bf5dc526cafb