- Late last Saturday afternoon, about 200 heavily armed
members of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) marched into a refugee camp
in northeastern Uganda. Their weapons were modern, their uniforms were
smart - and almost all were children.
-
- The children then indulged in an orgy of bloodletting
that left as many as 240 people dead, probably the worst single massacre
in the history of Uganda's 18-year war. Barlonyo camp, 20 miles north of
Lira, was home to 4,800 internally displaced people from the Langi region,
a tiny proportion of the 1.4 million people displaced by this war. It was
defended by 30 men and boys with a few weeks training and an AK47 each.
They didn't stand a chance.
-
- The child soldiers of the LRA, most of whom had been
abducted in earlier raids, ordered villagers into their huts and set fire
to the thatched roofs. Dozens died. Those who ran outside were shot or
bludgeoned to death.
-
- The government of President Yoweri Museveni has an unfortunate
habit of predicting the imminent defeat of the LRA, only to be proved bloodily
wrong.
-
- Last month, military leaders from the Uganda People's
Defence Force claimed the LRA had been 'routed' in the Langi region and
had fled to Sudan. Last week's massacre was a terrible demolition of that
claim. The LRA is an elusive and problematic enemy.
-
- It grew from remnants of a quasi-religious movement in
northern Uganda led by a mystic called Alice Lakwena. In 1987, Lakwena
launched a war against Museveni's government, which seized power in 1986.
Lakwena was defeated within a year and now lives in a refugee camp in Kenya.
But in 1987, her nephew, Joseph Kony, declared himself Alice's spiritual
successor and launched the LRA.
-
- In those days, the LRA had a programme, a combination
of Christian fundamentalism and political opposition to Museveni. Today,
as one aid worker put it, the LRA 'exists to cause havoc and causes havoc
to exist'.
-
- The LRA claims to be rooted in the Acholi people of the
north, yet the Acholi are their victims. Acholi villages are raided and
children stolen, to be brutalised until they become the rebel soldiers
of tomorrow. In 2001, the LRA abducted 100 children. Last year, it abducted
nearly 9,000.
-
- Once captured, the children are forced to watch, or take
part in, terrible acts of violence against their fellow abductees. Often
they are made to kill their older siblings, creating guilt and complicity
- a powerful initiation into their new lives.
-
- John Ayura was 18 when he was abducted and forced to
march, staggering under a load of looted supplies, to an LRA camp in the
bush near Soroti in the north-east. After five weeks, he escaped. 'They
made me kill three people; it was the young ones who ordered the killing
- that size,' he said, indicating a group of children who had escaped from
the rebels. All were between eight and 12.
-
- 'They forced us to kill the first one by treading on
him. They made us step on him until he died.'
-
- The barbarism in the camp was unrelenting. 'Another,
they tied him and made him lie down, then told us to beat his head with
big sticks until his head was crushed. The next one we killed with pangas,
beating his head with the side of the blade.
-
- 'I suffer now. Sometimes I dream of them, the people
I killed.' But if he had refused? 'They would have killed me.'
-
- Another LRA escapee, 13-year-old Merigoreti, smiled sweetly.
She, too, is plagued by nightmares. Merigoreti was abducted and made a
'wife' to one of the rebels. She only escaped last month and is still reluctant
to talk about him. 'He was a big man and he had a beard,' was all she would
say.
-
- The war was never supposed to come as far south as Teso,
to John and Merigoreti, nor even as far south as Lira where last week's
massacre happened. It has done so only because of yet another failed government
offensive that was supposed finally to defeat the LRA.
-
- By the end of last decade, the LRA had set up semi-permanent
camps in southern Sudan, on the Ugandan border. In 2002, with the reluctant
agreement of the Sudanese, the Ugandan army launched Operation Iron Fist
to drive the LRA from those bases. The LRA moved back into northern Uganda,
abductions and death escalated and the suffering of the Acholi became worse
than ever.
-
- Last June, marauding bands of LRA 'conscripts' reached
as far as Lira in the Langi region and even the outskirts of Soroti in
Teso. Museveni announced he was moving to Soroti to supervise the operation
to drive them back. That, he said, would be achieved by 28 August. The
LRA celebrated the passing of the deadline by massacring 25 people in a
bus ambush, killing 15 others in attacks on villages around Soroti and
abducting hundreds more.
-
- In reality, Ugandans get little protection from the army,
the Uganda People's Defence Force. Years of military adventures in Congo
have encouraged rampant corruption in the officer class and left foot soldiers
exhausted. More serious is that thousands of soldiers simply do not exist.
-
- Although the government would never admit it, that has
been one of the main reasons for the military's increasing reliance on
ill-trained local volunteer militias like those who were supposed to be
defending Barlonyo.
-
- Now Uganda faces a new problem. On Wednesday, an anti-government
demonstration by the mainly Langi people of Lira degenerated into a riot
in which as many as eight died. Several of those who died were Acholis
accused of being LRA collaborators, a particularly harsh claim because,
although most members of the LRA are Acholi, it is also the Acholi who
have suffered most.
-
- Just 100km north-west of Lira lies the town of Gulu,
a symbol of the suffering of the Acholi. Every open space, every street
corner, veranda or pavement is filled with the huddled, shivering bodies
of sleeping children. Night is when the LRA carries out its raids, so every
evening children leave their villages and trek into the relative safety
of town.
-
- In the bus yard, 14-year old Florence was huddled, playing
with her rosary. 'They came last year and abducted my cousins, but I escaped.
I haven't seen them since,' she said. 'They have also killed my father.
They killed him in 1999.'
-
- Then Florence said something you hear again and again
in this beleaguered town. 'We should forgive them for what they have done.
If we kill them, it is also bad.'
-
- That is the tragedy of Acholiland. The people here want
to forgive because the rebels who oppress them are their children and siblings.
-
- Father Carlos Rodriques, a local priest, explained: 'A
lot of LRA commanders are in their late teens or early twenties and were
abducted perhaps nine or 10 years ago when they were easy to manipulate
and brainwash.'
-
- Acholi leaders of all faiths - Christian, Muslim and
traditional - have been working together to broker peace talks.
-
- 'More than 90 per cent of the LRA rebels are abducted
children. We should not wage war against these people,' said Macleod Baker
Ochola, the retired Anglican Bishop of Kitgum, whose daughter was abducted
and raped by rebels. Eleven years later, his wife was blown up by an LRA
landmine.
-
- The government is less forgiving. It has offered amnesty
to rebels who give themselves up, but remains committed to a military solution.
-
- Fr Rodriques is in despair: 'We don't have oil, we don't
have mineral resources. This is not a place of strategic importance to
anybody. This is why the world doesn't care about us.'
-
- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
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- http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1158667,00.html
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