If the long night of the bloodthirsty visionaries were to end

North Uganda has been described as suffering the worst and the most forgotten humanitarian crisis in the world. It has been going on for twenty years without any great economic or strategic interests at stake. The article of a Combonian missionary explains the actual situation: Kony’s rebels, who claims to receive orders from the Holy Spirit, now massacre even those who belong to their own ethnic group. The hopes for a peace agreement

by José Carlos Rodríguez

On 14 April last, during his speech to the members of the Security Council, the Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs at the United Nations, Jan Egeland, described the war in north Uganda as «the worst humanitarian crisis in the world and also the most forgotten». The fact that it was the first time in the 18 years that the conflict has lasted, that it had found a place on the agenda of this international body, says a lot.
Different from other areas of Africa, north Uganda is a region where great interests, either economic or strategic, were never at stake. This is a fact which along with the official position of the government of Yoweri Museveni (until some time ago considered a model of economic progress on the continent), which has always minimized the problem by defining it as a simple «internal affair of insecurity on the point of being resolved», may explain the scarce international attention. Which, moreover, can be explained by the very irrationality of the situation itself: the rebels of the Liberation Resistance Army of the Lord (LRA is the English acronym) are Acholi (the principal tribe of the North), but they have systematically attacked the members of their own ethnic group. The LRA fires on cars it has ambushed, attacks and destroys villages, kidnaps small boys in order to force them to fight in its army, kills civilians who have the misfortune to be in their way or mutilates them in an atrocious way. Since 1966 the regular army has been forcing people to leave their villages and crowd into evacuee camps, known officially as “protected villages”, where thousands of people are massed together in inhuman conditions and hardly receive protection. It is enough to remember the recent case of the massacre at Barlonyo, in the district of Lira, 21 February last. About three hundred people were cruelly massacred – the majority burned alive in their huts – by the rebels.

The LRA is led by Joseph Kony, a visionary who claims to receive orders from the Holy Spirit and who since 1993 has had the constant logistical support of the Islamic government of Sudan, in reprisal for the help which the Ugandan government has always given to the Sudanese rebels of the SPLA of John Garang. Until 2002 the LRA limited itself to launching attacks from its bases, near Juba, against the Acholi territories (a region as big as Belgium). In March of this year, the Ugandan army (known as UPDF) organized an offensive called “Operation iron fist”, with which it attempted to annihilate the LRA inside Sudan, with the formal agreement of the government of Khartoum, which, in this way, attempted to modify its international image of financier of terrorist groups. The offensive succeeded only in further infuriating the LRA. It evaded the attacks of the UPDF, continued to receive undercover military support from the Sudanese army and moved into north Uganda with the greater part of its forces, setting off a spiral of brutality never seen before. Up to mid 2003, the LRA spread to the south and the east, in the regions of Lango and Teso, which had not been attacked for over ten years.
The consequences were catastrophic: after the escalation of the violence, the number of internal refugees went from half a million, in January 2002, to a million and a half. In the region of the Acholi alone, 90% of the population has evacuated. The basic social services such as schools and health centers have been destroyed or don’t function as they should because they were built in areas that are now uninhabited or because teachers and nurses have sought refuge in safer areas. The World Food Program, responsible for the distribution of foodstuffs in the camps, needs at least 127 million dollars to satisfy the needs of the population. Until now only 50 have arrived. The fact that the Ugandan government has systematically refused to declare a state of emergency in the area where the war is taking place has not favored the international intervention that could have alleviated its effects on the civilian population.

Above woman armed with a machete in the refugee village of Otwal and, below, a girl armed with an axe in the village of Pagak. People always move about with some tool or another so as to defend themselves against unexpected attacks by the LRA rebels. Often, in fact, the rebels attack the villages with sharp implements (so as to avoid attracting the army’s attention with firing), they kill, kidnap the children and disappear

The following is a case repeated daily, now for months, because of this lack of means: a group of evacuees – almost always women – venture into their villages to go and get the food they left in the granaries; but along the road they meet an LRA patrol which accuses them of being spies of the army and stabs them without pity or beats them to death. This year, in the month of April alone, 40 women lost their lives in this tragic way in the districts of Kitgum and Pader. And in the month of May, 150 civilians were assassinated during the course of five attacks by the rebels on the refugee camps of Odek, Pagak, Lukode, Kalabong and Abok. Stories of this kind do not usually appear in the international media, almost unrepresented in the conflict zone, and this provides the Ugandan army with the comfortable position of having practically the monopoly of information on the conflict, information which is ably manipulated in such a way as to always give the same message, which is that the LRA is almost finished and that the situation is under control. The religious leaders, who have always made a great effort to diffuse independent information, are often threatened or accused of collaborating with the terrorists so as to silence them.
The most dramatic aspect of the conflict is its impact on children. According to statistics from UNICEF, at least thirty thousand minors have been kidnapped by the LRA since 1994. Of these, ten thousand in the past 18 months. At least 80% LRA consists of young children forced to fight and commit the worst atrocities, many times against their own family members, until they are persuaded they would have no place to go to if they decide to flee. The young girls, as well as having to shoulder rifles, are forced to become sex slaves of the leaders. Almost every day news reports appear in the Ugandan press in which the army declares it has killed twenty or thirty rebels, especially with bombs from helicopters: the fact that the greater part of the victims are children is a secret that everyone knows, sometimes kidnapped only a few days before and used as human shields. And as if that were not enough, the children who succeed in escaping from the LRA are often recruited by the UPDF, or return to their own families, almost always in the refugee camps where they run the risk of being kidnapped again by the LRA.

A group of boys in the refugee village of Odek a few days after the massacre of 29 April 2004. The presence of the people’s militia for self-defense proved useless

For many children, the only way to escape the nightmare of kidnapping is to abandon their villages at dusk and look for a safe place to sleep in a nearby town. Since the second half of 2002, more than 40,000 children have been walking for one or two hours to find a place to sleep in cities such as Gulu, Kitgum, Lira or Kalongo, where they find refuge in the hospitals, the churches, the schools or in other public buildings, or simply under the street porticos. It is no exaggeration to say that there is no other place in the world with such grievous and lasting abuse of minors. International public opinion, which screamed scandal when the case of abuse of minors by some American priests was aired, doesn’t seem to be even half interested in putting an end to this much bloodier abuse. The dramatic scenario of these “night commuters”, as they are usually called, is a unique case in the world.
In the face of the incapacity of the UPDF to adequately protect the population, the government has given increasing backing to the founding of local militia to strengthen the armed presence. Different civilian groups have criticized this policy which, according to them, contributes to the proliferation of light arms in an area which, already in itself, is a powder keg. There are also well-founded fears that the creation of these armed groups may become a source of inter-ethnic conflict, with disastrous consequences.
From the beginning of the conflict, various leading local figures have tried for a peaceful negotiated solution. The last of these attempts was made by “A religious peace initiative” (ARPLI), an inter-religious group which brings together Catholics, Protestants and Muslims, led by the Archbishop of Gulu, John Baptist Odama. Between July 2002 until August 2003, representatives of this group - which was recently awarded the Niwano Peace Prize – have met the guerilla leaders about twenty times. Until now, however, the LRA and the UPDF have never agreed on a ceasefire. This, together with the fact that the LRA does not control any part of Ugandan territory but leads a nomadic life in bands that move through the vast woods of the region, means that the meetings take place in circumstances of high risk. The religious complain that on more than one occasion the army has attacked the contact zone, thereby ruining what small progress had been made to set the peace process going. The recent announcement, at the end of January of this year, that the International Criminal Court was investigating the LRA prior to prosecuting the leaders did nothing but increase the distrust of a group of rebels already resistant to negotiation, further diminishing the possibility of a negotiated solution.

The entrance to Lacor hospital

On 16 April last came a small spiral of hope when President Museveni publicly declared his wish to bring the conflict to an end in a negotiated form. There is no doubt that the pressure of the international community had an important role in this declaration in favor of peace. The donor countries cover 52% of the national budget of Uganda, and in diplomatic circles nobody any longer believes in a purely military solution to this war. Not more than a month ago Joseph Kony, in a conversation with Archbishop Odama declared that he was ready to join peace talks, adding that he did not trust Museveni however. Since then the LRA has on various occasions issued public declarations in favor of peace talks and the ceasefire, without anything concrete being done so far.
It seems that the LRA is also under pressure. Its leaders know that the peace agreement with Sudan could mean the definitive end to the supply of arms and logistic support for them. Almost every day rebel soldiers – the majority of them minors – flee from the LRA, even if the deserters are rapidly substituted by other kidnapped children. Faced with such a desperate situation, everyone wants the government and rebels to reach the earliest possible agreement on how and where to meet to negotiate the peace. It will be the only way to put an end to a tragedy that has so far aroused only the interest of the international community.

Genifex Nalumansi with her grandchildren. Mrs. Nalumansi, mother of 11 children, 9 of whom died of AIDS, has kept her grandchildren with her (a common occurrence in Ugandan families decimated by the evil), who cultivate the land and mine coal, work which allows the boys to go to school

Aids. The epidemic has wiped out an entire generation of Africans. The drama of child orphans

The drama of children made orphans by AIDS is a problem involving the whole African continent. In 2001 more than 34 million children of sub-Saharan Africa were made orphans, a third of them as a consequence of AIDS. The number of the orphans is increasing dramatically and it is predicted that by the year 2010 it will be more than 42 million. Twenty million of these children are orphans because of AIDS. In countries such as Uganda, however, where the rate of sickness has diminished, the parents who are already sick continue to die.
From 1981, when the first cases of AIDS were recorded, until 2001 in Uganda alone there were: 2,200,000 infected; 1,400,000 dead; 950,000 orphaned by AIDS. The rate of infection among adults is 8.3%; 420,000 women are infected, 350,000 men and 53,000 children.