Richard Dowden
18 April 2006
opinion
Kitgum — It was one of the deadliest encounters United Nations troops had ever engaged in. Guatemalan Special Forces, operating under UN command in northeastern Congo, made contact with 300 Lord's Resistance Army fighters who had crossed from Uganda into the Garamba National Park.
Authorised to use maximum force against the warlords and militias, the Guatemalans closed in for the kill. But the LRA unit laid an ambush. After a fierce gun battle, eight Guatemalans were dead. The terrorists beheaded the commander and escaped. How could one of the world's most experienced special forces be outfought by what is usually described as a cult of half-crazed cannibals whose tactics are murder, rape and pillage? How could their leader, a dreadlocked psychopath called Joseph Kony with no military training, lead such a successful army?
The LRA is portrayed as a mindless terror gang, so evil it makes political or military analysis unnecessary. But the difficult truth is that, although the LRA controls no territory, it has also been one of the most effective guerrilla armies in Africa. Supplied until recently by Sudan, it moves fast and undetected for hundreds of miles in days, breaks into small groups and re-forms.
Many people had assumed the sheer virulence of the LRA would quickly burn itself out. Surely no human could maintain such appalling brutality for long, let alone win a guerrilla war with it. But it has lasted 20 years. It grew out of the Holy Spirit Movement, another bizarre cult, led by Alice Lakwena, a priest who claimed that her fighters were protected from bullets by butter. She was defeated by the Ugandan army, but Kony, said to be her cousin, took up the cause.
Its origins go back to the defeat of the Okello regime by the army of now-President Yoweri Museveni in 1986. Tito Okello, a former British army sergeant, was an Acholi, the ethnic group which formed the backbone of the Ugandan army. The 1986 defeat traumatised the Acholis, but they did not abandon their fighting skills. A former UK soldier who interviewed captured LRA fighters was appalled to find that they use standard British army orders, handed down from colonial times.
In the Nineties, Sudan gave the LRA refuge and supplied it with weapons in retaliation for Ugandan support for southern Sudanese rebels. For a while it had anti-aircraft missiles, mortars and a battlefield communications system. Western governments have pressed Sudan to end its support, and a new plan is to get the Sudanese to arrest Kony or drive him into Congo, where the UN could hand him to the International Criminal Court.
Accepted wisdom is that the LRA is a mad cult led by a lunatic: kill Kony and the problem will go away. But a young Anglican church worker in Kitgum said: 'Kony has a spirit. It is in a sheep which leads him around and tells him what to do. When the spirit comes into him, his face changes, his voice changes. It is someone else. You must never look into his eyes. What we are worried about is this: the spirit was in Lakwena and when she crossed the Nile it went into her father and then to Kony. If anything happens to Kony, maybe it will leave him and move to someone else in their clan.'
The Acholi live in squalid camps where 1,000 people die each week, according to the World Health Organisation. A separate report last week by 50 charities in northern Uganda said 41 per cent of the dead are children under five. The violent death rate is estimated to be three times higher than in Iraq and the study says that the war is costing Uganda $85m a year. All this puts the region in the UN emergency category.
The official line is that these camps were formed voluntarily to protect the people from the LRA, but in the past five years the Ugandan army has placed a free-fire zone outside them. People out after sundown are regarded as rebels. When the Burundi government used similar tactics against its rebels a few years ago, international donors moved quickly against it, but, protected by Britain, which needed Museveni as a rare African success story, Uganda gets away with it. The camps exist only because the UN and the charities feed the inmates.
At Labuge camp on the outskirts of Kitgum, some 18,000 people live in traditional grass-roofed huts packed tightly together. Sanitation is minimal and rains make the camp a fetid swamp. If a fire starts, thousands of huts burn in minutes. Disease spreads more quickly. There is nothing for men to do but drink. Women are left with childcare, cooking and brewing beer. Ragged youngsters run wild.
'Children think food is something that comes off a UN lorry,' said a local priest. Fly over the once-rich farmland and you see an abandoned landscape.
The Observer
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