Frank Nyakairu
13 January 2008
analysis
In Part I published in last Sunday Monday, we touched on the birth and formative years of Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebel leader Joseph Kony. In Part II of these series, FRANK NYAKAIRU sees the LRA join Khartoum and how peace attempts were shattered in 1994
By the fall of 1990, rebel leader Joseph Kony and his group was the only one active in northern Uganda. A year earlier, the Addis Ababa Accord that finally integrated more Uganda People's Democratic Movement/Army (UPDM/A) rebels into the central government had been signed.
The UPDM/A ceased to exist, but some rebels, however, refused to come out of the bush. They instead joined Mr Kony's United Democratic Christian Movement/Army for a number of reasons some being the notorious acts of reprisal by government forces against Acholi civilians, including; alleged rape, indiscriminate and mass killings, murder, destruction and looting of property (cattle).
Mr Kony thus gained strength from the combination of forced recruitment of the remnants of the UPDA rebels and as elements of Alice Lakwena's defeated Holy Spirit Movement (HSM) forces joined him.
The LRA began launching daring attacks against the government troops that were dug in all around Gulu District in 1988-89. During one such raid late in 1988, the government troops suffered a series of reversals that were to show themselves to have been militarily significant in later years.
With news of such apparent rebel heroics, the population in Acholiland, many of whom were anti-President Yoweri Museveni, slowly began to believe that Mr Kony was capable of stopping the alleged atrocities being committed by his troops.
President Museveni responded in two ways: stepping up his military campaign and by setting up political infrastructure to coordinate a response to the crisis in the region.
During a cabinet reshuffle in mid-1988, President Museveni created a new ministerial post to address the rebellion in Acholi. He named one of his Acholi confidantes, Ms Betty Acan Bigombe, as 'Minister of State for Pacification of Northern Uganda, Resident in Gulu'.
But the controversial and implicit connotations of the term 'pacification' soon resulted in the revision of the title to 'Minister of State in the Office of the Prime Minister, Resident in Northern Uganda'.
The military campaign was codenamed 'Operation North', and its apparent intent was to try and end the conflict using one of most the heavy-handed of tactics. At one point, the operation's supreme commander sealed off northern Uganda, arrested politicians from there, enforced a media black-out while alleged crimes against humanity were being perpetrated against civilians. Parallel to this, Ms Bigombe started arming the population with bows and arrows to be used as a form of local defence at the village level.
It is at this stage, that Mr Kony, feeling that his support among the people was waning, began to mutilate those believed to be government supporters. This only served to turn more people, who were by now thoroughly terrified by the government army's suppression tactics, against the rebellion. The people were trapped between undisciplined government troops - who were viewed as an occupation force -- and rebels who felt betrayed by "their own".
Signs of escalation commenced in early 1992. The rebels abducted 44 girls from Sacred Heart Secondary School and St. Mary's Girls School, both near Gulu. The terror was now in full gear. Kony renamed his UDCM/A Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and organised it into proper military structures. Kampala slowly started waking up to the fact that a man President Museveni had once referred to as a "jigger", was not exactly one and alone.
Khartoum and LRA
President Museveni and Dr John Garang De Mabior (RIP) had always been close since they shared the same ideological background. Mr Garang was leading his Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) against the Khartoum government, fighting against what they referred to as Islamisation of the Christian south. Partly because of this personal relationship between Mr Garang and President Museveni, Uganda, according to information availed to Sunday Monitor, became part of a secret coalition of Black African Christian nations ranged under the umbrella organisation, the African Solidarity (AS).
Through AS, Uganda accepted to be a conduit for SPLA arms since it was South Sudan's immediate neighbour to the south. This inevitably angered President Omar el Bashir's Khartoum government. When Mr Bashir protested initially about Uganda's support for SPLA, President Museveni vehemently denied and agreed to the setting up of a joint verification commission early in 1991.
"Bashir sent a team of Sudan Armed Forces intelligence officers who were to probe at the border if SPLA had any bases in Uganda or received military help from the Uganda forces," said an SPLA official in Juba. The finding of that team's report reportedly implicated Kampala.
"The team also got information that there was a small rebel group, which was giving the Ugandan army a hard time and that was Kony's group," said the official who preferred not to be named.
At the same time, but on another front, Khartoum had managed to split the SPLA with a senior member of the rebel organisation, Riek Machar, breaking off to form a pro-Khartoum faction known as SPLM/A-United.
Mr Machar, who is currently vice president in the government of southern Sudan and mediator in the Juba peace process, is a crucial and controversial figure in the southern Sudanese struggle and northern Uganda conflict. Seventeen years since SPLA-United, the wheel has come full circle reuniting him with the LRA. Those many years ago, Machar was the link that actually brought the LRA and Khartoum together.
A report by the Small Arms Survey Switzerland published last year affirmed what is now generally known that Mr Machar's SPLM/A-United metarmophosed into the SSIM in 1994. "The SSIM then aligned with the EDF (pro-Khartoum Equatorial Defence Forces) and later with the LRA," the report noted.
"The EDF included members from various backgrounds, including Acholi, Madi, Lokoya, Lolubo, Iyire, and Lotuko. Many members of the EDF had taken refuge in northern Uganda and hence spoke Acholi. The EDF and SPLA United commander William Nyuon Bany, who was then working with Mr Machar, facilitated the first contact between the LRA and the Khartoum," the report said.
And so, 1994 marked a turning point in the northern Uganda conflict and may partly explain why the LRA was from then on lukewarm to overtures for peaceful settlement. Khartoum meant much-needed arms, training and logistical support for the LRA.
Blending of faiths
Slowly, the LRA's pseudo-Christian fundamentalist positioning - purportedly premised on a belief in the Ten Commandments -- would soon come under scrutiny.
Sunday Monitor has had the opportunity to watch a video clip showing LRA rebels chanting "Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar" (Arabic for God is great". The clip was filmed by the LRA in 1998 in the aftermath of a successful battle against the Ugandan army somewhere in Lira.
Quite clearly, in an odd blend of faiths, the LRA gradually became part of Khartoum's Islamisation campaign headed by Sudan's former Speaker Hassan Al Turabi. Under Turabi's sway, Khartoum was turning into an Islamist hub and a haven for anti-western radicals. Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda and Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the nihilist terrorist often romanticized as Carlos the Jackal, both lived in Khartoum at the time. Kony's LRA became another pawn in the game.
There are also unsubstantiated claims in some quarters that Mr Kony was given the Muslim name Mohammad. A claim corroborated by one Denis Ochola in a 2004 interview given to The Monitor (since renamed Daily Monitor). Then just 17-years-old, Ochola had just escaped from captivity and he said: "The prayers are in Islamic because Kony has also become a Muslim. He has been given the name Muhammad." "During prayers we kneel down like Muslims," he added.
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