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.
However, Mr Kony, in May 2006, was captured in the video clip referred to in earlier paragraphs, denying "adopting the whole thing of Muslims."
"I joined Khartoum because Museveni was supporting SPLA but I am not a terrorist...I am a freedom fighter," Kony said.
Regardless, "after entering an agreement with Bashir, Kony was officially allowed to open up bases in southern Sudan," Dr Lenzio Angole Onek, a Sudanese Acholi who lived in Juba at the time, told Sunday Monitor in an interview.
The proxy war was on
Dr Onek has always been close to Mr Kony and is known to have played a crucial role in convincing him to participate in the current peace process.
"Khartoum armed Kony with everything an army needs to fight a ground war. He had his major base in Jabelein and two offices in Juba; one in the major military garrison," Dr Onek said. "Kony once told me that he also visited Egypt and Libya and had some of his forces trained in some Asian countries," he added.
As a measure of the level organisation at his disposal, usually credible sources in Juba have told Sunday Monitor that Kony even had the freedom to run a maize mill "to generate food for his forces."
First peace steps
As earlier noted, the LRA's 'invincibility' startled Kampala and yet the Gen. David Tinyefuza-led Operation North achieved little success. Ms Bigombe's bow and arrow 'pacification' strategy only resulted in the slaughter of thousands of Acholi young men in reprisal attacks by the rebels. Things looked messier by the day and someone had to admit as much.
"The war could not continue that way, everything was not working and I asked President Museveni whether we could try a peace process," said Ms Bigombe in an exclusive interview with Sunday Monitor.
Ms Bigombe who had publicly condemned one Yusuf Okwang Adek, at the time a prominent LRA sympathiser, now had to turn to him for help. "I had to turn to Adek and ask him to tell Kony that government, specifically President Museveni, had asked him to consider a peaceful resolution to the war and luckily he did so," said Ms Bigombe.
Previous efforts by various leaders to initiate contact with the insurgents had generally ended in failure. Intermediaries claiming to have close contacts were usually frauds who demanded goods such as money, bicycles, or the return of cows, in return for letters purportedly written by rebel commanders - most of them fake.
Hence the letters that Mr Adek brought from the bush came under close scrutiny, but were found to be genuine. Ms Bigombe believed that Mr Adek was honest, and he never asked for more funds than he would need for the job and sometimes never asked for anything at all, arguing that nobody needed money to buy anything in the jungle.
"I have been close to Kony not because I support the LRA but I have been asking him to end the war peacefully and I am succeeding in that," Mr Adek, now in his 70s told Sunday Monitor when this newspaper finally caught up with him in December 2007. He is currently part of LRA negotiating team in the current peace process.
Finally Mr Kony and Ms Bigombe got talking. "Kony told me he too wanted to end the war but wanted government and his group to cease hostilities," she said. Her efforts paid off. Kony and Museveni agreed on a cessation of hostilities informally, said Ms Bigombe.
France-based Ugandan journalist, Billie O'Kadameri, was closely working with Ms Bigombe at the time. He analyses the two parties to the first peace attempts thus: "It is clear that supporting the process would give the President two important advantages.
If he allowed the initiative to continue, its limitations notwithstanding, and if it succeeded, he would quieten those who had always accused him of being militaristic and of never exploring peaceful solutions to conflicts.
If the talks failed, he could still parade the initiative as an example of his government's attempts at ending the war peacefully "which was derailed by the bandits who never knew what they wanted except to continue killing people."
Nevertheless, the rebel chief came face to face with Ms Bigombe on November 25, 1993 at Pagik, deep in Aswa county of Gulu District. But problems arose as Ms Bigombe asked Mr Kony to come to Gulu. He declined and accused her of plotting to have him picked up along with his officers. President Museveni denied that there was a quiet ploy to arrest Mr Kony and instead accused him of buying time.
As can be expected, everybody involved was jittery and all sorts of speculations began to fly about. President Museveni, possibly acting on (mis)information from his field commanders, was mainly concerned that Kony was buying time while "recruiting, re-arming and treating his sick" in preparation for a longer and bloodier war after getting into cahoots with Sudan's el Bashir.
On February 6, 1994, President Museveni visited Gulu to attend the first anniversary of the visit of Pope John Paul II to the district. While addressing the crowd at Kaunda Grounds, the President said that Ms Bigombe had started talks with the LRA to restore peace, but that the LRA had taken advantage of the talks to perpetuate "banditry" and killing of the people. He then summarily announced that the LRA had seven days in which to surrender, otherwise the government would defeat them militarily.
The seven-day ultimatum came and went but so did the first process to bring peace to northern Uganda evaporate. The bloody conflict dragged on.
Ms Bigombe never gave up. She said she maintained contacts with Mr Kony to-date. Today, she describes him as a "very intelligent man, humorous and very good at reading people's minds." She thinks of Mr Kony as being distinct from other rebel leaders. "Who else has led a rebel group for 20 years without having a splinter group?" she asks rhetorically.
Ms Bigombe blames the failure of her first attempt squarely on Acholi saboteurs she is not willing to name and underestimating Kony's closeness to Khartoum. The newspapers at the time were peppered with lamentations by Ms Bigombe that the male chauvinistic streak predominant in the Acholi political elite then may have informed their misguided and deliberate undermining of the peace process. This was mainly because it was being led by a woman called Ms Bigombe.
"Had I known that one of the most important players was Sudan, I would have started with them," she said regrettably. Soon after the talks collapsed, she reveals, "Kony called me and said he was very angry and that I would see his anger soon."
In another separate warning letter sent to Acholi elders, Kony warned: "You Acholi have refused to support us. We shall now teach you a lesson." In the months that followed, on April 17, 1995, Kony sent his now dead deputy, Otti Lagony and his trusted, Vincent Otti to the latter's home county of Atiak in Gulu to carry out Uganda's largest massacre in a single day. Over 250 people mostly women and children were hacked or shot to death on that black and sad day--dashing all hopes for peace.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 The Monitor. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
