Apart from friendships with shady dictators, the LRA has gotten pretty good at what it does — massacring and hiding throughout the region. “They’ve developed skills that no military has on Earth,” said Frank Nyakairu, who covered the LRA for 10 years for Uganda’s Daily Monitor and now works for Reuters. LRA fighters are excellent at hiding in and moving quickly across rough terrain, often at night, and few conventional militaries can keep up. The LRA has also honed its ability to forage and loot the supplies it needs, including child soldiers. Few if any similar guerrilla or insurgent groups worldwide have been capturing, brainwashing, and training children for as long as the LRA, and its leaders have refined their brutal techniques to an art form.
The LRA’s child soldiers have also made offensive operations against the movement extremely difficult because, bluntly put, children are a tactical advantage. Nyakairu covered several ambushes, for example, in which LRA child soldiers posed innocently playing football or bathing naked. As soon as Ugandan forces passed, the children grabbed hidden guns and opened fire.
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This is a chilling run down on the history of these animals, and how they have gotten away with their murderous exploits. The quote up top is especially troubling. In essence, this group of soldiers will do anything to survive. They have had total freedom to develop whatever strategy and tactics they think is necessary, and this child soldier based army is what has evolved.
I have talked about pseudo-operations recently and this is another area of discussion in which no one has really covered. Using children for operations, is an unfortunate tactic of some of the most despicable characters out there. But it is something that needs to be studied, because in a world of non-state actors, there are no rules. Using children as soldiers is perfectly acceptable to these folks, just as long as they achieve their goals.
Like the quote up top has stated, the ‘LRA has developed skills that no military has on earth’, and love them or like them, they have survived. They survive in the bush, they move fast, they have learned to live a life on the run, and they deploy their child soldiers like little pseudo operators, and this is working for them. Highly immoral, but it is working for them.
Now to answer the question why no one is able to stop them? There is a simple answer to this question. There is no political will to do what is necessary. Everyone cries as to how immoral or terrible the LRA is, but no one has the guts to step in and just kill him. We are too worried about what these corrupt countries and militaries think in this region, and we continue to throw money at them with the hopes that they will accomplish a task that they are not up to. Worse yet, if they actually kill or capture Joseph Kony, they will effectively end their anarchy gravy train that the West has loaded up with money. Kill Joseph, and the AGT is done.
Nope, if the West actually cared about the people of these regions, they would effectively ignore these governments and militaries, and kill Joseph Kony. Of course these countries would grumble and whine about threatening their sovereignty, but in the end, the world would be a better place because we actually removed such horrible human. I see no other way, and as this article has explained, the strategy has failed to kill him. What instead has happened, is the west has stood by and watched a psychotic killer, destroy the lives of thousands of children, as well as kill and maim thousands of people throughout Africa. –Matt
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Why Can’t Anyone Stop the LRA?
One of the evilest rebel armies in Africa has been kidnapping children and brutally murdering civilians for 20 years despite constant international efforts to wipe it out. Why?
BY MICHAEL WILKERSON | APRIL 19, 2010
In its nearly 20 years of fighting in northern Uganda, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) killed or injured thousands of civilians, abducted scores of children to fill its ranks, and traumatized a whole generation of Ugandans. But in recent years, it was beginning to look as if Uganda’s nightmarish two-decade struggle against the LRA was at last coming to an end. The rebels had mostly been driven out of northern Uganda in 2005 by government troops, and the last LRA attacks on Ugandan soil were in 2006. The terror that once plagued the country’s north was finally fading into memory.
The LRA, however, was not. It was just moving next door — to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), South Sudan, and the Central African Republic (CAR), where the rebels have continued their trademark nastiness, including a DRC rampage between Dec. 14 and 17, 2009, that killed more than 300 people. The massacre, chronicled in a recent Human Rights Watch report, shows that the LRA is still an immense threat to unarmed civilians.