Feral Jundi

  One of the biggest pigs feeding off of that Anarchy Gravy Train I was talking about, is the LRA.  If there was any a reason to step in with military action to effectively shut down an insane and highly murderous group, these guys take the cake.

   I posted two stories here, and this first one is about the massacre in the Congo these guys just committed. The other story is about legislation being passed in the US to support efforts to stop the LRA and support Uganda.  The second story also presents some very interesting angles about how certain aid groups and charities are really pushing for military action against the LRA–which is kind of a shocker to hear from such groups.  The article also talks about AFRICOM , and it’s roll in Africa, by getting us more involved with dealing with these ‘insane clown posses’ that continue to roam and terrorize Africa.

   My only input on all of this, is that the LRA is taking advantage of jungle cover, weak governments, and weak borders to keep surviving and killing. And if Uganda is able to push them out of their country, that is great, but these folks will just go across the border to the Congo and kill people there.  So now the Congo has to deal with these guys.  If everyone in the region came together and decided that destroying this group was the right thing to do, then and only then will there be a chance at ending this horror once and for all.

   And when I say destroy, I mean kill every last one of them.  You can’t negotiate with Joseph Kony, just like you can’t negotiate with a psychotic killer going on a rampage in a mall. You kill him, and if any of his troops want to continue the fight afterwards, then you kill them too.  It is absolutely vital that you destroy the leader of this group, and any trace amounts that could lead to it’s resurgence after said actions.  The leader, sub-leaders, or whatever.  The LRA should become just a horrible memory after you get through with them.

   As to the child soldiers or child sex slaves?  Hopefully you can rescue them, and get the help they need to become normalized again.  But once again, if you want to eradicate a group like this, forces will be fighting child soldiers along with the adult soldiers of the LRA, and that would be an unfortunate reality of the situation. (please note that a child did this to the woman in the picture below)

   So are  western nations prepared to do this, or are they willing to support other African nations in doing this task? Is the political will there, in order to do the dirty work of removing the LRA from the face of this planet?  That is my question, and until a conclusion is reached, we will continue to watch the LRA and groups like it murder/rape/mutilate/enslave and otherwise create living hells on earth for the innocent people of Africa.  –Matt

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Lokeria Aciro, 40, rests at Saint Joseph’s Hospital near Kitgum after an LRA attack in which a boy of about 11 cut off her lips and ears. She had been collecting firewood outside a camp.

Lord’s Resistance Army killed 321 people in Democratic Republic of Congo

March 29, 2010

Jonathan Clayton

At least 321 people were killed and hundreds were abducted in one of the worst massacres by Africa’s most feared rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), in the Democratic Republic of Congo in December.

A three-year-old girl was burnt to death during the attack on men, women and children, an investigation by a human rights group has revealed.

Villagers who escaped death were sent back with their lips and ears cut off as a warning to others of what would happen if they talked — a tactic used frequently by the LRA, which has terrorised much of northern Uganda and the border areas with Sudan and Congo for more than two decades.

The attack — which was unreported until now — confirms that the LRA has restarted terrorising the region despite losing its bases in Sudan a few years ago, when Khartoum, its main backer, signed a peace deal with south Sudanese rebels. According to Human Rights Watch the LRA also abducted at least 250 people during the attack, including 80 children.

Anneke Van Woudenberg, of the New York-based rights group, called the massacre in the Makombo area of northeast Democratic Republic of Congo “one of the worst ever committed by the LRA in its bloody 23-year history”.

The LRA is led by Joseph Kony, a warlord dubbed the Wizard of the Nile who mixes traditional African beliefs with fundamentalist Christianity. He has made a point of abducting children terrified of his supposed magical powers to perpetuate the movement. Kony turns the boys into killing machines, often unleashing them on their relatives, and takes girls as child brides for himself and his commanders. Peace talks with the group began about two years ago but failed after Kony executed any of his commanders who showed interest in reaching a settlement.

The majority of those killed in the December attack were men. They were tied up, some bound to trees, before being hacked to death with machetes or having their skulls crushed with axes. The dead included 13 women and 23 children, according to the report, which was written after a mission visited the region in February.

Dieudonne Abakuba, a clergyman at Isiro-Niangara, in the north east of the country, confirmed that 30 members of the LRA attacked about a dozen villages of the nearby Haut Uele district.

“They killed at least 300 people. They also kidnapped between 200 and 400 others before disappearing,” he said.

“During the well-planned LRA attack,” the LRA “killed at least 321 civilians and abducted 250 others, including at least 80 children,” said the 67-page HRW report.

According to the report, written after a mission visited the region in February: The vast majority of those killed were adult men, whom LRA combatants first tied up and then hacked to death with machetes or crushed their skulls with axes and heavy wooden sticks.

“The dead include at least 13 women and 23 children, the youngest a three-year-old girl who was burned to death. LRA combatants tied some of the victims to trees before crushing their skulls with axes.”

Story here.

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US legislation authorises military action against the LRA in Uganda

By Samar Al-Bulushi

Pambazuka News

Sunday, Mar 28, 2010

 

Despite harsh condemnation from US legislators in response to Uganda’s draft bill criminalising homosexuality, the Senate passed a bill in mid-March that will prop up Uganda’s government by authorising military action in the highly volatile region of Central Africa. Introduced last May, the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act aims to ‘support stabilisation and lasting peace’ in Northern Uganda – the site of conflict between the Ugandan government and the rebel group Lords Resistance Army (LRA) since 1986. The bill calls for an assessment of options through which the United States, working with regional governments, ‘could help develop and support multilateral efforts to eliminate the threat posed by the Lord’s Resistance Army’.[1]

 

While the bill allocates funding towards humanitarian aid and post-conflict justice and reconciliation processes, the primary focus in Congress is on a military strategy to ‘apprehend or otherwise remove’ LRA leaders. And despite the bill’s requirement that the government of Uganda commit to ‘transparent and accountable’ reconstruction efforts, it makes no similar demands of a military operation, thereby giving a green light to extrajudicial executions. With recent reports of US military drones flying over Mogadishu to help the transitional government in Somalia to track the Shabaab resistance, we can expect a similar ‘multilateral’ approach to eliminating the LRA.

 

The bill emerged in response to aggressive calls, not from the Ugandan people, but from a handful of US-based organisations. Much like the Save Darfur Coalition has done with Sudan, groups like the Enough Project, Invisible Children, and Resolve Uganda have developed an influential voice in Washington that speaks on behalf of Africans thousands of miles away, calling for the US to facilitate ‘peace’ in conflict zones through military intervention.

 

The emergence of these organisations roughly coincided with the little-noticed birth of AFRICOM, the US military command for Africa. Announcing the creation of the command in February 2007, President Bush stated that AFRICOM ‘will enhance our efforts to help bring peace and security to the people of Africa and promote our common goals of development, health, education, democracy and economic growth in Africa.’[2] While Africans have expressed grave concern over the political and economic interests behind a US military presence on the continent[3], the US advocacy groups campaigning to end conflict in Africa have been among AFRICOM’s most ardent supporters.

 

In a statement released just before Obama took office, Resolve Uganda and the Enough Project made an explicit call for a military operation to eliminate the LRA: ‘The United States military has strong ties to the Ugandan military and has assets based nearby at the U.S. military base in Djibouti. The incoming Obama administration should provide greater intelligence and logistical support and should consider direct support to, and collaboration with, Ugandan forces on the ground in direct action against the LRA.’[4] In response to their advocacy efforts, Senator Russ Feingold stated in March 2009 that the effort to stop the LRA is ‘exactly the kind of thing in which AFRICOM should be engaged.’[5]

 

Yet, in an effort to appeal to a wide audience, the bill’s supporters are deliberately vague about how exactly ‘peace’ will come about. Visitors to Invisible Children’s website can give US$5 to ‘rescue the child soldiers’ and can sign a petition calling on President Obama to lead an ‘international effort’ to arrest LRA leader, Joseph Kony, and implement the LRA bill. No information is provided on the content of the bill, nor is any reference made to military action.

 

Resolve Uganda says that US policymakers should develop a ‘comprehensive strategy for working with international partners’ to ‘permanently end the LRA insurgency’. One has to dig much deeper on their website to find reference of a military operation. On the third page of a memo to civil society partners, it states: ‘The bill makes it clear that the Obama Administration should consider supporting viable military actions to protect civilians from LRA violence and prevent rebel leaders from carrying out further attacks… for any strategy to end LRA atrocities to be deemed “viable” as required by the bill, Obama Administration officials will have to explore alternative options beyond supporting offensives led by weak regional militaries.’[6] Enter AFRICOM with its ‘assets’ in Djibouti to lead an offensive with US-trained Ugandan special forces.[7]

 

On its website, the Enough Project references the arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for the top LRA leaders, but the bill makes no mention of the ICC and none of the groups have explicitly called for the warrants to be executed. And yet the ICC’s prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo (along with the Ugandan minister of defence), attended and addressed participants in a lobby day organised by Resolve, Enough, and Invisible Children in June 2009 to raise support for the bill.

 

Why would the head of an ostensibly independent legal body participate in a political event dedicated to passing legislation that makes no commitment to upholding his arrest warrants and that leaves the door open to extrajudicial assassinations? For all its talk of the rule of law, the US government has never exactly been a friend of the ICC. Under the Bush Administration, the US aggressively sought out bilateral immunity agreements with governments worldwide to ensure that Americans would not be subject to the court’s jurisdiction (and threatened aid cuts to those who did not comply). Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) signed reciprocal immunity agreements with the US in 2003, thereby guaranteeing that the US would similarly shield Ugandan and Congolese citizens from accountability under international law. In light of the failure of any of these governments to hold members of their own armed forces responsible for gross human rights violations, there is an equally small chance of accountability under domestic law. The bill’s supporters fail to mention any of this.

 

The groups are also misleading about the level of support for the bill. Resolve Uganda refers to a coalition of organisations that includes groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, and Uganda.[8] This ‘coalition’ is composed primarily of American and Southern Sudanese organisations; it includes just two Ugandan and one Congolese group (most Congolese are wary of any Ugandan-led operation because of the Ugandan Army’s history of violence and exploitation in eastern Congo[9]).

 

In the US, a number of groups with greater historical ties to the region raised alarm bells about the bill’s military component. In June 2009, the Africa Faith and Justice Network (AFJN) submitted a petition to Congress against military involvement. It stated that ‘allowing AFRICOM to assist in an attack against the LRA is a recipe for disaster’, citing ‘a strong outcry from many religious groups and communities in northern Uganda, including several AFJN members’ who are against a military operation.[10] In response to these concerns, minor changes were made to the bill, such as a stipulation that military action would only be pursued ‘if there continue to be no viable efforts to achieve a genuine negotiated solution.’[11] But without further clarification on who determines what constitutes ‘viable efforts’ or a ‘genuine’ solution, it appears that the US government will retain the authority to pursue a military strategy. An AFJN staff member, has in fact, privately confirmed that the focus of discussions in Congress remains a military operation.[12]

 

Outside of Resolve Uganda’s website, where their names are listed, none of the African groups are vocalising any continued support for the bill. In Acholiland, the heart of the conflict in northern Uganda, where the ethnic Acholi people have suffered attacks from both the LRA and the government’s army, the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative expressed strong concerns about the military component of the bill and called for a peaceful resolution to the conflict. ‘We applaud the commitment of the bill [in the US Congress] to bring about stability and development in the region’, said the leaders in June 2009. ‘However, we as the Acholi religious leaders whose primary concern is the preservation of human life, advocate for dialogue and other non-violent strategies to be employed so that long term sustainable peace may be realised.’

 

James Otto of Human Rights Focus, a local NGO based in northern Uganda, says that lobbying by groups like Resolve is helping prop up a government that has long favoured a military solution. Emphasising his organisation’s long-standing insistence on dialogue, he also expressed concern about the children who were forcibly abducted by the LRA getting caught in the crossfire of a military operation. ‘I don’t know what kind of charity organization would support violence,’ he said. Referring to the funding in the bill allocated towards humanitarian and justice efforts, Otto said that no amount of money could replace the lives lost in a military offensive.

 

Ugandan opposition to a military solution stems from their experience of numerous counter-insurgency efforts that have not only failed to bring peace, but have led to the displacement and death of thousands of civilians. In 1996 the Ugandan army rounded up and forcibly relocated civilians in the north into what it called ‘protected camps’, claiming that this approach would make it easier to shield them from LRA attacks.

 

In 2002 the government launched a counter-insurgency attack dubbed ‘Operation Iron Fist’, which failed to crush the LRA. In the process, the government again ordered civilians to move to the camps, threatening military action against those who did not comply. By June 2003, it was estimated that over one million civilians were in internally displaced camps. Over-congestion, malnutrition and lack of water made these camps literal death traps – at the height of the crisis in 2005, Uganda’s Ministry of Health reported that up to 1,000 people were dying per week from preventable diseases.[13] Human rights groups have documented accounts of Uganda People’s Defense Forces’ (UPDF) involvement in rape and murder of civilians found outside the camps.[14] Between the forced displacement, UPDF abuses and failure to protect civilians from LRA attacks, some have accused the Ugandan government of a calculated attempt to destroy the Acholi people.[15]

 

Following the breakdown of peace talks in late 2008, the National Security Council authorised AFRICOM to support a military operation (one of the first publicly-acknowledged AFRICOM operations) against the LRA, which was believed to be in the Congo at the time. AFRICOM provided training and US$1 million in financial support for ‘Operation Lightning Thunder’ – a joint endeavour of the Ugandan, Congolese and South Sudan forces in Congolese territory launched in December 2008 to ‘eliminate the threat posed by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA)’. According to the United Nations, the offensive ‘never consulted with partners on the ground on the requirements of civilian protection.’[16] Stretching over a three-month period, it failed in its mission and the LRA scattered and retaliated against the Congolese population; over 1,000 people were killed and up to 200,000 displaced.[17]

 

Despite the severe civilian casualties and the Ugandan government’s poor human rights record, Resolve Uganda, the Enough Project and Invisible Children have since been lobbying Congress for a renewed military operation to help the Ugandan government ‘finish the job.’[18] ‘Given the close U.S. relationship with key actors in ‘Operation Lightning Thunder’—in particular Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and Southern Sudanese President Salva Kiir—the United States is uniquely placed to support better targeted military efforts’, wrote Enough and Resolve Uganda in a joint policy brief in January 2009.[19]

 

Beyond the rhetoric, what do we actually know about what this kind of military operation would entail? The latest reports indicate that the LRA is scattered across eastern DRC, the Central African Republic and southern and western Sudan. As the LRA operates in small groups moving between each of these countries, the potential for a protracted military campaign affecting thousands of civilians is high. In January 2009, the Canadian-based Heritage Oil Corporation announced what could be the largest onshore oil discovery in Sub-Saharan Africa on the Uganda/Congo border – the terrain where the proposed military operation would occur.[20] Disputes have already surfaced between the two governments at the border, and are likely to escalate with a heavier military presence to track the LRA.

 

And while the US lobby groups characterise LRA leader, Joseph Kony, as the spoiler who refused to sign a final peace deal, they fail to acknowledge that the Ugandan government itself has not yet signed the agreement. President Museveni has consistently thwarted peace efforts (1985, 1994, 2003) when he sensed that they did not serve his interests, which centre primarily on maintaining power. He has used his close ties to Washington to build and maintain a favourable image, hiring the DC lobby firm The Whitaker Group (TWG) to do his bidding. Between November 2006 and June 2007, Museveni paid the firm US$75,000 to publicise the government’s commitment to peace.[21] Jendayi E. Frazer, former US Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs under Bush, now works for TWG under a US$1 million contract with the Ugandan Ministry of Finance.[22] In an August 2009 Wall Street Journal editorial entitled ‘Four Ways to Help Africa’, she called on President Obama to ‘galvanize U.S. efforts to end the militia violence of Rwandan and Ugandan rebel groups still operating in the Congo.’[23] As a paid consultant for the Ugandan government, Ms Frazer is clearly suggesting Museveni’s preference for a military solution.

 

Indeed, the protracted conflict with the LRA has not only helped the Ugandan government justify exorbitant defence spending levels, but has also created a constituency within the military that benefits from its continuation.[24] The ‘global war on terror’ provided a convenient basis to expand military spending. After 9/11 President Bush designated the LRA as a terrorist organisation and Museveni followed suit with his own draconian anti-terrorism law in 2002. In 2003 the US awarded Uganda US$200 million to beef up its counter-terror work[25] and the defence department has since trained the Ugandan military for counter-terrorism operations.[26] This level of support has enabled Museveni to crack down on opposition in the name of fighting terror, with the president labelling those who question the government’s policies and actions as ‘LRA collaborators’.

 

As American military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan should remind us, neither peace nor justice can be brought about through force. The LRA is a symptom of deeper national problems that are best addressed by Ugandans themselves, and that – without the diversion of renewed conflict – are likely to gain more attention in the lead up to the 2011 presidential elections in Uganda. While the US advocacy groups might have us believe otherwise, Ugandans are not helpless victims awaiting rescue. They are actively mobilising for change on a vast array of issues, from LGBT rights to corruption, electoral reform, political representation, land, poverty, HIV/AIDS and violence. Many of them point to the ways in which the country’s anti-homosexuality bill – the product of external ideological influences – has focused attention on questions of morality and diverted energy away from broader questions of civil liberties and representation.[27] Propping up a militaristic regime risks not only exacerbating the conflict, but also deflecting attention away from crucial discussions and demands for internal reform.

Story here.