Ugee

Northern Uganda Strugles to Recover from The LRA.

Northern Uganda struggles to recover from the Lord's Resistance Army. On the morning of October 2nd Vincent Otti, the deputy leader of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), was led out into a clearing in the Garamba rainforest in northern Congo and shot dead, together with his supporters. The bodies were left to rot for three days, to “strengthen the spirit” of Joseph Kony, the leader of the LRA, who ordered the executions. Mr Otti's wives were distributed among Mr Kony's loyal lieutenants. At least, this is what the Ugandan government claims. The LRA, on the other hand, insists that Mr Otti is alive, just indisposed variously with fever, cholera and latterly house arrest. The claims and counter-claims have come as northern Uganda is beginning to return to something approaching normality after the end, it is hoped, of the LRA's 20-year insurgency against the government. Peace talks between the two sides have encouraged some of the 1m-odd people displaced by the conflict to leave their refugee camps and return to rebuild their villages. Curfews have been abolished. Wells are being drilled. But that sense of increasing physical security remains precarious, and psychological security is something else. The LRA is a small force, with perhaps less than 2,000 fighters holed up in Congo, but Mr Kony claims supernatural powers and his methods are barbaric: hacking open heads and limbs, slicing off ears and noses, gouging out eyes, padlocking vaginas, and abducting both adults and children. The violence is worth emphasising because it explains the almost demonic grip the LRA has over the displaced. A single LRA bullet, say aid workers, would be all it would take to send the resettled back to the camps. The LRA has used the peace talks to depict itself as an army fighting for the rights of the north. It hopes for positions in Uganda's government (Mr Otti fancied being vice-president), much as Sudan's southern rebels won cabinet posts under that country's comprehensive peace agreement of 2005. It is inconceivable that the Uganda Government would allow such a brutal group to join the Government, however comprehensive and genuine the talks may be. Northerners just want the force to disappear. Cosmos Akena, the head of Ober Abic village in the far west of Acholiland, trembles when asked about the LRA. He was abducted twice by the group, he says, but escaped. His village was abandoned and has only recently sprung back to life. There is not much to it; a few grass huts (some roofless), a primary school and a clinic. The children are barefoot, in tattered rags or naked, their bellies swollen with worms; traditional community life broke down in the centralised camps. The LRA hideouts in Congo are a long way away from Ober Abic, but still the sense of exposure here is palpable. The village is at the end of a dirt track and the bush unfurls beyond in a pale sea of thorn and scrub, fading unbroken into Sudan and Congo. The school is closed; no teacher is brave enough to take the post. The World Food Programme (WFP) provides the village with 40% of its food, in monthly handouts. The rest is scraped out in cassava and banana from what should be a fertile land but is unforgiving; this year's harvest has failed. Still, the WFP reckons it can pull back in a couple of years if the LRA is disbanded. That is a big if. Defections make the LRA less stable. Mr Kony may be selling the food aid he receives to rearm. Uganda's president, Yoweri Museveni, may also be dragging out negotiations in the hope of smashing Mr Kony militarily. His clever idea of offering amnesty to LRA deserters who give up fighting appear to be working. Some think the Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir, who has supported the LRA, wants to keep the fighters in play to destabilise south Sudan, if needed. Then there is the question of justice. The International Criminal Court (ICC) is determined to try Mr Kony and his lieutenants for crimes against humanity. Some Acholi say they would be willing to judge him according to their local laws; anything for peace. They believe that the spirits of the dead will anyway drive the LRA commanders demented. But this will not work. The LRA brutalised the entire north of Uganda, not just Acholiland, and young Acholi know little of, and care less about, traditional justice. Given the precedent it would set, the ICC can hardly back down now. Some think an unhappy compromise may be needed, with Mr Kony settled in a third country, while the ICC prepares a case against him until the end of his days. The more Kony's men escape and desert him, the weaker he gets and the less his bargaining power with the Uganda Government.

 

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