A 16-year-long ordeal for the population of northern Uganda appears to be nearly over. After September 11 one of the African continent’s most brutal rebel movements, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) was placed on a list of terrorist organisations by the United Nations, giving impetus to the Ugandan army’s hunt for the rebels.
The UN move also led to Uganda’s neighbour, Sudan, which had supported the LRA for more than a decade, giving the Ugandan army permission to cross its border.
During a military operation codenamed ”Iron Fist”, Ugandan troops surrounded the LRA rebels and their leader, Joseph Kony, in Sudan’s Imatong mountains on the Sudan/ Uganda border.
On the day I visit the area a frightened group of villagers has gathered at the marketplace in the small Ugandan village of Awer near the border.
A rebel unit of about 700 soldiers had crossed the border from Sudan and attacked and pillaged Awer the day before on their way south.
”The army says the LRA is encircled in Sudan, then how can they attack us here?” asks a young man and the owner of a small village pharmacy.
Travelling north to the Sudanese border in an army jeep with an armed escort we meet thousands of refugees heading south in desperate flight after reports that the LRA was back in northern Uganda.
The majority in northern Uganda are the Acholi people. When President Yoweri Museveni captured Kampala in January 1986 after a five-year guerrilla struggle, the defeated Uganda National Liberation Army fled north. Most members of that army were Acholi, who regrouped as the Uganda Peoples Democratic Army and operated in the north until 1988 when they signed a peace treaty with the government.
However, many of their fighters had by 1986 joined a strange rebel group, the Holy Spirit Movement, which was to prove a more serious threat to the government and would become the backbone of the LRA.
Since the rebel uprising began about 100 000 people have been killed. Another 500 000 people fled their homes and live in so called protected camps, defended by the Ugandan army.
The camps, however, have not prevented the LRA from abducting about 16 000 people, mostly children.
After several army roadblocks defended by tanks and troop-carriers we reach Ngom Oromo.
The army has just received eight rebel soldiers who gave themselves up after crossing the border. They are a sad lot: boys, aged between 10 and 14, who had been abducted from their homes to serve as soldiers in the LRA.
”I was abducted from my home fours years ago and taken to a rebel camp in Sudan were the LRA trained me to fight the Ugandan army,” says Richard Okot (12).
Colonel Andrew Gutti, commander of the army’s fourth division in Ngom Oromo, says once debriefed the children will be handed to humanitarian organisations before being returned to their families.
He says Kony is hiding with a group of fighters in Pamikwara, near the Ateppi river in Sudan.
”But they have nowhere to run [to] anymore after the Sudanese government and the army deserted them.”
At the military base at Ngom Oromo, where several thousand Ugandan soldiers are stationed, there is an intelligence unit.
A young captain claims the army has captured three of the LRA’s four most important bases in Sudan.
”We came across a number of important documents in these camps. Look here, Kony’s own diary,” he says and shows me a table of documents and books in a hut.
It is a frightening look inside the LRA: registers of every birth, execution and mutilation, accounts of young abducted girls who tried to escape after being given as ”presents” to successful commanders, their recapture and torture to death.
One book describes the structure of the movement and contains references to the movement’s headquarters as the ”control altar”.
We leave Ngom Oromo for the town Gulu, the centre for the Acholi people in Uganda. Here nearly everybody has suffered in some way during the strife.
Nowhere are the brutal effects of the war more clearly seen than at the aid organisation World Vision’s rehabilitation centre for children of war.
When we arrive there are 29 children at the centre. The latest arrival is about two, a boy who was found near his dead mother on a battlefield in the Imatong mountains.
The mother, who was in the LRA, had like most other female fighters in the rebel army been forced to carry her small child on her back during combat.
Lucy Aloyo, one of three girls in the camp, is 16 years old. Aloyo spent six years with the rebels before she managed to escape and get back to Uganda.
”I was only 10 years old when they came in the night and took me. First we took part in battles in Uganda and captured weapons from soldiers we killed, then we started a long terrible march. Of the abducted 100 children in our group, 40 died before we reached Sudan,” she says.
In Sudan Aloyo was trained as a soldier and at the age of 12 was given by Kony to a commander who had been brave in battle. One year later she was pregnant but had a miscarriage and nearly died .
While talking, her fingers circle two bullet holes in her leg. This year she managed to convince the rebels to take her with them on an operation into Uganda — this was her chance to escape and give herself up.
Now Aloyo waits to go back home to her family.
In a shanty town in Gulu, a small church is part of the history of the rebel uprising. An old man is holding a service for a handful of worshippers.
The old man, Severino Lukwiya, is one of the key figures in the rebel uprising that has left its bloody mark on northern Uganda.
In 1979 Lukwiya joined the liberation army that defeated Idi Amin. ”I was a talented soldier, but when the war was already over some soldiers killed my first-born son.
”Then God told me that it was my daughter Alice … who would be Lakwena [messenger and the holy ghost in Acholi] for our people.”
Alice spent 40 days by the river Nile were she was apparently told by God to lead an army called the Holy Spirit Movement against government.
Over two years the Holy Spirit Movement fought several bloody battles against the Ugandan army.
The movement was finally defeated in a big battle in 1988 and Alice Lukwiya fled to exile in Kenya.
Severino Lukwiya tried to take over the remnants of the rebel movement, first alone and later with his nephew — Joseph Kony, then 28 years old.
He was, however, soon out-manoeuvred by Kony, who changed the movement’s name to the Lord’s Resistance Army and went into the bush with a handful of loyal soldiers.
”I surrendered to the army and built this church in 1992,” says Lukwiya.
Today the old man is dreaming that his daughter will return from exile and resume her work as a ”spiritual leader”.
For the population of northern Uganda, who have paid a terrible price for this ”spiritual” leader’s power, Alice Lukwiya and Kony hopefully represent the beginning and the end of a long and frightening nightmare.