Spirited away in the night by the Lord’s army

Uganda’s war-ravished northern provinces are in worse shape than at any time since the fighting began 15 years ago, according to United Nations officials.

Among the atrocities being committed with increasing frequency by the insurgents calling themselves the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) are child abductions, executions, looting, torching of people’s homes and regular ambushes on civilian vehicles.

Jakob Mikkelson, head of the World Food Programme (WFP) for northern Uganda, said: ‘In terms of just about everything — food security, general security, the frequency of attacks and the numbers of abducted children — this crisis is worse than it’s ever been.”

The LRA says it is fighting to replace Uganda’s present government with one based on Moses’s Ten Commandments. It also says it wants to liberate the Acholi people of the north, although it has killed and abducted thousands of Acholis and displaced many more.

In recent weeks security has been so poor that virtually all of the inhabitants of Padar and Kitgum provinces have poured out of their home towns into northern Uganda’s densely packed refugee camps.

The camps are a grim sight. Populated in the most part by severely malnourished, pot-bellied children, they lack adequate food and water, sanitation is non-existent and there is no medicine.

The risk of being attacked prevents anyone from going out and cultivating the fertile land that surrounds the camps, so these areas rely completely on handouts from heavily armed WFP convoys.

To make matters worse, the camps themselves are not safe, in spite of a moderate army presence. Armed attacks by the LRA are common, especially after food drops.

As recently as last week 17 children were abducted from Awer camp, south-east of Gulu. Once abducted, children as young as six are made to carry heavy supplies for days until they reach LRA bases in southern Sudan. Many are then trained to become soldiers and a great many of those end up dying in fierce shoot-outs with the Ugandan army.

Lucy Lanyero has spent half her life in captivity. Abducted by the LRA at the age of 10, she was held for 10 years before escaping. In that time she bore two children, both by officers who raped her on many occasions; walked thousands of kilometres at gunpoint; sustained a bullet wound in the stomach; killed civilians as well as soldiers; and (later) saw her husband executed.

The story of her initial abduction is not uncommon. ‘I was visiting my sister. The LRA came to her house that evening, forced the door open and asked me, ‘Where is your food?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, I’m a guest here.’ So they hit me with a machete and took me away.”

At age 12 she was forced into bed with a senior LRA commander and when she refused to have sex she was beaten.

‘Some girls are taken for no other purpose than for a wife — no matter how young,” said Sam Kilara, coordinator of a World Vision rehabilitation centre for abductees.

Few can agree on why the government can’t seem to stop the rebels. Some cite a lack of will, pointing out that the war has become a lucrative business that both sides have an interest in perpetuating.

Acholi religious leaders also point out that the LRA is not the only side committing atrocities. The Ugandan army, which consists mainly of southerners, has done its fair share of looting and killing.

‘There are opportunists taking cover under the pattern of the rebels. The army is killing people and then blaming it on the LRA,” said the Reverend Macleord Ochola, one of a number of Acholi religious leaders urging peace talks. ‘And they are killing civilians and later saying they were rebel collaborators.”

But UN officials say President Yoweri Museveni realises that the mess in the north is not exactly endearing Uganda to foreign investors.

He is apparently anxious not to have Uganda seen as a failed state, like so many of its neighbours. Yet his increasingly hawkish effort to crack down has had mixed results — NGOs say it has merely fragmented the rebels into smaller groups and caused them to move around more.

Like so many insurgencies, this one acts like a balloon — squeeze it in one place and it pops up elsewhere.

Another question is whether the rebels still get support from the Sudanese government. Ugandan intelligence officers are coy about this. The official line is that the two governments signed a pact last month to end Sudan’s sponsorship of the LRA.

But as Archbishop Odama of the Gulu Catholic Church observes: ‘They still have supplies, new uniforms, guns and munitions. Where is it all coming from if not from Sudan?”

If rumours of peace talks become fact, it is hard to see what the warring sides could have to talk about. The press-shy LRA has yet to spell out any coherent demands.

‘This insurgency is unique,” remarked one WFP official, ‘because they don’t seem to have a cause. Their mystic leader, Joseph Kony, consults the spirits on a daily basis and this dictates the battle. How do you negotiate with spirits?”