Rebel fighters armed with assault rifles, artillery and rocket-propelled grenades massacred more than 190 refugees at a camp in northern Uganda on Saturday, it emerged on Sunday.
Some of the refugees were gunned down while they fled, and others were burned alive when the rebels torched their grass huts, according to a local politician, Charles Anjiro.
The attack on the Barloonyo camp in Lira district, more than 240km north of the capital, Kampala, is one of the worst in recent years by the Lord’s Resistance Army, which has been fighting the Ugandan government since 1994.
Anjiro said: ”It’s a hopeless situation. We went there this morning with the Lira district police commander and physically counted 192 bodies. The scene is terrible.
”The rebels came with sophisticated guns and grenades. When they arrived at the camp they approached it from three fronts — from the north, east and south — and left the western side for their exit. They bombed the camp with artillery and overpowered the local defence forces and then started burning the huts.”
More than 50 of the refugees were treated for burns, shrapnel and gunshot wounds from the attack on Saturday afternoon, according to the head of Lira hospital, Jane Aceng.
The camp — home to about 5 000 people who have fled their homes because of the fighting — was being guarded by a militia which was outnumbered and outgunned. A local Roman Catholic priest, Father Sebat Ayala, said that around 36 militiamen had been confronted by more than 100 rebel fighters.
”According to the local militia, the rebels started the attack from a distance using artillery fire,” the priest said.
”The militia, seeing they were overpowered, told the villagers to flee into the nearby bushes, but the villagers fled into their grass-thatched huts which the rebels set on fire.”
Most of the camp dwellers managed to escape into the nearby bush and returned to on Sunday morning.
More than 50 bodies were buried in a mass grave at the weekend.
Led by a self-proclaimed mystic, Joseph Kony, the LRA has devastated the northern Acholi area, forcing about 80% of its people into ”protected villages” or camps for the ”internally displaced”.
The chief targets of the rebellion, which has few stated aims beyond overthrowing the Ugandan government, have been civilians rather than soldiers.
The rebels have attacked schools and health centres as well as refugee settlements. More than one-million Ugandans have been displaced during the war.
An army spokesperson, Chris Magezi, said it appeared to be one of the worst rebel attacks since 1995, when 300 villagers were massacred in Gulu district.
In the past, rebels have launched attacks on northern Uganda from southern Sudan, mainly raiding villages and attacking military posts. But in March 2002, the Sudanese government permitted Ugandan troops across the border to destroy rebel bases.
Operation Iron Fist drove the rebels into northern Uganda, where they renewed their attacks on villages and camps, looting, killing, and forcing thousands of children to flee to the towns each night. The insurgency also spread to eastern Uganda last year.
The LRA rose from the remnants of a revolt by soldiers from the Acholi people, the dominant ethnic group in northern Uganda, after President Yoweri Museveni, a southerner, seized power in 1986.
Most rebels had given up by the late 1980s, but the remnant coalesced into the LRA, which replenishes its ranks by abducting children to be fighters, porters and sex slaves.
Uganda has asked the International Criminal Court at the Hague to investigate allegations of human rights abuses by the LRA. The court has said it could open its first case against the rebels within months. – Guardian Unlimited Â