The Emergence of the Lord’s Resistance Army
But if many of the UPDA soldiers were fairly quickly talked out of the bush, Lakwena’s more dedicated followers were not so easily budged. The UPDA soldiers, after all, had never been a very cohesive force: they had been bound together only by a shared opposition to Museveni. A remnant of the Holy Spirit Movement, led by the young Joseph Kony (he was only about twenty at the time), remained in the bush. Kony, who is said to be a relative of Alice, claims to share (or to have inherited) Alice’s spiritual powers. Although the rituals and beliefs of Kony’s followers differed slightly from those of Alice’s followers, Kony and Alice appear to have worked in close cooperation before Alice’s defeat and flight. He would dress like Alice during certain rituals, and he and Alice apparently performed many rituals together. Kony’s group underwent a number of name changes, but eventually began to call itself the Lord’s Resistance Army. For several years after Alice’s defeat, the Lord’s Resistance Army continued to harass government installations and those civilians seen as wrongdoers or government collaborators. At some point–most observers place it as early 1991–their tactics shifted, and they began large-scale attacks on civilian targets, including schools and clinics. Abductions, especially of children, were also stepped up. Little information is publicly available about this phase of the Lord’s Resistance Army’s activities. In 1991, the Museveni government responded to its inability to defeat the rebels by sealing off the northern districts of Gulu, Kitgum, Lira and Apac for “intensive military operations” against what they viewed as “gun-toting and panga-wielding thugs-cum-rebels.” During “Operation North,” there was a total press blackout, and the government forbade communication or physical movement between the sealed provinces and the rest of the country. According to Acholi members of parliament, Operation North was a tactical and human rights disaster: “Operation North. . . created more problems than it solved. . . . Private radio communications [methods] were removed from institutions and NGOs; there was massive arrest of civic leaders; the press was not allowed in the area and all members of parliament from the area were forcefully evicted/barred from Gulu, Kitgum, Apac and Lira.” During the operation, the government resorted to “protected camps” not unlike those creating so much suffering today, and many have alleged that National Resistance Army soldiers committed various atrocities. The Acholi Parliamentary Group, for instance, charges that:
People were herded into camps without food, health care, etc. for days at various locations purportedly for screening. Many people died and there were human rights abuses all over. Some innocent civilians were buried alive in Bucoro, while others were shot, crops in the fields were destroyed by the National Resistance Army. The NRA Mobile Battalion nicknamed ‘GUNGA’ committed homosexual acts even with very old men, raped wives, mothers and daughters in the presence of their families. This painted a terrible picture of the National Resistance Army. At the same time, Kony had also started abducting, raping and killing of innocent people using pangas.
Like previous National Resistance Army efforts, Operation North failed to wipe out Kony’s rebels. Arguably, the Lord’s Resistance Army became even more of a problem as time passed: the rebels stepped up their attacks on civilian targets, and spent less and less time attacking government installations. In 1994, attempts were made to start negotiations between the government and the rebels. For a while, the prospects for peace looked bright: “UPDF guys and Kony’s men were drinking together in bars,” says Paulinus Nyeko at Gulu Human Rights Focus. But for some reason, the negotiations fell apart. The government claims that the rebels were not serious about peace, while government critics claim that the government lured rebel leaders to peace talks and then staged an ambush, killing several rebel commanders. For whatever reason, the negotiations failed, and the violence continued.
The Role of Sudan
The most recent phase of the conflict in the north began about two years ago, when Sudan started to provide substantial aid to the Lord’s Resistance Army. Equipped with machine guns and land mines in place of pangas and rifles, the Lord’s Resistance Army’s ability to terrorize and kill increased many times over. It seems clear that since 1995, the number of people abducted and killed by the Lord’s Resistance Army has dramatically increased. Although the government of Sudan denies that it provides military aid to the Lord’s Resistance Army, these denials cannot be taken seriously. Many of the children and adults abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army escape from Lord’s Resistance Army camps in Sudan, or surrender to the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), which then turns them over to the Ugandan army (now called the Ugandan People’s Defense Force, or UPDF–not to be confused with the defunct rebel alliance, the UPDA). The escapees recall the arrival in Kony’s camp of heavy trucks driven by “Arabs” in Sudanese army uniform, bearing food and weapons. Some escapees report that seriously injured rebels were airlifted to hospitals in Khartoum.The Sudanese government has a dual motive for supporting the Lord’s Resistance Army. First, the Lord’s Resistance Army is used by the Sudanese government to fight in its increasingly desperate war against the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). Second, Sudan has long accused the Ugandan government of aiding the SPLA. Sudan’s support for the Lord’s Resistance Army is thus a form of retaliation. While the Lord’s Resistance Army constitutes little serious threat to the Museveni government, it is nonetheless an embarrassment and a serious drain on the national budget.There is, of course, an apparent irony in Sudan’s support for the Lord’s Resistance Army: the Sudanese government is militantly Islamic, while the Lord’s Resistance Army is at least ostensibly Christian. But over time, it seems clear that the beliefs and practices of Kony and his followers have changed: in 1987, Kony’s group was closely identified with Alice Lakwena, and like Lakwena, Kony appears to have enjoyed substantial popular support among the Acholi. Huge crowds would gather to hear him preach. By May 1997, when we conducted most of our interviews, the testimony of the children we met suggested that many of the rituals common in Lakwena’s time had been abandoned or were only sporadically followed. Many children also reported rebel practices that appear to have been adopted from Islam: for instance, the rebels pray while facing Mecca, respect Friday as a holy day, and forbid the keeping of pigs.
Why the Conflict Persists
The uneven economic development of north and south and the history of ethnic violence have cast a long shadow over Uganda. For the Acholi people, the legacy of the decades following independence has been one of demoralization and distrust. This climate of hopelessness has provided the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army with ideal conditions for sowing discord and terror.The rebels themselves claim that they will fight until they overthrow the government of Yoweri Museveni. In the absence of a clearly reliable official spokesperson for the rebels, their more specific political grievances can only be pieced together from the reports of escapees. The rebels appear to view Museveni as an illegitimate leader because of his refusal to allow multi-party elections, his alleged strategy of keeping the north poor and under-developed, and his alleged dislike and mistreatment of the Acholi. The rebels still insist that they are obeying the orders of the Holy Spirit, and there can be little doubt that religious rituals, of however eclectic a nature, are important in rebel life. The rebels continue to claim that they must root out “misbehavior” and offenses among the Acholi as part of their effort to overthrow the government and turn Uganda into a “paradise.”It is tempting to speculate on whether the rebels “really” believe any of this–to what extent are the rebels true believers, and to what extent is religion being cynically manipulated for unrelated ends? But this may not be an entirely meaningful question. For one thing, the question assumes that “the rebels” are a monolithic force. It is impossible to know how many of the rebel commanders are left over from the days of Lakwena’s Holy Spirit movement, and it is also impossible to know just what motivates them to fight.
What evidence we have suggests that while Kony’s control over the Lord’s Resistance Army is near total, a great number–perhaps even a large majority–of the “rebels” are abducted children, rather than adults who voluntarily joined Kony. Terrified and indoctrinated, the children participate in atrocities along with the adults. Although some of the children obey their captors only out of a wholly non-spiritual fear, some of them certainly believe what they are told about the Holy Spirit, and some of them grow to adulthood among the rebels, and cease to imagine having any other identity. In the end, some of the rebels probably commit atrocities out of the sincere belief that they are obeying the Holy Spirit’s orders to eliminate wrongdoers within the Acholi community; some probably participate in atrocities only because they fear being killed if they refuse; some may literally be unable to imagine any other life, and some may be acting solely to increase their personal power and prestige. And some, of course, may act out of a combination of all of those motives.Needless to say, despite all Lord’s Resistance Army claims to be fighting on behalf of the Acholi, and despite whatever popular Acholi support Kony may have had in the late 1980s, it seems overwhelmingly clear that today the Acholi people regard Lord’s Resistance Army activities as an unmitigated evil. Hardly a family remains untouched by the violence, and nearly all of our interviewees, both Acholi and non-Acholi, vehemently denied the idea that Kony’s rebellion is in any sense a popular movement. According to Paulinus Nyeko, some Acholi civilians believe that Kony does possess spiritual powers, but they see him as having wrongly usurped them from Alice Lakwena: “In the villages, many people think the spirit which had possessed Alice has moved on to Kony, and that he uses it for ill where Alice used it for good. People say that Kony will only lose his powers if Alice comes back from Kenya.” In late May 1997, the wife of an Anglican bishop who had been an outspoken critic of rebel atrocities died when her car hit a land mine; some saw this as further evidence of Kony’s spiritual power to punish his enemies. But fear of Kony’s alleged supernatural powers does not translate into Acholi support for the rebels. “We Acholi are the ones who bear the brunt of the suffering,” says Alphonse Owiny-Dollo, Minister of State for the North. “It is our children who are being abducted and killed. Any sympathy people might have had for Kony is long over.” Daniel Omara-Atuba, the MP for Lira, observes that “there is no sensible leader in the north who supports Kony. He is a killer, and the people are tired of him.” Livingstone Okello-Okello, MP for Kitgum, was equally clear: “The rebels have zero support. There is nobody in Acholi who has not lost a relative. Since 1991, I don’t think anyone has voluntarily joined the rebels. Some people believe Kony has power, but they think it is witchcraft, not the power of God.” Many Ugandan government officials insist that Kony himself is motivated neither by religious beliefs nor by any real desire to overthrow the government, but by nothing more complicated than greed. “I believe that Kony himself gets everything he wants from this war,” said James Kazini, the commander of the Uganda People’s Defense Force Fourth Division in Gulu. “Because he helps fight the SPLA, he gets aid from Sudan. So he has women, power, a car.” The government has repeatedly characterized the rebels as mere “bandits” and thugs, and insisted that with only a few small bands remaining in the Ugandan countryside, the rebels are on the verge of being permanently defeated by the Uganda People’s Defense Force. In a recent interview with the Guardian, Ugandan finance minister Jehoash Mayanja Nkangi dismissed the rebels as “mosquitoes.” In late April, President Museveni informed Parliament that “the remnants of Kony’s group have broken into small groups that are being picked off one by one, or they are surrendering in droves.” But events at the time of Museveni’s speech starkly contrasted with this optimism: throughout April and May, there were several hundred thousand displaced people in Gulu and Kitgum, and new abductions and attacks almost every day. Although about 13,000 Uganda People’s Defense Force soldiers (a mixture of regulars and militia) are stationed in Gulu and Kitgum, and the government reportedly spends an estimated 800 million Ugandan shillings a day (roughly, U.S. $800,000) on expenses associated with the conflict, the war in the north has now dragged on for more than ten years. Commander Kazini attributes the government’s failure to wipe out the rebels in part to the existence of collaborators among the Acholi civilians. Several children told us that civilians do help the rebels at times, but for the most part, civilians have no real alternative. “The civilian population is caught in the middle,” explains Omaru Atubo, the MP for Lira. “Basically they are forced to cooperate with whoever controls their area at any given time.” Jim Mugungu, a journalist, observes that “people collaborate out of fear. It’s not because they support the rebels. It’s because they don’t want to be killed or mutilated. If they defy the rebels, the UPDF won’t protect them–so they have no choice.” Although some children are killed while actively fighting against government forces, others–including new captives–are simply caught in the crossfire. Unarmed and often tied up–often tied to a long chain of other captives–the newest captives are extremely vulnerable during rebel confrontations with government forces. Angelina Atyoum, whose daughter is still missing, sums up the problem: “I want the rebels to be defeated. But if you go against the rebels militarily, you are causing the death of our children. The children are caught in the crossfire. As a parent, how can I support that?”
Many Acholi see their situation as hopeless: whatever happens, they suffer. “When the government fights the rebels lately, mostly it is local defense units [the militia] being sent to fight, not the regular UPDF soldiers,” said Paulinus Nyeko. “Since it is mostly Acholi in the local defense units, and they go to fight Acholi rebels, many of whom are abducted children, what we have now is Acholi fighting Acholi children. If this conflict does not end we will have none of us left.”