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Friday, September 24, 2010

The atrocities of the Lord's Resistance Army

3-2-1, L-R-A.  Imagine waking up in the middle of the night to the sight of several men carrying guns and rifles. You, a mere child, are snatched from your bed, and forced to join a spiritual movement that aims to undo the harms imposed by the national government.  The first part of your initiation involves a beating, often with sticks, centered on the soft spots of your body, including your head. You are then coated in shea nut oil as a protection ritual, and taught to use guns, clubs and machetes.  You start by killing neighbors and family relatives. You are also educated in the art of killing other children who have been abducted: anyone who refuses to follow the rules is encircled by other children, each taking a shot at bludgeoning the rule breaker until he or she is dead.  


If you are a young girl and pretty, you are given to one of the movement’s leaders and married.  Finally, you are instructed to abduct other young children, recruiting them to the movement; the more you abduct, the more you reap.  Welcome to the Lord’s Resistance Army or LRA, Northern Uganda’s rebel group, alive and well today, preying on innocent civilians in the Congo, Central African Republic, Sudan, and Uganda.
            The Lord’s Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony, started in 1987.  It is based on a heterogeneous suite of ideologies, combining the Acholi tradition from Uganda with mysticism, apocalyptic Catholicism, and the guiding light of the ten commandments. Unlike many rebel groups who seek financial gains or power, the LRA is primarily ideological, operating in God’s name, attempting to undermine what they perceive as government injustices, and to right these wrongs by means of horrific brutality. Since their inception, they have killed thousands, and forced approximately 100,000 people to leave their homes and villages. Their signature: excessive brutality, both physical and psychological.  Though they have guns, most of their murders involve clubs, machetes, and fire. They have butchered hundreds in a church, bludgeoned and macheted women and children, raped women and young girls in front of their spouses and fathers respectively, marched hundreds off of a cliff, and captured young boys as soldiers and young girls as sex slaves. These activities continue today, including a massacre that took the lives of 321 people within just a few days during December 2009, and over 100 people in February 2010.  These deaths occurred under the watch of the Ugandan Army, backed by considerable financial support from the United States. Sometimes, even money and superpower status can't kill the ancient recipe for malice.
         As Anneke van Woudenberg, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch (and one of my heroes) notes, the trail of death left by the LRA is horrific, has largely gone unnoticed by the humanitarian community, and showcases how small, predatory groups can wreak great havoc on innocent people. 

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