Why Kony must be taken alive to end the LRA

Acholi People Trapped Between Vicious Cult And Vengeful Army

by Richard Dowden allAfrica.com
Kitgum

It was one of the deadliest encounters United Nations troops had ever engaged in. Guatemalan Special Forces, operating under UN command in northeastern Congo, made contact with 300 Lord's Resistance Army fighters who had crossed from Uganda into the Garamba National Park.

Authorised to use maximum force against the warlords and militias, the Guatemalans closed in for the kill. But the LRA unit laid an ambush. After a fierce gun battle, eight Guatemalans were dead. The terrorists beheaded the commander and escaped. How could one of the world's most experienced special forces be outfought by what is usually described as a cult of half-crazed cannibals whose tactics are murder, rape and pillage? How could their leader, a dreadlocked psychopath called Joseph Kony with no military training, lead such a successful army?

The LRA is portrayed as a mindless terror gang, so evil it makes political or military analysis unnecessary. But the difficult truth is that, although the LRA controls no territory, it has also been one of the most effective guerrilla armies in Africa. Supplied until recently by Sudan, it moves fast and undetected for hundreds of miles in days, breaks into small groups and re-forms.

Many people had assumed the sheer virulence of the LRA would quickly burn itself out. Surely no human could maintain such appalling brutality for long, let alone win a guerrilla war with it. But it has lasted 20 years. It grew out of the Holy Spirit Movement, another bizarre cult, led by Alice Lakwena, a priest who claimed that her fighters were protected from bullets by butter. She was defeated by the Ugandan army, but Kony, said to be her cousin, took up the cause.

Its origins go back to the defeat of the Okello regime by the army of now-President Yoweri Museveni in 1986. Tito Okello, a former British army sergeant, was an Acholi, the ethnic group which formed the backbone of the Ugandan army. The 1986 defeat traumatised the Acholis, but they did not abandon their fighting skills. A former UK soldier who interviewed captured LRA fighters was appalled to find that they use standard British army orders, handed down from colonial times.

In the Nineties, Sudan gave the LRA refuge and supplied it with weapons in retaliation for Ugandan support for southern Sudanese rebels. For a while it had anti-aircraft missiles, mortars and a battlefield communications system. Western governments have pressed Sudan to end its support, and a new plan is to get the Sudanese to arrest Kony or drive him into Congo, where the UN could hand him to the International Criminal Court.

Accepted wisdom is that the LRA is a mad cult led by a lunatic: kill Kony and the problem will go away. But a young Anglican church worker in Kitgum said: 'Kony has a spirit. It is in a sheep which leads him around and tells him what to do. When the spirit comes into him, his face changes, his voice changes. It is someone else. You must never look into his eyes. What we are worried about is this: the spirit was in Lakwena and when she crossed the Nile it went into her father and then to Kony. If anything happens to Kony, maybe it will leave him and move to someone else in their clan.'

The Acholi live in squalid camps where 1,000 people die each week, according to the World Health Organisation. A separate report last week by 50 charities in northern Uganda said 41 per cent of the dead are children under five. The violent death rate is estimated to be three times higher than in Iraq and the study says that the war is costing Uganda $85m a year. All this puts the region in the UN emergency category.

The official line is that these camps were formed voluntarily to protect the people from the LRA, but in the past five years the Ugandan army has placed a free-fire zone outside them. People out after sundown are regarded as rebels. When the Burundi government used similar tactics against its rebels a few years ago, international donors moved quickly against it, but, protected by Britain, which needed Museveni as a rare African success story, Uganda gets away with it. The camps exist only because the UN and the charities feed the inmates.

At Labuge camp on the outskirts of Kitgum, some 18,000 people live in traditional grass-roofed huts packed tightly together. Sanitation is minimal and rains make the camp a fetid swamp. If a fire starts, thousands of huts burn in minutes. Disease spreads more quickly. There is nothing for men to do but drink. Women are left with childcare, cooking and brewing beer. Ragged youngsters run wild.

'Children think food is something that comes off a UN lorry,' said a local priest. Fly over the once-rich farmland and you see an abandoned landscape.

Urbane Analysis: This story goes to the heart of what so many Ugandans have told me: Joseph Kony must be taken alive - and kept alive - in order that the "spirit cult" not "pass over" to a desperate Kony follower. As was stated, it happened before when Kony himself proclaimed the same spirit taken from its original progenitor, Alice Lakwena (for more about this, watch the documentary Invisible Children). The LRA problem is bigger than most people realize. It needs more attention than Western governments are paying. And it needs more careful handling than the Ugandan government is capable of providing. The UN Security Council simply must place this crisis among its most immediate priorities alongside Iran, North Korea and the like. The death count in Uganda alone, due to violence as well as preventable disease and malnutrition caused by the violence, demands this immediate course of action.

Oh, and though it is obvious, let us be clear: military might is a non-starter regarding the LRA. While rooted in a bizarre cult, the LRA is conducting a classic insurgency against an unpopular ruling authority. This crisis can only be addressed by improving overall living conditions throughout northern Uganda - so that even the LRA lieutenants can see that they are pursing a false agenda. Right now they are so isolated, and continually confronted with desperate conditions to deal with (yes, even as they further the desperation around them); so from where they are at - the "line" that they hear from Kony often continues to make sense to them.

The obvious means to deal with the LRA is to lessen their isolation (not increase it as the Ugandan army and UN is attempting), and improve overall conditions throughout the region to increase the demand among the lower level LRA commanders to "come in" - for twenty years they have been trying it the other way and it hasn't worked. Now it is time to establish a propaganda war, even as quick (footed and witted) negotiators begin to cut deals with LRA units on an individual basis to turn in their arms. The goal here is to finally make the LRA "whither away" due to defections. Basically, what this means is trying the Betty Bigombe "approach" but with about 10,000% more effort. Former LRA fighters and commanders who have escaped back to the "real world" need to be carefully "played" as communicators of the truth. But that is only part of the work to be done.

There is a role for the military here. Though it is an undercover one. The Allies employed very successful "Psy Ops" during World War II, as did NATO during the Cold War; today there are many more refined and updated techniques that can be employed against the LRA. But this approach will only work if measures are implemented to dramatically (and suddenly) improve health, living conditions, nutrition and economic opportunity (have I said that enough?). Overall, it is frustrating that this is not already being undertaken by the Ugandan government with the assistance of specialist advisors in the British and American military who know how to get results.

Pass the word and talk it up: that is the only way to move toward peace in Uganda. And let us be mindful of what Senator James Inhofe said on February 2:

"I urge President Bush to examine every aspect of his executive authority to relieve the suffering in northern Uganda. I also urge far more action from the United Nations. These significant steps can shed light into the darkness that has cloaked this ongoing tragedy in Uganda and can begin to affect change for peace."