While most of the consumerist world, Christian or not, shops and prepares for a few days’ rest around the feast of Our Lord’s Nativity, villagers in parts of north-eastern DR Congo await the Christmas celebrations with trepidation.
In a statement on December 16th, the Washington-based non-government organiztion, ENOUGH, dedicated to ending genocide, said that Ngilima, Bangadi and Niangara in the Haut Uele Province are likely to suffer brutal attacks from the rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army, (LRA).
Following a recent LRA attack on Tapili village, fifty kilometers from Niangara, in which several villagers were killed and 2,000 people fled, the Catholic Bishop of Isiro-Niangara, Julien Andavo Mbia, spoke also of leaflets threatening a repeat of massacres similar to those of Christmas Day, 2008, when a crowded Catholic church was attacked and set on fire, and several hundred people perished. The leaflets read: “We’ll be celebrating Christmas with you!”, especially directed at the residents of Ngilima village. The bishop warned that if the international community and the local authorities do not intervene in time, there’s a real risk of another bloody Christmas. In recent weeks the LRA rebels have attacked several other locations in the province.
However, the spokesman of the Ugandan army (UPDF), Lt. Col. Felix Kulayigye, said such an attack was not likely. The LRA, he said, is not capable of carrying out mass killings like they did in 2008, because they have been greatly decimated. The UPDF expelled the LRA from Uganda in 2005 and they relocated to Garamba Park in north-east DRC.
On December 14th, 2008, a combined force of DRC, Ugandan and South Sudan military bombed the LRA headquarters in the Garamba forest. In retaliation, the LRA killed 800 civilians in Faradje and surrounding areas within the next three weeks, mostly on Christmas Day.
However, the ENOUGH field officer, Ledio Cakaj, said that people in Haut Uele province are so panicky and given the history of last Christmas’s massacres and the frequent attacks in recent months, they don’t have the luxury to doubt the LRA’s threats. Suspected rebels killed more than a dozen civilians between November 26 and December 12 this year.
The LRA is an offshoot of the Holy Spirit Movement of Alice Lakwena, which originated in northern Uganda after Museveni restored peace in 1985 following two decades of conflict and instability. Her Movement attempted unsuccessfully to dislodge the Museveni government and was thrown into disarray about 100 kilometres east of Kampala, the capital, and Alice fled to Kenya.
Little has been reported about the LRA and its charismatic leader, Joseph Kony, whose soldiers abducted boys and girls from their own people, the Acholi, to oust Museveni, and which terrorized much of northern Uganda for twenty years, from 1986 to 2006. Children were transformed into brutal soldiers and the girls, besides being armed, became the “wives” of Kony and his officers. The Ugandan government forced local people into camps, to both protect them and monitor possible trouble-makers; at one time nearly two million were displaced. Many, but not all, have now returned to what was their home, and the camps are being officially closed. The luckier child soldiers escaped from the LRA force, though most of them are trying to cope with frightful trauma; others stayed with the rebels, and still others were killed mostly by other child soldiers or trying to escape.
Kony behaves like a paranoid schizophrenic. He makes rare appearances or interviews, but is always polite and kind when he does. He is the mastermind of the deaths, misery and mutilations of thousands, and still resists capture. He continues now to spread his campaign of terror outside Uganda, abducting children in DR Congo, South Sudan and Central African Republic, and training them to be brutal killers, and preparing a new generation of rebels from the children the abducted girls give birth to.
International efforts to expose him and bring him to justice have been half-hearted. The ICC is after him, but no-one with any real muscle. He has done nothing constructive, and he has wreaked far worse havoc than Idi Amin whose name is still reviled in the Western world.
Kony isn’t seriously interfering with anyone’s interests; perhaps that is why he’s not been caught yet. His sphere of activity is outside the mineral-rich area of DRC, which is further south, and that could be his ‘salvation.” He is also well-equipped and financed from abroad.
Kulayigye, the UPDF spokesman, may be right, that Kony’s forces aren’t strong and organized enough to commit another mass murder. We certainly hope so. We trust we won’t have to wait and find out he was wrong, and ENOUGH and the bishop predicted more correctly, because the local authorities and the international community hadn’t raised a finger to help.
Martyn Drakard is a writer based in Uganda and Kenya.
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