AFRICA-File: the regional threat of the LRA

Rome (Fides Service) - The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) was born in 1987 in northern Uganda, on the basis of a previous insurrectionary movement. In the early 90s it begins to install some bases in the south-east of Sudan. In 2002 Operation Iron Fist, launched by the Ugandan army against the Sudanese bases of the LRA, are not able to eradicate the movement.
The real regionalization of the LRA takes place, however, in September 2005 when the Ugandan rebels, led by Joseph Kony, installed their headquarters in the National Park in Garamba, in north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In July 2006, negotiations are started in Juba (southern Sudan), but fail after a series of false starts; the last hope for peace ceased to exist on September 29, 2008, when Kony failed to appear in Kuba to sign the agreements achieved. In February 2008 a group of LRA rebels settle in Central African Republic and in September of that year the LRA cause a serious humanitarian crisis with a series of attacks in the Duru area. In 2008 the LRA begin to attack the south-west of Sudan.
Faced with the threat of the LRA, the armies of Uganda, southern Sudan and DRC, began Operation Lightning Thunder against the headquarters of Kony in the jungle of Garamba on December 14, 2008, which however did not reach the goal of stopping the guerrillas’ leadership. The reprisals against the civilian population was violent: during the Christmas attacks in the northeast of the DRC more than 800 civilians died. Since then, the LRA has adopted a strategy of destabilization of a vast area stretching from High and Low Uele in the DRC, the County of Yambio in South Sudan, to the prefecture of Haut Mbomou and Mbomou in the Central African Republic.
The tactics of the LRA is marked by massacres, ransacking and above all kidnapping of children and adults, who are recruited by force into the ranks of the movement, which now has a multiethnic, multinational configuration, and not only Acholi (the people of north Uganda, from which the original group of the LRA comes from). Because of the terror spread by the LRA, about half a million people have become refugees in an area of 100,000 sq km, which spreads over three states. (L.M.) (Agenzia Fides 06/15/2011)