UGANDA-POLITICS: Rebels Deny that They are Licked

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Oct 2 1997 (IPS) - Rebels seeking to topple Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni have played down claims by his government that their leader is starving in his north Uganda hideout and looking for a guide to smuggle him out to Kenya to seek refuge there.

News of Joseph Kony’s alleged plight was broken by Brig James Kazini, the overall army commander in northern Uganda who had told the state-run ‘New Vision’ newspaper on Sep. 19 that the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) leader and his 40 escorts were “starving, but fear to come out into the open to confront the army”.

In a statement released here and made available to IPS on Thursday, the LRA dubbed Kazini’s remarks as “rubbish”.

“We have heard a lot of rubbish from Mr Kazini. We are not interested in targeting individuals as Mr Kazini has been doing about our chairman. We are interested in winning the war against the government in Kampala,” it said.

The four-page statement carried the LRA’s logo but not the usual signature of its secretary-general, Dominic S. Wanyama, or spokesperson John Obita, both of whom operate from Nairobi.

Efforts to reach the two have been fruitless since their telephone lines went dead last month. The statement did not react to a rumour that both had been transported to a refugee camp in northern Kenya as a result of pressure from the Ugandan government.

The statement, which was also silent on the whereabouts of Kony, catalogued a series of alleged LRA military successes against the Ugandan army, and urged the people of Uganda to ignore any anti-LRA rethoric by Kampala.

“We appeal to Ugandans of all tribes to reject the regime in Kampala and join hands with us to remove it from power. We must not accept again a situation where a Ugandan continues to kill another Ugandan just because he/she wants to protect the regime in Kampala,” it said.

Despite the rumours sweeping Kampala, two recent events appear to show that not everyone believes the LRA has ceased to be a force to be reckoned with and can therefore be dismissed.

The first one was a multi-denominational church leaders meeting last month in the Ugandan capital, Kampala, which appealed to the Museveni government to hold direct peace talks with Kony. This was rejected by the Ugandan president, who argued that talking to Kony would only set a bad precedent for other rebel groups operating in the tiny East African nation.

The second event concerns a report by a USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) mission to Uganda on the conflict in the north which recommended reconstruction assistance for the region. The 106-page report, entitled ‘The Anguish of Northern Uganda’, proposed that the U.S. government fund a three-year, six- million-dollar programme for the war-ravaged Gulu and Kitgum districts, both of which are Kony’s strongholds.

According to the New Vision newspaper, the report, which was prepared by independent consultant Robert Gersony, and commissioned by USAID and the U.S. embassy in Kampala, said the funds should be targetted at infrastructure projects and called on the government to reconsider “direct peace negotiations” with Kony.

Kony is a herbalist and former Roman Catholic cathecist. The goal of his LRA — which operates in northern Uganda on the border with Sudan — is to rule the country on the basis of the 10 biblical commandments.

The LRA began its fight against Museveni’s government in 1987, shortly after the defeat of a rebellion by the Holy Spirit Movement, led by Kony’s cousin Alice Lakwena.

The rumours surrounding the demise of the rebel group heightened after a top LRA official said in August that it had scaled down its military operations to allow farmers to plant their fields.

John Obita, the LRA spokesperson here, was quoted by a European radio station as saying that the decision to reduce the rebels’ activities did not mean surrender or their defeat by government forces. “Instead we want to dispel the widespread claim by the government that the LRA does not care about the welfare of the civilian population in northern Uganda,” he had said.

Immediately after that, Ugandan papers, quoting military sources, reported that Sudan had cut supplies to LRA base camps, forcing Kony and some 300 rebels into Uganda. Their arrival sparked a series of clashes with the army in the northern district of Kitgum and 50 children abducted earlier by the rebels were reportedly rescued after one battle.

Military sources in Kampala say more than 800 LRA rebels have surrendered to the army since March. Perhaps the biggest blow to the rebels is the reported sealing off by the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) of the Sudan/Uganda border, a key supply route for the LRA. However, the reports to that effect have not been confirmed.

The SPLA is a rebel group fighting to topple the Islamic fundamentalist regime in Khartoum, which has consistently accused Uganda of backing the Sudanese rebels. Kampala, on the other hand, has charged that the LRA uses bases in Sudan as a springboard for raids into Uganda.

Each country’s government has denied supporting rebels opposed to the other.

While the LRA purports to be motivated by religious principles, human rights groups such as the London-based Amnesty International and Africa Watch have documented atrocities imputed to the rebel group. These include forced recruitment through abduction, rape and the cutting off of the ears, lips or limbs of civilians suspected by the rebels of collaborating with the government.

In a joint report they released in September, the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch condemned the kidnapping and murder of children by the LRA.

The report charged that 8,000 to 10,000 Ugandan children, some as young as 11 years old, had been abducted in the past two years and subjected to extreme and arbitrary violence. Some were forced to kill other children, and girls were allocated to LRA commanders as sex slaves, it said.

The LRA has responded angrily to the report.

“We have great respect for the work of Amnesty International … for the great work they have done around the world but on this occasion they have got it wrong,” it said in its statement. “One would say the same about UNICEF. Since it started work in Uganda, UNICEF has never been impartial and will never be so as long as its current Representative in Kampala has not been changed.”

The LRA said it had released four women soldiers captured when its forces overan a Uganda military barracks at Minakulu, near the main northern town of Gulu, on Sep. 19.

“Following their release, the four women were told to go home and be good citizens. And that they should have nothing to fear from LRA and should tell the truth about the LRA,” ran the statement.