UGANDA’S LORD’S Resistance Army (LRA) has killed at least 225 people over the past 18 months and abducted 697 during a forced recruitment campaign in the Central African Republic (CAR) and the north of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Human Rights Watch has said.
According to reports, the LRA has brutally killed adults and children who tried to escape or were unable to carry heavy loads they were forced to carry.
Nearly one-third of those abducted have been children, Human Rights Group added.
Many of the children are being forcibly recruited as soldiers or are being used for sex by the group’s fighters.
“The LRA continues its horrific campaign to replenish its ranks by brutally tearing children from their villages and forcing them to fight,” said Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The evidence points to Joseph Kony, the LRA leader, as the author of this atrocious campaign.”
Wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, Mr Kony has waged war against the Ugandan government of President Yoweri Museveni since 1988, when members of the Alcholi community of northern Uganda were forced out of the army.
The LRA says the rebel group is defending the Alcholi community, but from the start its goals have become blurred. Mr Kony claims to be “spokesperson” for God and says the LRA’s aim is to establish a Ugandan government based on the 10 commandments.
Since 2005, when it was defeated by the Ugandan army, the group has operated along the border that straddles south Sudan, Uganda, the CAR and northern DRC.
Human Rights Watch carried out its investigation between July 12th and August 11th, interviewing 520 civilians, “including 90 former kidnap victims”.
Those who had managed to escape from the LRA told stories of children forced to kill other children and people trained to treat other human beings as animals.
One 12-year-old Congolese girl told the rights group that she was forced to participate in the killing of dozens of adults to prevent them from revealing the LRA’s location to government soldiers or the Ugandan army.
“The LRA tied the hands of the victims behind their back, a cord around their legs and placed the victims face down on the ground,” she said.
“Then the LRA would give us children a heavy wooden stick and force us to beat them on the head till they died.” Human Rights Watch called on Uganda and the international community to do more to protect civilians.
However, securing an area that stretches from southern Sudan across to northern Congo and into the CAR would not be easy, said analysts.
“You cannot contain them, the area is far too big and remote and the LRA is now broken up into a lot of small groups across three different countries,” said Thierry Vircoulon, Central Africa project director with the International Crisis Group in Nairobi.
“The Obama administration is supposed to come up with a new strategy to deal with the LRA. It will be interesting to see if there is a shift in it, as so far the strategy is to let the Ugandan army deal with the problem.”