KINSHASA - Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels killed 189 people during three days of raids on villages in northeast Democratic Republic of Congo last week, a UN agency said yesterday, citing local officials.
UN humanitarian agency OCHA said the killings were reported to have been carried out between Thursday and Saturday in Faradje, Doruma and Gurba villages by LRA fighters fleeing a two-week-old multinational military offensive led by Uganda.
"According to local officials, on December 25th the rebels killed 40 people in Faradje. On December 26th and 27th they attacked Doruma and the neighbouring village of Gurba, killing 89 people in Doruma and 60 people in Gurba," OCHA (Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs) said in a statement.
At least 20 children and an unknown number of adults were abducted during the attacks, OCHA added.
Uganda, Congo and South Sudan launched a joint assault on LRA bases in Congo's isolated Garamba National Park on December 14th after the rebels' leader, Joseph Kony, again failed to sign a peace deal to end his rebellion against the Ugandan government.
Days after the offensive began, UN Security Council member states commended the three neighbours' decision to take on the LRA, whose two-decade bush war has killed thousands of people in northern Uganda and displaced about two million more.
Congo's foreign minister Alexis Thambe Mwamba told reporters in Paris last week that he expected to be "totally rid" of the rebels within days.
However, despite early bombing raids on rebel bases and initial claims of success, the offensive has so far failed to locate Kony, a self-styled mystic whose rebels have a reputation for kidnapping women and children and forcing children to fight.
An LRA spokesman last week said that Kony and his top commanders had survived the bombings and were calling for peace talks to be relaunched with a new mediator.
Kony and two of his deputies have been indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for war crimes.
Ugandan and Congolese soldiers killed 13 LRA fighters in an ambush 20km west of Doruma on Sunday, the Ugandan army said.
But otherwise there has been little to indicate that progress has been made towards rooting out the rebels. Furthermore, with civilian casualties on the rise, the overall effectiveness of the campaign appears increasingly in doubt.
"The fact that there have been so many civilian deaths over the past week raises the question of whether this is in fact an operation to protect the Congolese people," said Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher with New York-based Human Rights Watch.
Ugandan and UN officials believe Kony's forces splintered into smaller groups following the initial bombing campaign. Some fighters are now moving towards the Central African Republic, which borders Congo and Sudan and where the LRA has conducted raids in the past.
"We are very satisfied with the progress that has been made. We have successfully displaced them from their bases in Garamba. We will pursue them. The LRA is more vulnerable than before," said Captain Chris Magezi, the Ugandan spokesman for the joint operation.
Uganda is deploying more troops to the scenes of last week's killings to prevent further LRA raids.
Congo's 17,000-strong UN peacekeeping mission, MONUC, is also assisting in the deployment of additional Congolese forces but is not participating directly in the joint offensive. - (Reuters)