Lord's Resistance Army

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"LRA" redirects here. For other uses, see LRA (disambiguation).
Lord's Resistance Army
Participant in the Lord's Resistance Army insurgency,
First Sudanese Civil War and Second Sudanese Civil War
Flag of Lord's Resistance Army
Flag of the Lord's Resistance Army
Active 1987–present
Ideology Mysticism
Acholi nationalism
Christian fundamentalism
Leaders Joseph Kony
Vincent Otti †
Raska Lukwiya †
Okot Odhiambo
Dominic Ongwen
Odong Latek †
Headquarters Dispersed (2012)
Area of
operations		 Uganda
South Sudan
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Central African Republic
Strength 500-3,000 (2007)[1]
300-400 (2011)[2]
200-250 (2012)[3]
Originated as Holy Spirit Movement
Uganda People's Democratic Army
Allies Sudan Sudan (1994–2002)
Opponents Sudan Sudan (2002–2012)
Uganda Uganda People's Defence Force
South Sudan Sudan People's Liberation Army
Democratic Republic of the Congo Military of the DR Congo
Central African Republic Central African Armed Forces
United Nations UN Stabilization Mission in the DR Congo[4]
United States United States Army[5]

The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), also known as the Lord's Resistance Movement, is a militant group operating in northern Uganda, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic.[6] It has been accused of widespread human rights violations, including murder, abduction, mutilation, sexual slavery and forcing children to participate in hostilities.[7][8]

Initially it was an outgrowth and continuation of the larger armed resistance movement waged by some of the Acholi people against a central Ugandan government which they felt marginalized them at the expense of southern Ugandan ethnic groups. Ideologically, the group is a syncretic mix of African mysticism, Acholi nationalism, Islam, and Christian fundamentalism.[9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] It claims to be establishing a theocratic state based on the Ten Commandments and local Acholi tradition.[20][21][22]

The group is led by Joseph Kony, who proclaims himself the spokesperson of God and a spirit medium. Since 1987, Kony is believed to have recruited between 60,000 and 100,000 child soldiers and displaced around 2 million people throughout central Africa.[23] The LRA is one of the foreign organizations designated as terrorist by the United States,[24] and its leadership is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity.[7]

Contents

[edit] Name

The group's initial names were the Uganda People's Democratic Christian Army and the United Holy Salvation Army, later known as the Lord's Resistance Movement/Army (LRM/A or LRA/M) and eventually the LRA since 1992.[25][26] For simplicity's sake, this article refers to all of these various manifestations as the "Lord's Resistance Army".

[edit] History

Main article: Lord's Resistance Army insurgency
Lord's Resistance
Army insurgency
Ugandan districts affected by Lords Resistance Army.png
Events

The area now known as Uganda has been divided along racial and language lines since at least the 4th century BC.[27] Bantu speaking agriculturists such as the Baganda people in Uganda's south and east created different and competing social and economic structures from the Nilotic language speaking Acholi in the north, whose economic system was centred around hunting and livestock herding.[27] The ethnic and cultural divisions within Uganda continued to exist during the years of the British Uganda Protectorate. The agricultural Baganda people worked closely with the British. In contrast, the Acholi and other northern ethnic groups supplied much of the national manual labor and came to comprise a majority of the military.[28] The southern region, with its rich soil and fertile land, became the center of agricultural development.[29] The livestock raising Acholi dominated north of Uganda was relatively poorer than the cash-crop agricultural economy of the south. Following the country's independence in 1962, Uganda's ethnic groups continued to compete with each other within the bounds of Uganda's new political system.

In 1986, Alice Lakwena established the Holy Spirit Movement, an armed resistance movement claimed to be inspired by the Holy Spirit of God. Lakwena portrayed herself as a prophet who received messages from the Holy Spirit of God. She expressed the belief that the Acholi could defeat the government run by Yoweri Museveni (following Museveni's own victory in the Ugandan Bush War) by casting off witchcraft and spiritualism embedded in their culture. According to her messages from God, her followers should cover their bodies with shea nut oil as protection from bullets, never take cover or retreat in battle, and never kill snakes or bees.[30] Joseph Kony would later preach a similar superstition encouraging soldiers to use oil to draw a cross on their chest as a protection from bullets. During a later interview Alice Lakwena distanced herself from Kony, claiming that the spirit does not want them to kill civilians or prisoners of war. Kony sought to align himself with Lakwena and in turn garner support from her constituents, even going so far as to claim they were cousins.[31] Meanwhile, Kony gained a reputation as having been possessed by spirits and became a spiritual figure or a medium. He and a small group of followers first moved beyond his home village of Odek on April 1, 1987.[32] A few days later, he met with a group of former Uganda National Liberation Front soldiers from the Black Battalion whom he managed to recruit.[32] They then managed to launch a raid on the city of Gulu.[32]

By August 1987, Lakwena's Holy Spirit Mobile Force scored several victories on the battlefield and began a march towards the capital Kampala. In 1988, after the Holy Spirit Movement was decisivily defeated in the Jinja District and Lakwena fled to Kenya, Kony seized this opportunity to recruit the Holy Spirit remnants and members of Ugandan People's Democratic Army, another northern rebel group, including its founder Odong Latek. Latek convinced Kony to adopt conventional guerrilla warfare tactics, primarily surprise attacks on villages. The LRA also occasionally carried out large-scale attacks to underline the inability of the government to protect the population. Until 1991, the LRA raided the settlements for supplies, which were carried away by villagers who were abducted for short periods. The fact that some National Resistance Army (NRA) government forces, in particular former members of the Federal Democratic Movement (FEDEMO),[33] were known for their lack of discipline and brutal actions ensured that the LRA were given at least passive support by segments of the Acholi population.[34]

March 1991 saw the start of Operation North, which combined efforts to destroy the LRA while cutting away its roots of support among the population through heavy-handed tactics.[35] As part of Operation North, an ethnic Acholi government minister Betty Oyella Bigombe created the "Arrow Groups" village guards, mostly armed with bows and arrows. The creation of the Arrow Groups angered Kony, who began to feel that he no longer had the support of the population. In response, the LRA mutilated numerous Acholi whom they believed to be government supporters, and the rebel retaliation caused many Acholi to finally turn against the insurgency. After the failure of Operation North, Bigombe initiated the first face-to-face meeting between representatives of the LRA and government. The rebels asked for a general amnesty for their combatants and to "return home", but the government stance was hampered by disagreement over the credibility of the LRA negotiators and political infighting.[34] At a meeting in January 1994, Kony asked for six months to regroup his troops, but by early February the tone of the negotiations was growing increasingly acrimonious and the LRA broke off negotiations, accusing the government of trying to entrap them.[34]

For a decade starting in the mid-1990s, the LRA was strengthened by military support from the government of Sudan,[36] which was retaliating against Ugandan government support for rebels in what would become South Sudan. In 1994, convinced that the Acholi were now collaborating with the Museveni government, Kony began to terrorize civilians with his increased military strength, resulting in a series of mass atrocities such as the killing or abduction of several hundred villagers in Atiak in 1995 and the kidnapping of 139 schoolgirls in Aboke in 1996. The government responded with creation of the so-called "protected camps" beginning in 1996. The LRA declared a short-lived ceasefire for the duration of Ugandan presidential election, 1996, possibly in the hope that Yoweri Museveni would be defeated.[37] In January 1997, the LRA killed more than 400 and displaced about 100,000 people in a raid on the town of Lamwo.[33]

In March 2002, the Uganda People's Defence Force (UPDF) launched a massive military offensive code-named Operation Iron Fist against the LRA bases in southern Sudan, with agreement from the National Islamic Front. In retaliation, the LRA attacked the refugee camps in northern Uganda and the Eastern Equatoria in southern Sudan, brutally killing hundreds of civilians.[33][38][39][40] By 2004, according to the UPDF spokesman Shaban Bantariza, mediation efforts by the Carter Center and the Pope John Paul II had been spurned by Kony.[41] In February 2004, the LRA unit led by Okot Odhiambo attacked Barlonyo IDP camp, killing over 300 people and abducting many others.[33][42] In 2006, UNICEF estimated that the LRA had abducted at least 25,000 children since the conflict began.[43] In January 2006, eight Guatemalan Kaibiles commandos and at least 15 rebels were killed in a botched UN special forces raid targeting the LRA deputy leader Vincent Otti in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.[44]

The conflict forced many civilians to live in internally displaced person (IDP) camps, such as this Labuje IDP camp near Kitgum, Uganda in 2005

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the LRA attacks and the government's counter-insurgency measures have resulted in the displacement of nearly 95 percent of the Acholi population in three districts of northern Uganda. By 2006, 1.7 million people lived in more than 200 internally displaced person (IDP) camps in northern Uganda.[43] These camps had some of the highest mortality rates in the world. The Ugandan Ministry of Health and partners estimated that through the first seven months of 2005, about 1,000 people were dying weekly, chiefly from malaria and AIDS. During the same time period of January-July 2005, the LRA abducted 1,286 Ugandans (46.4 percent of whom were children under the age of 15 years), and violence accounted for 9.4 percent of the 28,283 deaths, occurring mostly outside camps.[45]

In 2006-2008, a series of meetings have been held in Juba, Sudan, between the government of Uganda and the LRA, mediated by the south Sudanese separatist leader Riek Machar. The Ugandan government and the LRA signed a truce on August 26, 2006. Under the terms of the agreement, LRA forces would leave Uganda and gather in two assembly areas in the remote Garamba National Park area of northern Democratic Republic of Congo that the Ugandan government agreed not to attack. In December 2008-March 2009, however, the armed forces of Uganda, the DR Congo and South Sudan launched aerial attacks and raids on the LRA camps in Garamba, destroying them, but the efforts to inflict a final military defeat on the LRA were not fully successful. Rather, the U.S.-supported Operation Lightning Thunder resulted in brutal revenge attacks by scattered LRA remnants, with over 1,000 people killed and hundreds abducted in Congo and South Sudan, and hundreds of thousands were displaced while fleeing the massacres. The military action in the DRC did not result in the capture or killing of Kony, who remained elusive.[46]

During the Christmas of 2008, the LRA massacred at least 143 people and abducted 180 at a concert celebration sponsored by the Catholic church in Faradje in the Democratic Republic of Congo,[47] and struck several other communities in the near-simultaneous attacks: 75 people were murdered in a church near Dungu, at least 80 were killed in Batande, 48 in Bangadi, and 213 in Gurba.[48][49][50] By August 2009, the LRA terror in this country resulted in displacing as 320,000 Congolese, exposing them to a threat of famine, according to UNICEF director Ann Veneman.[51] That same month, the LRA attacked a Catholic church in Ezo, South Sudan, on the Feast of the Assumption, with reports of victims being crucified, causing Sudanese Archbishop John Baptist Odama to call on the international community for help in finding a peaceful solution to the crisis.[52][53][54] In December 2009, the LRA forces under Dominic Ongwen killed at least 321 civilians and abducted 250 others during a four-day rampage in the village and region of Makombo in the DR Congo.[33][55] In February 2010, about 100 people were massacred by the LRA in Kpanga, near DR Congo's border with the Central African Republic and Sudan.[56] Small-scale attacks continued daily, displacing large numbers of people and worsening an ongoing humanitarian crisis which the UN described as one of the worst in the world.[57] By May 2010, the LRA killed over 1,600 Congolese civilians and abducted more than 2,500.[58] Between September 2008 and July 2011, the group, despite being down to only a few hundred fighters, has killed more than 2,300 people, abducted more than 3,000, and displaced over 400,000 across the DR Congo, South Sudan and the Central African Republic.[59]

By July 2011, 90 percent of people in the LRA areas of activity in the Democratic Republic of Congo still lived in fear of their safety, feeling completely abandoned and believing that neither their government nor the MONUSCO UN peacekeepers care for their security, according to Oxfam survey.[59] In March 2012, Uganda announced it will head a new four-nation African Union military force (a brigade of 5,000, including contingents from the DR Congo, Central African Republic and South Sudan) to hunt down Kony and the remnants of the LRA, but asked for more international assistance for the task force.[3][23]

[edit] Ideology

Drawing by a Ugandan child from memory. Translated caption states, "Rebels are heading towards Sudan led by Otii Lagony and Lagira. Many people were captured and when one failed to walk he was killed."

The LRA's ideology is disputed among academics.[41][60] Although the LRA has been regarded primarily as a Christian militia,[10][61][12][13][14][15][16] the LRA reportedly evokes Acholi nationalism on occasion,[62] but many observers doubt the sincerity of this behaviour and the loyalty of Kony to either ideology.[63][64][65][66][67]

Robert Gersony, in a report funded by United States Embassy in Kampala in 1997, concluded that "the LRA has no political program or ideology, at least none that the local population has heard or can understand."[68] The International Crisis Group has stated that "the LRA is not motivated by any identifiable political agenda, and its military strategy and tactics reflect this."[69]

IRIN comments that "the LRA remains one of the least understood rebel movements in the world, and its ideology, as far as it has one, is difficult to understand."[41] During an interview with IRIN, the LRA commander Vincent Otti was asked about the LRA's vision of an ideal government, to which he responded,

"Lord’s Resistance Army is just the name of the movement, because we are fighting in the name of God. God is the one helping us in the bush. That’s why we created this name, Lord’s Resistance Army. And people always ask us, are we fighting for the Ten Commandments of God. That is true – because the Ten Commandments of God is the constitution that God has given to the people of the world. All people. If you go to the constitution, nobody will accept people who steal, nobody could accept to go and take somebody’s wife, nobody could accept to kill the innocent, or whatever. The Ten Commandments carries all this.

In a speech delivered by James Alfred Obita, former secretary for external affairs and mobilisation of the Lord's Resistance Army, he adamantly denied that the LRA was "just an Acholi thing" and stated that claims made by the media and Museveni administration asserting that the LRA is a "group of Christian fundamentalists with bizarre beliefs whose aim is to topple the Museveni regime and replace it with governance based on the Bible's ten commandments" were false.[70] In the same speech, Obita also claimed that the LRA's objectives are:

  1. To fight for the immediate restoration of competitive multi-party democracy in Uganda.
  2. To see an end to gross violation of human rights and dignity of Ugandans.
  3. To ensure the restoration of peace and security in Uganda.
  4. To ensure unity, sovereignty and economic prosperity beneficial to all Ugandans.
  5. To bring to an end to the repressive policy of deliberate marginalization of groups of people who may not agree with the National Resistance Army's ideology.

The original aims of the group were more closely aligned with those of its predecessor, the Holy Spirit Movement. Protection of the Acholi population was of great concern because of the reality of ethnic purges in the history of Uganda.[71] This created a great deal of concern in the Acholi community as well as a strong desire for formidable leadership and protection.[71] As the conflict has progressed, fewer and fewer Acholi offered sufficient support to the rebels in the eyes of the LRA.[72] This led to an increased amount of violence toward the non-combatant population, which in turn further alienated them from the rebels.[72] This self-perpetuating cycle led to the creation of a strict divide between Acholis and rebels, a divide that was previously not explicitly present.

[edit] Strength

In 2007, the government of Uganda claimed that the LRA had only 500 or 1,000 soldiers in total, but other sources estimated that there could have been as many as 3,000 soldiers, along with about 1,500 women and children.[1] By 2011, unofficial estimates were in the range of 300 to 400 combatants, with more than half believed to be abductees.[2] The soldiers are organized into independent squads of 10 or 20 soldiers.[1] By early 2012, the LRA had been reduced to a force of between 200 and 250 fighters, according to Ugandan defence minister Crispus Kiyonga.[3] Abou Moussa, the UN envoy in the region, said in March 2012 that the LRA was believed to have dwindled to between 200 and 700 followers but remained a threat: "The most important thing is that no matter how little the LRA may be, it still constitutes a danger [as] they continue to attack and create havoc."[23]

The bulk of the soldiers fighting for the LRA are child soldiers. Since the LRA first started fighting in 1987 they may have forced well over 10,000 boys and girls into combat, often killing family, neighbors and school teachers in the process.[73] Many of these children were put on the front lines so the casualty rate for these children has been high. The LRA have often used children to fight because they are easy to replace by raiding schools or villages.[74] According to Livingstone Sewanyana, executive director of the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative, the government was the first to use child soldiers in this conflict.[75]

Sudan has provided military assistance to the LRA, in response to Uganda lending military support to the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA).[76][77] According to Matthew Green, author of The Wizard of the Nile: The Hunt for Africa’s Most Wanted, the LRA was highly organised and equipped with crew-operated weapons, VHF radios and satellite phones.[78]

[edit] ICC arrest warrants

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants on July 8 and September 27, 2005, against Joseph Kony, his deputy Vincent Otti, and the LRA commanders Raska Lukwiya, Okot Odhiambo and Dominic Ongwen. The five LRA leaders were charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder, rape, sexual slavery, and enlisting of children as combatants. The warrants were filed under seal; public redacted versions were released on October 13, 2005.[79]

These were the first warrants issued by the ICC since it was established in 2002. Details of the warrants were sent to the three countries where the LRA is active: Uganda, Sudan (the LRA was active in what is now South Sudan), and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The LRA leadership has long stated that they would never surrender unless they were granted immunity from prosecution; so the ICC order to arrest them raised concerns that the insurgency would not have a negotiated end.[80]

On November 30, 2005, the LRA deputy commander, Vincent Otti, contacted the BBC announcing a renewed desire among the LRA leadership to hold peace talks with the Ugandan government. The government expressed skepticism regarding the overture but stated their openness to peaceful resolution of the conflict.[81]

On June 2, 2006, Interpol issued five wanted person red notices to 184 countries on behalf of the ICC, which has no police of its own. Kony had been previously reported to have met Vice President of South Sudan Riek Machar.[82][83] The next day, Human Rights Watch reported that the regional government of Southern Sudan had ignored previous ICC warrants for the arrest of four of LRA's top leaders, and instead supplied the LRA with cash and food as an incentive to stop them from attacking southern Sudanese citizens.[84]

At least two of the five wanted LRA leaders have since been killed: Lukwiya in August 2006[85] and Otti in late 2007 (executed by Kony).[86] Odhiambo was rumoured to have been killed in April 2008.[87]

In July 2011, South Sudan seceded from Sudan, cutting the LRA off geopolitically from its former allies in Khartoum.

[edit] United States involvement

Since the beginning of the LRA's operations in northern Uganda, the United States has provided humanitarian assistance and support for community reconciliation and development initiatives aimed at supporting the social and economic recovery of the war-torn area. The United States also provides support for military efforts, notably by the UPDF against the LRA.[88]

After the September 11 attacks, the United States declared the Lord's Resistance Army a terrorist group.[89] The U.S. has been involved in tackling the LRA On 28 August 2008, the United States Treasury Department placed Kony on its list of "Specially Designated Global Terrorists", a designation that carries financial and other penalties.[90]

In November 2008, U.S. President George W. Bush personally signed the directive to the United States Africa Command to provide assistance financially and logistically to the Ugandan government during the unsuccessful Garamba Offensive, code-named Operation Lightning Thunder.[91] No U.S. troops were directly involved, but 17 U.S. advisers and analysts provided intelligence, equipment, and fuel to Ugandan military counterparts.[91] The offensive pushed Kony from his jungle camp, but he was not captured. One hundred children were rescued.[91]

In May 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama signed into law the Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act,[92] legislation aimed at stopping Joseph Kony and the LRA. The bill passed unanimously in the Senate on March 11, 2010, with 65 senators as cosponsors, then passed unanimously in the House of Representatives on May 13, 2010, with 202 representatives as cosponsors. On November 24, 2010, Obama delivered a strategy document to Congress, asking for money to disarm Kony and the LRA.[93]

On October 14, 2011, President Obama announced that he had ordered the deployment of 100 U.S. military advisors with a mandate to train, assist and provide intelligence to help combat the Lord's Resistance Army,[94] reportedly from the Army Special Forces,[94][95] at a cost of approximately $4.5 million per month.[96] Human Rights Watch welcomed the deployment, which they had previously advocated for,[97][98] and Obama said that the deployment did not need explicit approval from Congress, as the 2010 Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act already authorized "increased, comprehensive U.S. efforts to help mitigate and eliminate the threat posed by the LRA to civilians and regional stability". The military advisors will be armed, and will provide assistance and advice, but "will not themselves engage LRA forces unless necessary for self-defense".

The advisers will operate in South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, subject to approval by those states. The military advisors will not operate independently of the host states. General Carter Ham, the head of U.S. Africa Command, said that his best estimate was that Joseph Kony was probably in the Central African Republic, not in Uganda.

[edit] In popular culture

  • The 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale features the Lord's Resistance Army, which is being financed by Le Chiffre via Quantum. Later in the film, when Le Chiffre fails to pay the LRA, one of its lieutenants, Steven Obanno, arrives to threaten and intimidate him, giving him a deadline by which to win it in a high-stakes poker game, before being dispatched by Bond in a fight to the death thereafter.
  • The 2006 documentary film Invisible Children centers around a group of Ugandan children who walk miles every night to places of refuge in order to avoid abduction by the LRA.
  • The 2007 documentary film War/Dance chronicled three months in lives of three Acholi child refugees living in an IDP camp in northern Uganda.
  • The music video for the 2007 Fall Out Boy single I'm Like a Lawyer with the Way I'm Always Trying to Get You Off (Me & You) is set in northern Uganda and focuses on the lives of two children who fall in love and work hard to be able to go to school. The boy is taken by the LRA, but manages to escape and return home.
  • Sharon E. McKay's 2008 novel War Brothers is a young adult novel set in Uganda about children forced into the LRA.[99]
  • The 2010 documentary film Children of War follows the journey of a group of former LRA child soldiers as they undergo a process of trauma therapy and emotional healing while in a rehabilitation center.
  • The 2011 feature film Machine Gun Preacher is the story of Sam Childers, a biker preacher engaged a struggle in collaboration with the SPLA against the raids of the LRA in South Sudan.
  • On 14 October 2011, political commentator Rush Limbaugh originally questioned the U.S. move against the LRA on the grounds that the "Lord's Resistance Army are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them. ... So that’s a new war, a hundred troops to wipe out Christians in Sudan, Uganda." Later, Limbaugh stated that he would research the group as he was made aware of accusations of their atrocities,[100] but the show's written transcript was later posted to his website under the title "Obama Invades Uganda, Targets Christians" without retraction.[101][102][103] The list of LRA objectives as cited by Limbaugh appeared to have come from Wikipedia, but was then used without sufficient research and without due diligence.[104]
  • The 2012 book The Night Wanderers by Polish journalist Wojciech Jagielski chronicles the story of Joseph Kony and the child warriors in the Lord’s Resistance Army. [105] Jagielski focuses on the plight of the children who are trying to reintegrate themselves back into society after their coerced roles as guerrilla fighters in the Lord's Resistance Army. [106]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c IRIN (2 June 2007). UGAND-SUDAN: Ri-Kwangba: meeting point . Retrieved 10 June 2008.
  2. ^ a b Le Sage, Andre (July 2011). "Countering the Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa". Strategic Forum. Institute for National Strategic Studies. http://www.ndu.edu/press/lib/pdf/StrForum/SF-270.pdf. Retrieved March 12, 2012. 
  3. ^ a b c Uganda to head new military force to hunt for Kony - Hindustan Times
  4. ^ "Guatemalan blue helmet deaths stir Congo debate". http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900SID/ABES-6LKL3W?OpenDocument. Retrieved 16 October 2011. 
  5. ^ "US troops to help Uganda fight rebels". Al Jazeera English. 4 October 2011. http://english.aljazeera.net/news/africa/2011/10/20111014174712102972.html. Retrieved 16 October 2011. 
  6. ^ "Terrorist Organization Profile: Lord's Resistance Army (LRA)". National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, University of Maryland. http://www.start.umd.edu/start/data_collections/tops/terrorist_organization_profile.asp?id=3513. Retrieved 16 October 2011. 
  7. ^ a b International Criminal Court (14 October 2005). Warrant of Arrest unsealed against five LRA Commanders. Retrieved 2 June 2009.
  8. ^ Richard Dowden. "Court threatens to block cannibal cult's peace offer". Royal African Society. http://www.royalafricansociety.org/articles-by-richard-dowden/261.html. Retrieved 5 January 2011. 
  9. ^ The Scars of Death: Children Abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda. Human Rights Watch. 1997. pp. 32, 72. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/1-56431-221-1|1-56431-221-1]]. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=7u593EKw-ngC&q=islam#v=snippet&q=islam&f=false. Retrieved 25 April 2012. 
  10. ^ a b Doom, Ruddy; Vlassenroot, Koen (1 January 1999). "The Lord's Resistance Army in Northern Uganda". Afraf.oxfordjournals.org. http://afraf.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/98/390/5. Retrieved 16 October 2011. 
  11. ^ name="community.seattletimes.nwsource.com">"Christian Cult Killing, Ravaging In New Uganda"
  12. ^ a b Ten Commandments of God: Mass Suicide in Uganda
  13. ^ a b Lamb, Christina (2 March 2008). "The Wizard of the Nile The Hunt for Africas Most Wanted by Matthew Green". The Times (London). http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article3449276.ece. 
  14. ^ a b McKinley Jr, James C. (5 March 1997). "Christian Rebels Wage a War of Terror in Uganda". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/1997/03/05/world/christian-rebels-wage-a-war-of-terror-in-uganda.html. 
  15. ^ a b McGreal, Chris (13 March 2008). "Museveni refuses to hand over rebel leaders to war crimes court". The Guardian (London). http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/13/uganda.internationalcrime. 
  16. ^ a b Boustany, Nora (19 March 2008). "Ugandan Rebel Reaches Out to International Court". The Washington Post. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/18/AR2008031803054.html. 
  17. ^ Haynes, Jeffrey (2002). Politics in the developing world. Wiley-Blackwell. p. 121. ISBN 978-0-631-22556-0. 
  18. ^ McLaughlin, Abraham (31 December 2004). "The End of Uganda's Mystic Rebel?". Christian Science Monitor. Global Policy Forum. http://www.globalpolicy.org/intljustice/wanted/2004/1231mystic.htm. Retrieved 4 March 2009. 
  19. ^ Muth, Rachel (8 May 2008). "Child Soldiers in the Lord’s Resistance Army: Factors in the Rehabilitation and Reintegration Process". George Mason University: 23. http://hdl.handle.net/1920/3005. Retrieved 4 March 2009. [dead link]
  20. ^ Ruddy Doom and Koen Vlassenroot (1999). Kony's message: A new Koine? The Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda. 98. Oxford Journals / Royal African Society. pp. 5–36. 
  21. ^ Martin, Gus (2006). Understanding Terrorism: Challenges, Perspectives, and Issues. SAGE. pp. 196–197. ISBN 978-1-4129-2722-2. 
  22. ^ "Interview with Vincent Otti, LRA second in command" and " A leadership based on claims of divine revelations" in IRIN In Depth, June 2007
  23. ^ a b c Conal Urquhart, Joseph Kony: African Union brigade to hunt down LRA leader, guardian.co.uk, 24 March 2012
  24. ^ Current List of Foreign Terrorist Organizations and Other Terrorist Organizations
  25. ^ What is the Lord's Resistance Army? - CSMonitor.com
  26. ^ Profile: The Lord's Resistance Army - Africa - Al Jazeera English
  27. ^ a b Rita M. Byrnes, ed. Uganda: A Country Study. Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1990. p. 4
  28. ^ Alfred G. Nhema, "The resolution of African conflicts: the management of conflict resolution & post-conflict reconstruction". p.53. Ohio University Press, 2008
  29. ^ Dolan, Chris, "Social Torture: The Case of Northern Uganda, 1986–2006", 2009, New York: Berghahn Books, p.41
  30. ^ Briggs, Jimmie, Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go to War, 2005, p. 113.
  31. ^ Van Acker, Frank, "Uganda and The Lord's Resistance Army: The New Order No One Ordered", 2004, African Affairs 103(412), p.345
  32. ^ a b c Green, Matthew (2008). The Wizard of the Nile: The Hunt for Africa's Most Wanted. Portobello Books. pp. 40–41. ISBN 978-1-84627-031-4. 
  33. ^ a b c d e "DR Congo rebel massacre of hundreds is uncovered" by Martin Plaut
  34. ^ a b c O’Kadameri, Billie. "LRA / Government negotiations 1993–94" in Okello Lucima, ed., Accord magazine: Protracted conflict, elusive peace: Initiatives to end the violence in northern Uganda, 2002.
  35. ^ Gersony, Robert. The Anguish of Northern Uganda: Results of a Field-based Assessment of the Civil Conflicts in Northern Uganda[dead link] (PDF), US Embassy Kampala, March 1997, and Amnesty International, Human rights violations by the National Resistance Army, December 1991.
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[edit] Further reading

  • Briggs, Jimmie (2005). Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go to War. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-00798-1. 
  • Green, Matthew (2008). The Wizard of the Nile: The Hunt for Africa's Most Wanted. Portobello Books. ISBN 978-1-84627-030-7. 
  • Singer, Peter W. (2006). Children at War. University of California Press. 
  • Allen, Tim; Vlassenroot, Koen (2010). The Lord's Resistance Army: Myth and Reality. Zed Books Ltd.. 

[edit] External links

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