Uganda: Northern Ugandans Fear Rebel Resurgence
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Institute for War & Peace Reporting (London)
April 15, 2006
Posted to the web April 18, 2006
Posted to the web April 18, 2006
Peter Eichstaedt
Lira, Uganda
Lira, Uganda
The Lord's Resistance Army is still raiding villages, but the Ugandan military says the rebels are close to defeat.
Fear clouds Tom Okeng's eyes and his voice is strained as he recounts the attack on his village by ten rebels from the Lord's Resistance Army early last month.
While his children and wife watched in horror, Okeng was
dragged from his thatched-roofed mud hut in the darkness of night, tied up with a rope, and stabbed repeatedly with a bayonet.
The rebels wanted money from him but settled for food, he says. Then they abducted a handful of villagers whom they would use as porters, cooks and soldiers to swell their depleted ranks.
When the band's leader called for a pistol and threatened to finish him off, Okeng leapt up, struck at his captors, and stumbled into the darkness with bullets whizzing by his head.
Later that night, eight of the kidnapped villagers escaped when the rebels, who had by now separated into two groups, began shooting at each other in the belief that they had been attacked by a local defence militia.
"We all ran off in different directions," recalled Lily Aburu, 40, who had earlier been yanked from her hut. "I thought it was the end."
Aburu believes both she and Okeng were lucky. "If Tom [Okeng] had not taken the chance to run, he would not have survived," she said.
For nearly 20 years, the mysterious Joseph Kony and his LRA have terrorised northern Uganda, southern Sudan, and most recently eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC.
More than 1.8 million people, about 94 per cent of northern Uganda's entire population, live in 202 refugee camps created by the war, according to a consortium of aid groups called Civil Society Organisations for Peace in Northern Uganda.
A recent report from the consortium, which represents dozens of aid groups with decades of experience in the region, says that some 900 people die each week from the warfare or related problems, such as disease and injury. That is three times higher than the death rate seen in the Darfur region of western Sudan.
The LRA rebels survive by pillaging communities, kidnapping children to become soldiers and wives, and routinely killing and mutilating victims.
An estimated 25,000 children have been kidnapped during the past 15 years.
The recent LRA attack on Orem - the second in a month - has left villagers wondering if this war will ever end, even though the Ugandan military says it is all but over.
According to the villagers, their assailants were well-armed and wore new camouflage uniforms. This suggests the LRA still have access to supplies, which many analysts believe come from neighbouring Sudan.
By day, Okeng's wife Lucy and her neighbours tend garden plots of cassava, beans and millet around the village. But at night, they return to the nearby refugee camp, or hide out in the dense bush to sleep or keep an eye on their few remaining farm
animals.
"Once the moon is full, they will come back," says Okeng, nervously watching the waning daylight - the rebels move around at night.
But Ugandan officials say the villagers' fears are largely unfounded.
They dispute the extent of the problem claimed by the coalition of civil society groups, and argue instead that the LRA's days as an effective fighting force are over.
Colonel Charles Otema, the head of intelligence for the Ugandan army in the north, says the rebels still active are just "a few remnants" of Kony's army "who have resorted to thuggery".
Otema describes the army's activity as "mop up" operations, in pursuit of disparate bands of rebels. "If there's an attack, we pursue them, we chase them and crush them."
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"In the villages, people are feeling safe, gradually," said Otema, indicating that some people may soon leave the refugee camps and go back to their farms.
Recent reports suggest Kony may
be in Garamba National Park, a jungle game preserve in the troubled northeastern provinces of the DRC.
Kony fled his previous stronghold in southern Sudan with a small force of his most loyal soldiers, many of whom were kidnapped as children and have known no other life, to join his second-in-command, Vincent Otti.
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