IJCentral: International Justice Central

March 17, 2010 (JUBA) – The Ugandan rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) are planning to carry out attacks in Southern Sudan during the April elections, says the spokesman of the Southern Sudan army.

Maj. Gen. Kuol Deim Kuol said the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) has confirmed that LRA has planned for massive attacks in Western Equatoria state and Greater Bahr el Ghazal region to coincide with the elections in the region.

Speaking to the UN-sponsored Miraya FM radio based in Juba, Kuol accused the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) of supporting the LRA to destabilize Southern Sudan.

He said the SPLA forces are ready to repel such attacks and provide security to the people during the elections.

Kuol also echoed the recent statement by the Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni that LRA forces are based in Darfur region.

He added that LRA forces have already been spotted in areas of Western Bahr el Ghazal state in their preparation for the attacks.

Earlier Sudan Armed Forces denied the claim that the LRA forces are based in Darfur, describing it as “baseless.”

LRA’s leader, Joseph Kony, had been supported by SAF during the war time and his forces were established or roaming in the three states of Eastern, Central and Western Equatoria before the signing of the CPA that ended the North-South civil war in 2005.

In 2006, the Government of Southern Sudan and Uganda agreed on the initiative to talk peace with the rebels in an effort to end the more than twenty years of conflict which began in 1986.

After two years of successful Southern Sudan-mediated talks in Juba that resulted to relative peace in northern Uganda, nearly two million people displaced by the conflict in northern Uganda were able to leave IDP camps and returned to their villages.

However, after concluding the talks by signing several protocols between Uganda government and the rebels including the timetable for implementation of the agreement, Joseph Kony in the last minute refused to sign the compiled Final Peace Agreement document with President Museveni, citing ICC’s arrest warrant for his indictment as an obstacle.

Southern Sudan’s Vice President, Dr. Riek Machar, who was the Chief Mediator in the negotiations between the two parties had to shuttle between Juba and Sudan-DR Congo border looking for Joseph Kony in the wild jungles of thick forests in that region to find him for face-to-face talks in order to convince him to sign, but to no avail.

Kony has since then instead continued with the cross-border international rebellion which affects Southern Sudan, DR Congo, Central Africa Republic and the native country, Uganda.

source: Sudan Tribune

Western Equatoria, Sudan – “Tell them about our suffering here,” said the Bishop of Yambio of the Sudanese Episcopal Church. “The LRA is killing, raping and looting in our communities and the world does not know about it,” he added.

Bishop Peter’s words came at the end of a meeting I had with Episcopalian pastors from various Western Equatorian districts in South Sudan. Packed in the All Saints Church in Yambio, the capital of Western Equatoria State, or WES, I heard many hours-worth of testimony from people who had been victims of the Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, most of them in the past two months.

The village of Yubu, for instance, which is 4 km away from Yambio, was attacked at the end of September. Many people were abducted, some were released but at least six were killed. The remnants of their bodies were collected only a few days before my visit. These events have become common in WES. A report by the U.N. coordination agency estimated 202 LRA related deaths and 131 abductions in September alone.

LRA attacks on the civilian population have been particularly brutal and frequent in and around Ezo, a town close to Sudan’s border with Congo, where the LRA attackers are coming from. As a result, many people have been internally displaced, moving to areas as far as Yambio – a 7 to 10 day trek on foot – trying to escape the LRA.

The displaced people I spoke to in Yambio described how the LRA had destroyed most of their villages around Ezo in search of food. Stories of killings, rape, and looting are again, all too common. There are at least 1,500 displaced people around Yambio living in squalid conditions without much help. An estimated 25,000 people in WES are displaced and most are thought to have fled LRA attacks.

The number of refugees from Congo and Central African Republic are also on the rise. The refugee camp of Makpandu, 45 km northeast of Yambio town, currently houses over 2,500 refugees, and at least 50 people arrive each week, according to the U.N. refugee agency. At least 3,000 refugees are stuck in Ezo town where food distribution is rare due to LRA attacks, but relocation of these refugees to the Makpandu site is on hold until the security situation improves.

In the meantime, LRA attacks in Western Equatoria continue. On October 7, the LRA attacked the village of Nimba near Yambio town. Two women were mutilated and killed.

The attacks have prompted more displacement, misery, and hunger. Food supplies for the local population and the displaced are dwindling because of the looting and destruction. On Wednesday, Governor Jemma Nunu Kumba of Western Equatoria appealed on Radio Miraya FM for swift humanitarian aid to the people of WES. The governor’s plea echoed the words of the director of the Sudanese Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Committee in our meeting: “We had never had people dying of starvation in Western Equatoria until the LRA came.”

From Enough Project

How is it possible that the international community continues to allow the LRA to perpetrate atrocities with impunity?  In today’s article by Jeffrey Gettleman in the New York Times, he describes the horrific violence inflicted by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels on villagers in the northeastern corner of the Congo, around Garamba National Park where the LRA has been hiding for the past few years.  Since last December the LRA has been rampaging, pillaging, raping, maiming, kidnapping and killing these innocent villagers, in retaliation for a botched military offensive against them by the Ugandan and Congolese armies (with U.S. advisers involved) after peace negotiations failed.  These poor villagers don’t even understand the LRA rebels who are mostly from northern Uganda and speak Acholi, not the local language Lingala.  So they emerge from the bush, armed to the teeth and speaking a strange language, and proceed to massacre the unfortunate civilians - can you even begin to imagine such a nightmare?  Is it possible that we, the international community, are incapable of bringing the LRA to its knees?  This is shameful and tragic.  Where are the LRA getting their guns, their bullets?  They may extract food from the villagers, but not bullets and grenades to replenish their arsenal.  Who pays for their satellite phone accounts?  Where is the cash support flowing from?  Are we really expected to believe that this information is unattainable?  Can’t the satellite phone carriers shut down the LRA accounts, or use the phones to trace their movements?  Whomever is aiding and abetting them on the outside must be immediately arrested and prosecuted.  If the U.S. was advising the Ugandan and Congolese forces, why can’t the ultra-sophisticated global intelligence system created to track potential terrorists, with satellites that can detect movements and heat emissions under the jungle canopy, be brought to bear on the LRA?  If the international community doesn’t pull out all the stops now to bring this escalating horror to an end, we will have failed miserably - we already have failed the 1,000 victims of the latest LRA rampage.  I commend Jeffrey Gettleman for making this ongoing story a priority, and our response has to be to end the story (nightmare).

It’s high time to make a concerted and sustained international military intervention to capture Joseph Kony and bring the nightmare of his crazed militia group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) to an end.  Today’s story in the New York Times, describing the atrocities inflicted on the peaceful rural people of the remote northeastern corner of the Congo, in and around Garamba National Park, is truly a horror story of innocent civilians being hacked to death and babies’ heads being torn off.  I hope no one is still talking about lifting the ICC warrants for the arrest of Kony and his top leaders.  It’s good that the US military has chosen to contribute tactical advice and information, as reported in the NY Times story, to help the Ugandan forces in their effort to rout and apprehend Kony, but the hapless Ugandan army will need more than advice and information to get the job done.  Even the “Kaibiles”, Guatemalan special forces sent after the LRA by the UN a couple of years ago, were decimated by Kony’s forces - let’s stop underestimating the LRA and send out some serious troop numbers, like the UN peacekeeping force sent into East Timor in 1999, to end his reign of terror once and for all, restore peace and stability, and put Kony on trial for war crimes at the ICC.

A recent report in Ugandan newspaper New Vision says that Okot Odhiambo, one of the 5 Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) senior commanders wanted by the ICC, is ready to throw in the towel and turn himself in to Ugandan authorities.  Apparently he was wounded last December in battle during the offensive mounted by Ugandan forces in conjunction with Congolese and Southern Sudan forces, in an attempt to end the reign of terror mounted by LRA leader Joseph Kony in and around his hideout in Garamba National Park in northeastern Congo.  Kony’s refusal to sign the Juba peace agreement with the Uganda governement, after 2 years of painstaking negotiations, led to the military offensive in December.  Okot says that he will turn himself in to Ugandan authorities under the condition that he not be transferred to ICC custody to face trial and be given amnesty in Uganda, and the Ugandan government has declared that they will follow the terms of the Juba peace deal even though it was never signed, which would call for Okot to face court in Uganda.  This raises yet another challenge for the nascent ICC - despite the terms of the Juba peace agreement, will the ICC still demand custody of Okot?  After all, the ICC was not involved in the peace deal and has a clear justice and accountability mandate, so the Ugandan government would have to mount a “complementarity” challenge to the ICC claiming that they can prosecute Okot under the Ugandan legal system - will the ICC accept this?  After all, the Ugandan/LRA case was originally referred to the ICC by the Ugandan government itself, claiming that they didn’t have the capacity to deal judicially with the mass atrocities committed by Kony and his cohort.  If they have developed the capacity, that would be a feather in the cap of the Rome Statute, that has as a primary goal the strengthening of the national justice systems of the member states, like Uganda.

Okot is not the first LRA commander to defect - on our video page you can see an interview we filmed with Patrick Makasi, LRA Commander of Operations, who defected in October 2007 under mounting tension in the LRA camp over the lack of progress in the peace talks, because Kony wouldn’t sign for fear of being taken to The Hague to face justice.  Kony at the time killed his right-hand man Vincent Otti, but Makasi managed to get away and after several days moving through the Congolese jungle, turned himself in to MONUC peacekeepers, who gave him over to the Ugandan government.