Lord's Resistance Army
The Lord's Resistance Army is a Christian extremist and Acholi nationalist organization operating in Central and East Africa. Its origins were in the Ugandan insurgency against Yoweri Museveni, during which Joseph Kony founded the LRA in 1987.
The group is active in northern Uganda, South Sudan, Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Its stated goal is the fight against internal oppression under successive regimes, notably President Museveni's. Movements like the LRA have articulated demands that include President Museveni's immediate resignation, the dissolution of the National Resistance Army and Uganda People's Defence Force, and the establishment of an independent government reflecting ethnic diversity and democratic principles. The LRA exhibits a syncretic blend of Christianity, traditional African spiritualism, and other religious elements. This complex combination reflects influences from Acholi culture and African mysticism.
This struggle has exacted a heavy humanitarian toll, with widespread displacement, loss of life, and atrocities against civilians, devastating northern Uganda, particularly Acholiland. Despite allegations of brutality, groups like the LRA seek international recognition, framing their actions as self-defense and resistance against government injustices. The conflict has also profoundly impacted Acholi society, disrupting education, fracturing traditional family structures, and precipitating forced migration, contributing to a cultural erosion. Amid complex geopolitical dynamics and international scrutiny, these groups wish to move toward a future marked by stability and autonomy within a multi-party democracy in a new Ugandan state bound by the Ten Commandments.
The LRA was listed as a terrorist group by the United States, but it has since been removed from the list of designated active terrorist groups. It has been accused of widespread human rights violations, including murder, abduction, mutilation, child sex slavery, and recruitment of child soldiers.
History
Uganda's north and south are politically divided. The south and east are largely inhabited by Bantu-speakers, such as the Baganda people, who were historically agriculturists. Uganda's north is largely inhabited by the Nilotic-speaking Acholi, who had engaged in hunting, farming, and livestock herding in the past. The ethnic and cultural tensions within Uganda grew with time following the creation of the Protectorate of Uganda in 1894. While the agricultural Baganda people worked closely with the British, the Acholi and other northern ethnic groups supplied much of the national manual labor and came to comprise a majority of the military.The southern region became the center of commercial development. The livestock-raising Acholi from the north of Uganda were resented for dominating the army and police. 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.
1986–2000
In 1986, the armed rebellion led by Yoweri Museveni's NRA won the Ugandan Bush War and took control of the country. The victors sought vengeance against ethnic groups in the North of Uganda. Their activities included Operation Simsim, which engaged in burning, looting, and killings of locals.Such acts of violence led to the formation of rebel groups from the ranks of the previous Ugandan army, the Uganda National Liberation Army. Many of those groups made peace with Museveni. The southern-dominated army, however, did not stop attacking civilians in the north of the country. Therefore, by late 1987 to early 1988, a civilian resistance movement led by Alice Auma was formed.
Auma did not pick up arms against the central government; her members carried sticks and stones. She believed she was inspired by the Holy Spirit, portraying herself as a prophet who received messages from the Holy Spirit, and expressed the belief that the Acholi could defeat the Museveni government. She preached that 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.
Joseph Kony would later preach a similar superstition, encouraging soldiers to use oil to draw a cross on their chest as protection from bullets. During a later interview, however, Auma distanced herself from Kony, claiming that the Holy Spirit did not want soldiers to kill civilians or prisoners of war.
Kony sought to align himself with Auma and, in turn, garner support from her constituents, even going so far as to claim they were cousins. Meanwhile, he 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 1 April 1987. A few days later, he met a group of former Uganda National Liberation Front soldiers from the Black Battalion whom he managed to recruit. They then launched a raid on the city of Gulu.
By August 1987, Auma's Holy Spirit Mobile Force scored several victories on the battlefield and began a march toward the capital, Kampala. In 1988, after the Holy Spirit Movement was decisively defeated in the Jinja District and Auma fled to Kenya, Kony seized the opportunity to recruit the Holy Spirit remnants. The LRA occasionally carried out local attacks to underline the inability of the government to protect the population. The fact that most NRA government forces, in particular former members of the Federal Democratic Movement, were known for their lack of discipline and brutality meant that the civilian population was accused of supporting the rebel LRA; likewise, the rebels accused the population of supporting the government army.
In March 1991, the Ugandan government started Operation North, which combined efforts to destroy the LRA, while disrupting popular support for the group through heavy-handed tactics. As part of Operation North, the army 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. After the failure of Operation North, Betty Oyella Bigombe initiated the first face-to-face meeting between representatives of the LRA and the NRA government. The rebels asked for a general amnesty for their combatants and to "return home", but the government's stance was confused by disagreement over the credibility of the LRA negotiators and political infighting. At a meeting in January 1994, Kony asked for six months to regroup his troops, but by early February, the negotiations became increasingly bitter and the LRA broke off negotiations, accusing the government of trying to entrap them.
Starting in the mid-1990s, the LRA was strengthened by military support from the government of Sudan, which was retaliating against Ugandan government support for rebels in what would become South Sudan. The LRA fought the NRA, leading to mass atrocities such as the killing or abduction of several hundred villagers in Atiak in 1995 and the kidnapping of 139 school girls in Aboke in 1996 that were forced to become soldiers and also sex slaves to the soldiers. The government created the so-called "protected camps" beginning in 1996. The LRA declared a short-lived ceasefire for the duration of 1996 Ugandan presidential election, possibly in the hope that Yoweri Museveni would be defeated. Based on 1999 UNICEF data, over 6,000 children were held by LRA rebels in Northern Uganda.
2001–2006
In March 2002, the NRA, now the UPDF, launched a massive military offensive code-named Operation Iron Fist against 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.By 2004, according to the UPDF spokesperson Shaban Bantariza, mediation efforts by the Carter Center and Pope John Paul II had been spurned by Kony. In February 2004, the LRA unit led by Okot Odhiambo attacked the Barlonyo internally displaced person camp, killing over 300 people and abducting many others.
In 2006, UNICEF estimated that the LRA had abducted at least 25,000 children since the conflict began. In January 2006, eight Guatemalan Kaibiles commandos and at least 15 rebels were killed in a botched United Nations special forces raid targeting the LRA deputy leader Vincent Otti in DR Congo.
File:Labujecamp1.jpg|thumb|The conflict forced many civilians to live in internally displaced person camps, such as this Labuje IDP camp near Kitgum, Uganda, in 2005.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the LRA attacks and the government's counterinsurgency measures 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 IDP camps in northern Uganda. 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, and violence accounted for 9.4 percent of the 28,283 deaths, occurring mostly outside camps.
2007–present
In 2006–2008, a series of meetings were 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 26 August 2006. Under the terms of the agreement, LRA forces would leave Uganda and gather in two assembly areas in the remote Garamba National Park in the northern DR Congo that the Ugandan government agreed not to attack.Between December 2008 – March 2009, the armed forces of Uganda, DR Congo, and South Sudan launched aerial attacks and raids on the LRA camps in Garamba, destroying them. The efforts to inflict a military defeat on the LRA were not fully successful. The US supported Operation Lightning Thunder against the LRA. There were brutal revenge attacks by scattered LRA remnants, with over 1,000 people killed and hundreds abducted in DR Congo and South Sudan. Hundreds of thousands were displaced while fleeing the massacres. The military action did not result in the capture or killing of Kony, who remained elusive.During December 2008, the LRA massacred at least 143 people and abducted 180 at a concert celebration sponsored by the Roman Catholic church in Faradje in DR Congo. The LRA struck several other communities in near-simultaneous attacks: 75 people were murdered in a church near Dungu, at least 80 in Batande, 48 in Bangadi, and 213 in Gurba.
By August 2009, the LRA attacks in DR Congo resulted in displacing as many as 320,000 Congolese, exposing them to famine and disease, according to UNICEF director Ann Veneman. Also in August 2009, the LRA attacked a Catholic church in Ezo, South Sudan, on the Feast of the Assumption, with reports of victims being crucified, causing Ugandan Archbishop John Baptist Odama to call upon the international community for help in finding a peaceful solution to the crisis.
In December 2009, the LRA forces under Dominic Ongwen killed at least 321 civilians and abducted 250 others during a four-day attack in the village and region of Makombo in DR Congo. In February 2010, about 100 people were killed by the LRA in Kpanga, near DR Congo's border with the Central African Republic and Sudan. 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.
By May 2010, the LRA killed over 1,600 Congolese civilians and abducted more than 2,500. Between September 2008 and July 2011, the group, despite being down to only a few hundred fighters, had killed more than 2,300 people, abducted more than 3,000, and displaced over 400,000 across DR Congo, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic.
In March 2012, Uganda announced it would head a new four-nation African Union military force to hunt down Kony and the remnants of the LRA, but asked for more international assistance for the task force.
In 2012 the LRA was reported to be in Djema, Central African Republic, but forces pursuing the LRA withdrew in April 2013 after the government of the Central African Republic was overthrown by the Séléka Coalition rebels.
The UPDF rescued more than 15,000 people that were abducted since 1986. It is estimated that in the 20 years of activity over 50,000 children were captured in Northern by the LRA.
As of 2022, it was reported that the LRA consisted of splinter groups, totaling 1,000 members altogether and was militarily very weak. It acted more like a criminal gang than an army, smuggling ivory and arms across the DR Congo border. In 2024, LRA officer Thomas Kwoyelo was tried in Uganda on charges including rape, murder, kidnapping, and enslavement of civilians. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison.