Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army – An Impediment to Peace in a Volatile Region

The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has been fighting a guerrilla war against the government of Uganda since Yoweri Museveni came to power in 1986. Led by Joseph Kony, the resistance movement follows a “cultish” ideology based on Christian “mysticism” and gains new recruits through kidnapping children, both male and female. It indoctrinates them as combatants, and preys on local populations for food, money and support. The LRA has been known as the worst human rights-abusing insurgencies ever and has been accused of cutting off the ears, noses, lips and limbs of its victims.

The government of Uganda has followed a two-track approach to pressure the LRA into a peace agreement. The first track is through peace talks. The Juba peace process began in 2006 and has led to the agreement of 5 sign protocols to end the 23 year-old conflict, according to the International Crisis Group. But Kony skipped the last round of talks in April 2008 and the LRA started a new offensive in the region during Christmas last year.

The second track the government has used to pressure the LRA to lay down their arms involves a military approach. Since the late 1980s, the Ugandan Peoples’ Defense Force (UPDF) has been active in Northern Uganda, where the LRA was founded. It has rooted out many of mid-level LRA operatives. High-level operatives have fled to the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) to rebuild and regroup. The Enough Project, a human rights advocacy group that focuses on Africa, issued a report in May 2009 that Kony may have relocated to the Central African Republic, with many of the LRA bases now along the border between the DRC and Sudan.

Recent Developments – A Wider Regional Crisis
Since the government of Sudan, the primary supporter of the LRA in the 1990s, made peace with rebel groups in south Sudan in the early 2000s, Uganda has been effective in dismantling LRA operations inside the country. But the LRA’s recent offensive last Christmas indicates that the group has reformed and is now focusing its attacks on Congolese and Sudanese targets. It seems the UPDF’s operations have led to the exportation of violence throughout the region.

After the string of attacks in Congo and Sudan last December, the Congolese government invited the UPDF into the country to disarm the LRA through a joint military operation. In recent decades, eastern DRC has been a notorious safe haven for insurgent rebel armies from Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. And the LRA is no exception. It has been highly successful in dodging the most recent coordinated military operation. One humanitarian working in southern Sudan concluded, “They’re the world’s best bush guerrillas.”

The LRA is in a unique position to destabilize an already weak region. The United Nations Mission in the DRC (MONUC) has been working with the Congolese government since 2005 to disarm rogue militias in eastern Congo, and the Congolese and Rwandan governments have recently coordinated a military operation to rid the region of several Tutsi and Hutu rebel armies that were terrorizing the local population. But the LRA has already shown its unique ability to survive counterinsurgency operations while still maintaining a core base of support.

Additionally, the LRA might destabilize the peace process in Sudan. There is fear among some analysts, most recently expressed by John Prendergast during a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last month, that the Sudanese government may use the LRA to disrupt security arrangements in southern Sudan leading up to the elections.

The Debate Over Prosecution vs. Amnesty
Last month Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni promised amnesty to several senior commanders of the movement (including Okot Odhiambo and Dominic Ongwen, who have both been indicted by the International Criminal Court) if they return to the peace process and agree to stop spreading violence.

President Museveni’s offer of amnesty to leading members of the LRA stirs a hotly contested debate within the literature about amnesty over prosecution. Issaka Souare presents both sides of the argument in a paper published last year in African Security Review. He argues that success in the Juba peace process can be achieved by finding a compromise between these two opposing camps.

The camp that favors prosecution provides three arguments. First, they believe that amnesty laws are incompatible with international laws. Second, they say that amnesty is not morally justifiable. And the last argument claims that amnesty does not offer guarantees that the peace will be sustained.

The camp in favor of amnesty laws provides two central arguments. They first believe that the pursuit of prosecution should not constrain the peace process. Second, the Rome Statute allows for amnesty when peace might be compromised.

Souare observes,

The debate presented above revolves around two central and equally valid preoccupations: The first is ending the two-decade-long armed conflict in Uganda so as to prevent further killings, human rights violations and destruction of property; and second to combat impunity so as to ensure that those responsible for past violations do not feel protected by the cover of an amnesty and commit more atrocities in the future.

He proposes a solution that blends these two camps and redefines the meaning of justice. Since the LRA has refused to return to the negotiating table until the ICC indictments against them are removed, Souare believes that justice and amnesty “are not mutually exclusive.” Uganda can provide amnesty to LRA commanders while also seeking justice using local justice mechanisms. By justice, Souare defines it in terms of economic, social and cultural rights as well as civil and political rights.

This approach is attractive and does present a unique solution, but the LRA has redirected its targets from the Ugandan civilian population to towns and villages in Congo and Sudan. A local justice mechanism in Uganda will not be able to restore violated rights in Congo and Sudan. A wider regional approach will be required before an end to this conflict appears.


Sources

Greenwald, Jon. “Uganda: ‘Laying Ghosts and Making Peace’.” allAfrica, 18 December 2008.
International Crisis Group. Northern Uganda: The Road to Peace, With or Without Kony. 10 December 2008.

“CrisisWatch: Uganda.” Website accessed 23 March 2009, http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm? action=cw_search&l=1&t=1&cw_country=111&cw_date=.
Plaut, Marin. “Behind the LRA’s terror tactics.” BBC News, 17 February 2009.
Prendergast, John. Statement of Enough Project Co-chair to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, U.S. Congress, 12 February 2009.
Spiegel, Julia and John Prendergast. A New Peace Strategy for Northern Uganda and the LRA. ENOUGH Strategy Paper 19 (May 2008).
Souare, Issaka K. “Moving the Uganda peace process from the dichotomy of criminal trials vs amnesty,” African Security Review, Vol. 17, No. 1 (2008).