The Lord's Resistance Army

Ever heard of the LRA, the Lord's Resistance Army?

They represent a face of violent religious insurgency in Uganda, southern Sudan and the eastern Congo. Apocalyptic Christians, their leader claims he is the spokesman of God, and seeks to establish a theocracy based on the ten commandments, with elements of the mystic traditions of the Acholi ethnic group.

Somehow this translates in practice into sexual slavery, child slave-soldiers, kidnapping, mutilation and murder. And against obvious proof of the contrary, painting a cross on your chest makes you bullet proof, if you believe their current leader, Joseph Kony.

Kony is now thought to be hiding in southern Darfur.

The LRA began in 1986, and since then has been responsible 30,000 abducted children.
Maybe 40,000 - no-one can count them all.
Over 2 million displaced people. One investigation found a child slave-soldier bearing arms at age 5. The second youngest was 6.

Kony has been described, optimistically in my opinion, as "Africa's last warlord". He's been hunted for years.
According to Jendayi Frazer, the then US assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Dubbya would rant ""How can this guy call himself a soldier of the Lord? He's just a murderer."

But the hunt for Kony has never gone well....
In 2006, the United Nations did something it doesn't usually do: They sent a hit team. American-trained Guatemalan Special Ops soldiers. They were all killed and the LRA had some new heavy machine guns and grenade launchers to play with.

Then in December 2008 came Operation Lightening Thunder. Reporter Scott Johnson, in an article for Newsweek, writes:

Shortly after dawn last Dec. 14, four Ugandan Mi-24 helicopters banked low over the thick forest canopy of Congo's Garamba National Park. A dense fog had rolled in overnight, and the weather had turned nasty. Earlier that morning at a forward staging area in Uganda, a team of American military advisers equipped with large-scale US government maps and Google Earth technology had shown the helicopter pilots what to look for—four distinct "fishhook shape" camps spread out in cleared areas of the park. In one of these camps, they believed, was Joseph Kony, the professed mystic who leads Africa's longest-lived insurgent group, the Lord's Resistance Army. Find Kony, the pilots' commander had said, and kill him.

Descending through the fog bank and hovering just above the tree line, the pilots spotted what looked like a rebel council meeting in the largest cluster of shelters, code-named Camp K. The gunships immediately unleashed a barrage of rockets and chain-gun fire. Reports from the helicopter crews later stated that several dozen people, including women and children, had been caught in the open. "I saw the helicopters come—they were black, and they were bombing us," recalls George Komagun, 16, one of the hundreds of child soldiers in the Lord's Resistance Army. "I ran. We tried to fight the helicopters, but could not."

Two days after Operation Lightning Thunder began, Ugandan commandos finally reached Camp K. They found bloody trails heading into the jungle in all directions. Hastily dug graves dotted the site's periphery. Kony had been on the run for more than two decades, but this place had the look of a settled homestead. Acres had been cultivated with sorghum, cassava and maize. Stashes of sugar, rice and water in large plastic containers were buried all around.

....

Eight days later Kony retaliated, as usual by attacking helpless civilians. Within a few days, LRA fighters had slaughtered more than 1,000 Congolese villagers, beating them to death with clubs, rifle butts and machetes, and burning entire villages to the ground. Hundreds of children were kidnapped, and roughly a quarter of a million people fled their homes in Congo and south Sudan.

According to George Komagun, mentioned above, Kony would say 'Now you killed them, you must drink their blood and eat their liver." Komagun claims to have eaten 20 livers. In his dreams the people he has killed come to him begging for mercy.

In Southern Sudan there is a militia called the Arrow Boys who defend their village against the LRA. They fight with anything they have, including bows and poison darts.

On of their fighters, Emmanuel Samuel, joined the Arrow Boys in July.

In a report today by Jason Koutsoukis, a journalist with Fairfax Media, he says "The village elders told me to stay in the village but I wanted to stay and follow my father... I have fired my weapon [a bow and arrow] just once"

Emmanuel Samuel is 10 years old.