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.

Preaching hate in Uganda

First I want to preface this by saying I don't believe all religiously inspired missions to foreign countries are destructive, and I also want to add that it is true that many genuinely humanitarian causes are supported by religious organisations.

I personally am not religious. Doesn't mean I have blanket disapproval of those who are.

But here is the fly in the soup:

This is the start of an article by Jeffrey Gettleman published in the New York Times today:

"Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived (in Kampala, Uganda) to give a series of talks.

The theme of the event, according to Stephen Langa, its Ugandan organizer, was “the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda” — and the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the traditional African family.
For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

Now the three Americans are finding themselves on the defensive, saying they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behavior."

The whole article is here.

Did the three speakers have any inkling that this was a potential consequence of the prejudice that they were stiring up... ? The article is probing but not conclusive either way but...

If they DID... then they have betrayed the spirit of their own faith. And if they didn't, they have demonstrated tragic incapacity to percieve the fricking obvious: that stirring up hate will lead to actions based on hate.

Seriously... stick to saying what a bad idea it is to kill thy neighbour and what a good idea it is to care for the sick and the poor.
Don't go near sexuality. You're not qualified.

As one female TV identity here in Australia said of the Pope and the Archbishop of Sydney's (stupid and outrageous) assertion that condoms contribute to - rather than inhibit - the spread of HIV: "...and who would know better about sexual health than two old men who don't get any?".