HUMAN Rights Watch has this article about LRA attacks, killings and kidnappings in the Central African Republic and suspected LRA attacks in the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo). The U.S. government, along with the E.U. and the African Union need to commit to coordinated boots on the ground actions to capture joseph kony and the LRA leadership, turn them over to the ICC and disarm the LRA. Check out Human Rights Watch for more on the LRA and other human rights issues around the world. (This post originally included information on Invisible Children's KONY2012 campaign. I have removed it because of their affiliation with the right wing "religious" extremist group known as the "Family". Be sure to read the comment after this post from Bruce Wilson, check out his links KONY 2012, Invisible Children, and the Religious Right: The Evidence16APR12 and Invisible Children Touts Ties To NOM & Proposition 8 Funders 20APR12 and for more information check out my earlier post on them, WHEN IS IT A CHURCH 4MAR10
and
Tea Party Jesus: Koch's Americans For Prosperity Sidles Up to Religious Right for 2012 Campaign16APR11
(Nairobi) -- The Ugandan
Lord’s Resistance Army
(LRA) rebel group has increased its attacks in the Central African
Republic (CAR) since the beginning of 2012, putting civilians in
affected areas in need of urgent protection, Human Rights Watch said
today. Attacks also continue in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The LRA carried out at least 53 new attacks in
Congo and
CAR
between January and March, abducting 90 civilians and killing nine
others, according to new research by Human Rights Watch in CAR and
United Nations (UN) documentation. The number of attacks in southeastern
CAR is a significant increase over attacks reported in 2011.
“The increase in LRA attacks shows that the rebel group is not a spent force and remains a serious threat to civilians,” said
Anneke Van Woudenberg,
senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The African Union,
United Nations, and governments in the region should take urgent steps
to implement comprehensive civilian protection measures and put real
muscle into making them work.”
During a three-week research mission to CAR and Uganda in March and
April, Human Rights Watch interviewed 23 victims and witnesses to the
attacks, as well as local leaders, civil society representatives,
military officials, and UN and African Union (AU) representatives.
Two sisters from Agoumar, ages 43 and 62, told Human Rights Watch
that they had gone fishing on February 27 when the LRA abducted them.
They were taken by a group of three fighters, who forced the women to
carry honey, peanuts, and heavy bags of flour that had been looted from a
nearby granary.
“We were fully loaded with goods and had to walk in the forest for
three days and three nights without stopping,” one of the women said.
“They beat us in a horrible way, and when my sister got seriously ill
after the third night, the fighters decided to let us go. Our brother
and nephew who were abducted on the same day are still missing, and we
fear they may have been killed.”
Civilians across the region visited by Human Rights Watch said they
live in fear of the next LRA attack. Over 400,000 people remain
displaced due to LRA attacks, including at least 2,000 newly displaced
in 2012. Many civilians told Human Rights Watch they desperately needed
protection.
In the area around Ngouyo, a village 30 kilometers south of Djema,
the LRA has carried out 12 attacks in the past two years, including two
attacks in December 2011 and three in March 2012. Only two soldiers from
the CAR armed forces are based in Ngouyo. Since the attacks in December
the Ugandan army has deployed soldiers to Ngouyo, but villagers are
afraid to leave the village and fear the Ugandan soldiers might soon
depart, leaving them at the mercy of the LRA.
“It is very difficult for us to cultivate our farms, and now people
are suffering from hunger,” a local leader in Ngouyo told Human Rights
Watch. “Since the attacks started, we only go to our farms in groups and
only to the farms within five kilometers of the village center. But
since the recent attacks in the area, no one has left the village to go
to their farms for the past two weeks.”
There is no phone network in Ngouyo or radio communication, so villagers often have no means of reporting LRA attacks.
On March 8, suspected LRA fighters attacked a group of seven people
from Ngouyo who were fishing in the Ouara River, about 15 kilometers
north of the village. An elderly mother of 10 who witnessed the attack
told Human Rights Watch what happened: “They told my son to get down on
the ground, and then they tied his hands behind his back. They looted
all of our goods, and left with my son and our belongings. When I cried
out to protest, they hit me on my arm with a bayonet and told me not to
follow them.” The woman’s 29-year-old son is still missing.
Human Rights Watch documented other attacks in the region that may
have been carried out by the LRA, including a massacre of 13 artisanal
gold diggers in the Cawa Safari camp area around March 20. Further
investigations are required to determine if the attack was carried out
by the LRA or other actors, although the massacre resembled previous LRA
attacks in Congo. The victims were beaten to death with machetes and
pieces of wood. Some were tied up or stripped naked before they were
killed. The LRA is the only armed group suspected to have been active in
the camp area recently.
CAR judicial authorities are currently investigating the massacre.
Whereabouts of the LRA Leaders
The LRA’s leader,
Joseph Kony, is wanted on an arrest warrant from the
International Criminal Court
(ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed between 2002
and 2004 in Uganda. The Ugandan military reports that they suspect he
is hiding in the Darfur region of Sudan with an estimated 100 to 150
fighters, family members, and abducted children and adults. Two other
LRA leaders also sought on ICC arrest warrants, Dominic Ongwen and Okot
Odhiambo, are reported by the Ugandan military to be hiding in the
remote forests around the Vovodo and Chinko Rivers in CAR with an
estimated 100 fighters divided up into small groups. Both Kony and the
other LRA leaders forcibly hold an unknown number of abducted children
and adults.
Col. Binansio Okumu (also known as Binany) and another LRA commander
known as Obol are suspected to be in Congo, possibly near Garamba
National Park, where the LRA were previously based. These commanders
were responsible for the
Makombo massacre in December 2009 which left 345 civilians dead and over 250 abducted.
“No government should give safe haven or support to Joseph Kony or
other LRA leaders wanted for mass atrocities,” Van Woudenberg said. “If
Kony is in Darfur, then the government of Sudan should join the regional
efforts to apprehend him and send him to The Hague.”
In recent months, the LRA has mostly operated in small groups,
raiding fields and abducting civilians to transport looted goods. Some
abductees who managed to escape told Human Rights Watch that Kony and
other senior LRA leaders may have given instructions to LRA fighters to
avoid large-scale killing to keep their locations hidden from the armed
forces pursuing them.
A 19-year-old from southeastern CAR, interviewed by Human Rights
Watch, spent over a year with the LRA before she escaped in January. She
described the LRA’s current strategy as looting when supplies were
needed, but not to kill since the LRA were under constant pressure from
the Ugandan army and the leaders did not want to reveal the group’s
locations.
But LRA violence against those abducted continued, Human Rights Watch said.
“As soon as I was abducted, the LRA taught us their language,
Acholi, and told us their rules,” the young woman told Human Rights
Watch. “We had to wash three times per day, prepare the food well for
the fighters, keep their clothes clean, and if we tried to escape, we
would be killed. Two people who were abducted from Agoumar tried to
escape, and the LRA forced us, the other children, to beat them to death
with heavy sticks. The LRA fighters treated us horribly. If we
committed an error, they would beat us terribly and we even risked being
killed. That’s why I had to escape. I managed to flee when they sent me
to look for water.”
Other armed groups, armed cattle herders and bandits also operate in
this region of CAR, adding to the insecurity in the area and sometimes
making it difficult for residents to identify who attacked them. For
example, since early 2012, the Popular Front for Recovery (Front
Populaire Pour le Redressement, FPR), a Chadian rebel group led by Baba
Laddé and formerly based in northern CAR, is reported by military
authorities in CAR to have moved south toward the areas where the LRA
also operates.
Lack of Civilian Protection
Armed forces from the region and the UN have adopted few measures to
protect civilians who live in the areas where the LRA operate, most
notably in CAR. Only around 100 CAR soldiers are deployed to the vast
eastern region. In many towns there are only two to five ill-equipped
soldiers with limited transport and communications means. Some villages
and towns have no soldiers deployed at all.
The Ugandan army has an estimated 600 to 800 troops deployed in CAR
as part of the joint operation against the LRA, but few are deployed to
population areas to protect civilians and instead are focused on
tracking the LRA’s leaders.
In late 2011, the United States deployed 100 special forces
personnel to the LRA-affected region as military advisers to the armed
forces carrying out operations against the LRA. In CAR, these advisors
are based in Djema and Obo. The U.S. deployment has helped improve
civilian-military relations, coordination between the armies of the
various countries, and the conduct of the Ugandan soldiers, who
previously were accused of drunken disorderly conduct and some cases of
sexual violence. Ugandan army officers told Human Rights Watch that
intelligence gathered recently from U.S. aerial surveillance has also
permitted their forces to more accurately deploy troops to areas where
the LRA is present, and that intelligence is now shared with the Uganda
People's Defence Forces (UPDF) in a more efficient way.
The U.S. military advisers’ impact on civilian protection has been
limited, however, by the lack of authorization from the U.S. Defense
Department to move outside of the towns where they are deployed to
assess the impact of LRA attacks on communities, to facilitate
humanitarian assistance, to expand demobilization activities, and to
accompany regional forces on patrols.
Human Rights Watch called on the U.S. advisers to develop concrete
measures to protect civilians from retaliatory attacks by the LRA as
part of the joint military planning.
“Despite the presence of foreign armies and their own security
forces, civilians in CAR have shockingly little protection from the
LRA’s brutal attacks,” Van Woudenberg said. “Tackling this protection
gap and apprehending the LRA’s leaders wanted on ICC arrest warrants are
both urgently needed to end the LRA’s abuses.”
The UN has a peacebuilding mission in CAR, known as BINUCA, which
was mandated by the UN Security Council in December to report on LRA
attacks and support demobilization and disarmament activities for LRA
combatants. But no BINUCA personnel have been deployed to the
LRA-affected areas to date.
In March, the AU announced a Regional Cooperation Initiative to
strengthen efforts to combat the LRA, including the deployment of a
5,000-member Regional Task Force incorporating soldiers from Uganda,
Congo, CAR, and South Sudan, most of whom are already deployed in the
region. The European Union and other donors have said they would support
this initiative.
It is not yet clear how the current military forces conducting
operations against the LRA will transition to a new joint command
structure or if they have the capacity to deploy the troops needed to
protect civilians adequately. While there have been efforts to improve
coordination and information sharing between the armed forces, this too
has been far from adequate, especially on planning for civilian
protection. Tensions between the Congolese and Ugandan armies have
hampered the operations. In late 2011, ahead of Congolese national
elections, the Congolese government ordered all Ugandan soldiers to
leave Congo. They have not yet been permitted to return.
Human Rights Watch also called on the AU and its partners to enhance
communication and road infrastructure, and to improve demobilization
efforts of LRA fighters, especially in CAR.
“It’s civilians who pay the price when the governments of the region
are unable to resolve their differences or coordinate their efforts,”
Van Woudenberg said. “The AU and the UN’s promises to help coordinate
and strengthen these efforts cannot wait a day longer.”
Photo: Two sisters in Agoumar who were abducted on their farm by
the LRA on February 27, 2012. They were released, but their brother and
nephew are still missing.
© 2012 Ida Sawyer/Human Rights Watch
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/human-rights-watch/central-african-republic_b_1441408.html
We’re also behind schedule. To prevent another outburst of violence, the United States must convince the regime in Khartoum, ruled by wanted war criminal Omar al-Bashir, to stop stalling and start seriously preparing for the vote. Our government must demand that all parties in Sudan allow unimpeded access for peace keepers, humanitarian aid organizations, and robust human rights monitoring throughout the country. The United States must also demand that other nations – like China and Russia – respect the outcome of the referendum.