SUMMARY
The LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) was a rebel group fighting the government of Uganda from the late 1980s, through the 1990s and well into the 2000s.
The group has gone under many names since it initiated its armed struggle. There was a general confusion in the literature during the movement’s first few years, with different sources using similar names, only differentiated by a transposition of two letters in the abbreviated form. Many of the early acronyms used are thus nearly identical. According to some sources the group that today is known as the LRA was first called the HSM II (Holy Spirit Movement II) emphasising the (weak) link with the first Holy Spirit Movement of Alice Lakwena, active 1986 to November 1987. Other names used in the literature are the UHSA (United Holy Salvation Army), LSA (Lord’s Salvation Army), UCDA (Uganda Christian Democratic Army) and UDCM/A (United Democratic Christian Movement/Army). In August 1992 the movement changed name for the last time, adopting the name Lords Resistance Army.
When LRA emerged in 1987 Uganda had seen close to two decades of near constant armed conflict. A pattern of ethnically based regimes, targeting other ethnicities had prevailed since independence. The LRA was founded among the Acholi ethnic group, which had dominated the armed forces of regimes prior to 1986. When a new government under Yoweri Museveni came to power in 1986 the Acholi population suffered as historical scores were settled. As a result two prominent northern rebel groups emerged: UPDA (Ugandan People’s Democratic Army) and HSM (the Holy Spirit Movement). The latter, which became a very influential prophetic movement, was founded by an Acholi woman named Alice Auma who claimed to have been possessed by an alien Christian spirit, known as Lakwena. Speaking through Alice, the spirit Lakwena ordered a fight against evil, something that manifested itself both as an external enemy - the government - and as an internal enemy, in the form of impure soldiers and witches.
Whilst both UPDA and HSM were short-lived, they left one big legacy, the LRA, which had its roots in both these movements. Its leader, Joseph Kony, started out as a fighter in the UPDA, but sometime in 1987 he set out to create his own group. When Alices forces were defeated and she was forced to flee to Kenya in late 1987, Kony, claiming to be Alice’s cousin, declared that he had inherited the spirit and would keep fighting the regime. Thus, he took over some of her troops. Furthermore, as the political wing of UPDA signed a peace agreement with the government in 1988, Kony’s new movement was joined by defecting UPDA rebels.
LRA claimed to be fighting to oust the government of Yoweri Museveni, early on stating that some of the main causes of the rebellion were human rights violation against the Acholi population by the government army, ideological objections to Musevenis system, lack of confidence in the government, the governments mismanagement of the economy, forced conscription into the NRA army and the lack of northerners in the government. However, aside from these political reasons there was another dimension to LRAs struggle. The rebels were driven by a firm belief that their struggle was a divine cause, directed and guided by God through his prophet Kony. Kony, in his first speech, said that he had been sent by God to liberate humanity from disease and suffering, but that he had come to realise that healing was senseless as long as those who were healed were then killed. Thus, he had resolved to fight to kill all those who wanted to fight and to destroy the evil forces in the world, promoting justice and righteousness throughout Uganda. Nonetheless, most observers concluded over the course of the conflict that the rebels came to increasingly appear “cause-less”, simply using extreme violence to terrorise the population. The popular support among the Acholis that LRA might have enjoyed during the first years of its struggle vanished quickly in the face of increasingly brutal attacks on civilian targets. Hence, recruitment became difficult for the rebels, who in the mid-1990s turned to large-scale kidnappings to fill up their ranks.
When LRA first appeared and through the first years of its struggle, there were no reports of the movement receiving outside help. However, by the mid-1990s, this changed completely, as the conflict between LRA and the Ugandan government became increasingly interlinked with the intrastate conflict fought north of the Ugandan border, in Sudan. The regimes in Kampala and Khartoum were long-time enemies and Museveni’s government had for years supported the Sudanese rebel group SPLM/A (Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army). Thus, LRA was useful to Khartoum in two ways: for one it could be used to fight against SPLM/A, and secondly by supporting LRA Sudan could destabilise Museveni’s regime. By 1994 the Sudanese government had commenced its support of the Ugandan rebels, supplying them with sophisticated arms like landmines and allowing them to have rear bases on Sudanese territory, out of the reach of the Ugandan army. This support continued in full scale until 2001, when negotiations between Uganda and Sudan led to an agreement under which both countries agreed not to support each others rebels. While there continued to be reports of continued aid, this appeared to be on a much smaller scale, and it was unclear whether it came from official sources or rouge officers.
LRA was from the start led by Joseph Kony. However, the movement was fairly de-centralised, with small groups of fighters spread out over a large area, and field commanders operated with a certain degree of independence. The rebel group was divided into four brigades, named Gilva, Sinia, Stockree, and Trinkle, which answered to the high command, the ‘Control Altar’. Apart from Kony, other known members of the Control Altar were Vincent Otti, Dominic Ongwen, Okot Odhiambo and Raska Lukwiya. In 2005 the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for these five, detailing 33 separate crimes committed between mid-2002 and 2005. After the indictments, the high leadership of the movement was in a state of flux, due to both military and political pressure. Raskwiya was killed in fighting with government troops in August 2006 and Vicent Otti was killed on the order of Joseph Kony in November 2007. Apparently the peace talks, ongoing since mid-2006 had caused splits within the movement, and Kony felt that Otti had become a threat to his own position.
LRA has been involved in the intrastate, non-state and one-sided categories of UCDP organised violence.
