SUMMARY

When the Ugandan rebel group LRA (Lord’s Resistance Army) emerged in the late 1980s, it claimed that one of its reasons for fighting was to defend the ethnic Acholi population against government abuses. However, during the course of LRA's intrastate armed conflict with President Yoweri Museveni’s regime the group itself came to increasingly target the civilian population, among many other crimes carrying out one-sided killings.

As statements from the rebels themselves have been scarce over the years, many analysts have attempted to explain LRA's abuses against the population of northern Uganda and some common lines of reasoning can be traced. First of all, it appears as if there were few attacks on civilians during the first years of the conflict. It was not until the early 1990s that the group turned against the northern population and it then appears to have been as a revenge for their perceived betrayal. In March 1991 the government had launched a brutal anti-insurgency operation called “Operation North”. As part of this, the so-called “Bow and Arrow groups” were formed. These were local self-defense militias, set up so that the villagers would be able to defend themselves until government soldiers could come to the rescue. As the name implies the militias were mainly armed with bows and arrows and were subsequently no match for LRA, but the fact that many civilians were willing to join them angered the rebels, who felt abandoned by the population. As a result, the rebels stepped up their abuses against the civilian population. However, initially, the focus appears to have been on mutilations and not killings. The rebels cut off ears and lips, padlocked mouths, and gouged out eyes. LRA leader Joseph Kony has said of this practice that “The Bible says that if your hand, eye or mouth is at fault, it should be cut off”.

After a second perceived betrayal in 1994, the LRA began a new phase in the conflict, for the first time resorting to major massacres of the civilian population that it was supposedly fighting to defend. The perceived display of disloyalty that tipped the barrel was the Acholi populations’ support for the ongoing peace talks between the rebels and the government. While Kony in the end chose to return to arms, the population was clearly in favour of an agreement, and were subsequently willing to settle with Museveni’s government. From this, Kony passed a collective guilty sentence on the entire Acholi population.

The practice of attacking the population for their perceived disloyalty affected the entire populace, as they as a collective group were considered to have failed the rebellion. However, some groups were particularly targeted, especially those that the rebels associated with the government such as teachers and secondary students. Furthermore, entire villages could be viewed as more pro-government than others by LRA and thus be especially targeted. According to survivors, LRA rebels said in the course of attacks that they were punishing the population of specific villages or areas for their lack of support. An area or village could be branded as pro-government simply if many rebel soldiers from the area had deserted, if locals had revealed the whereabouts of injured rebels hiding or identified the position of landmines to the army.

A complementary explanation for LRA's targeting of civilians is that it is best viewed as an effort to control the population. By using one-sided violence, the rebels were able to inflict terror on the population to such an extent that there could be no semblance to normal life in the conflict zone. This, in turn, was also a vehicle to project power towards the Ugandan state by immobilizing the population. As a result, approximately 90 % of the population in the three districts that bore the brunt of LRA's attacks (Gulu, Kitgum and Pader) ended up in so-called protected villages.

The use of one-sided violence was massive in northern Uganda and the attacks ranged from small-scale, low-intensity assaults to large-scale massacres. The former took the form of almost daily attacks on remote villages, where houses were burned, children abducted and civilians killed and sometimes mutilated. Occasionally civilians were abducted temporarily and released later, after having served as porters. However, those that refused were generally killed on the spot, as were those that failed to carry the heavy loads. This type of attack also included killings of people simply walking on the road, something that the rebels had forbidden. Also riding a bicycle was against LRA rules and would render a person killed or without legs (which would be chopped off).

Furthermore, the group carried out numerous large-scale massacres in northern Uganda, killing and maiming hundreds of people at a time. An absolute zenith in brutality was reached in the mass-killings in Pader district in October 2002, where victims were chopped up and cooked by the rebels, who then tried to force the villagers to eat the remains. Usually these attacks were well-planned and also involved large-scale abductions. Abducted children were frequently forced to torture and kill relatives and other abducted children, and were thus cut off from normal behaviour and reintegration into society.

While the districts Gulu, Kitgum and Pader saw the bulk of one-sided violence by LRA during the 1990s and the early 2000s, the rebels also carried out attacks across the border in southern Sudan, where they had bases. Furthermore, the year 2003 saw what appeared to be a deliberate and well coordinated spread of the conflict to the eastern districts of Lira, Apac, Katakwi and Adjumani in the Teso and Lango regions. Developments in the armed conflict against the government eventually forced LRA out of northern and eastern Uganda by 2006. Negotiations ensued, punctuated by more low-scale, intermittent attacks on civilians in southern Sudan. In 2008, as negotiations broke down, the same pattern of attacks on the civilian population which was seen in northern Uganda in the 1990s and first years of the 2000s was repeated in the northeastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire), where the group had re-grouped and established bases.

The following years saw the group moving even further away from its original home in Uganda. A large-scale offensive carried out by the Ugandan army together with the Governments of DR Congo (Zaire), Southern Sudan and the Central African Republic forced the rebels to disperse. Small bands of rebels spread out over a large area stretching from north-eastern DR Congo (Zaire), through Southern Sudan's Western- and Central Equatoria provinces and CAR's eastern Haut-Mbomou and Haue-Kotto prefectures, leaving a trail of death behind them.

LRA first became active as a one-sided actor in UCDP data in 1989 when the one-sided violence resulted in over 25 civilian deaths. The threshold was reached on 14 April that year when the group shot dead 6 civilians in Layibi village.