1st step a success! This is huge. Read this!
“Dear all –
I just wanted to let you know the LRA Disarmament & Northern Uganda Recovery Act, S.1067, was passed unanimously this afternoon by Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a voice vote. We’ll be sending out a press release soon. This is a huge step forward to getting it past in the Senate and ultimately by all of Congress. Thanks for all your support and help thus far. The next step for us is ramping up the # of cosponsors so we can try to pass it through the whole Senate next month with unanimous consent.
All the best,
Senator Feingold’s office.”
Here is the press release:
SENATE COMMITTEE PASSES FEINGOLD BILL REQUIRING NEW STRATEGY TO CONFRONT THE LRA
Feingold’s Bipartisan Legislation Would Bring New Attention and Support to Ending Africa’s Longest Running Rebel War
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Washington, D.C. – The Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed bipartisan legislation today authored by U.S. Senator Russ Feingold and cosponsored by Sam Brownback (R-KS) requiring the Obama administration to develop a new multifaceted strategy to confront one of Africa’s longest running rebel groups, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). For more than two decades, under the leadership of Joseph Kony, the LRA has kidnapped more than 66,000 children and forced them to fight as child soldiers, wreaking havoc in northern Uganda and southern Sudan, and more recently, northeastern Congo and Central African Republic. Feingold’s bipartisan Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act requires the United States to work with multilateral partners to develop a viable path to disarm the LRA, while ensuring the protection of civilians.
“For too long, Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army have terrorized innocent civilians across four countries of central Africa, kidnapping thousands of children and forcing them to become child soldiers and commit horrific acts,” said Feingold, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on African Affairs, who visited Uganda in 2007. “My bill will commit the United States to develop a proactive strategy to work with regional governments to stop the LRA, while better targeting our assistance to address the conditions in northern Uganda that enabled the LRA to emerge in the first place. I will work with my colleagues to move this important piece of legislation through the Senate.”
“The LRA’s 30-year campaign of violence has scarred communities across central Africa, who have in turn been let down by their governments, the UN and the international donor community,” said Jon Elliott, Africa Advocacy Director at Human Rights Watch. “This Bill offers an opportunity to put civilian protection where it should be, at the top of the agenda, and much-needed American leadership to finally bring Joseph Kony and his co-accused to justice. And it will hopefully ensure that victims receive the support and redress they need to rebuild their lives.”
Feingold’s bill authorizes $10 million in additional funding for humanitarian assistance for those areas outside of Uganda now directly affected by the LRA’s brutality. In this year alone, the UN reports that the LRA has killed more than 1,500 people, abducted over 1,800, and displaced hundreds of thousands of people in Central African Republic, Congo and southern Sudan. Feingold’s bill also authorizes $30 million over three years for transitional justice and reconciliation to encourage and help the Ugandan government to address the grievances and regional divisions that the LRA exploited for nearly two decades. The Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act is cosponsored by Sam Brownback (R-KS) and 25 other senators, including several members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The Guardian: US pledges $246m in aid to Uganda
The US is to give Uganda $246m (UShs 461bn) in aid to revive health, agriculture and trade, it was announced this weekend.
On Saturday, the US assistant secretary of state, Johnnie Carson, signed an agreement with Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, the Daily Monitor reported today. The money is the largest single amount given to Uganda directly from another government for years, said the paper.
The Ugandan government announced that some of the money would be fed into the UShs1.1tr peace, recovery and development plan (PRDP) intended to regenerate the northern regions of the country that were affected by 20 years of fighting between the government and the Lord’s Resistance Army. The three-year plan was launched in October last year, but was suspended in January to allow for better accounting and monitoring practices to be designed.
Uganda has been the beneficiary of other significant bilateral support to the PRDP. The UK government’s Department for International Development has stated that one of its priorities in Uganda was to help rebuild the north of the country.
The Monitor reported that the US money will also fund HIV/Aids, environmental conservation and conflict mitigation programmes.
During Saturday’s bilateral talks, Museveni assured the US contingent that the country’s expected windfall from oil would not be misappropriated. “There is no possibility of this oil money being a curse for Uganda as it will not be used for consumption or salaries,” he reportedly said.
Read more here at The Guardian’s website.
Enough Project: Report from Southern Sudan
Western Equatoria, Sudan – “Tell them about our suffering here,” said the Bishop of Yambio of the Sudanese Episcopal Church. “The LRA is killing, raping and looting in our communities and the world does not know about it,” he added.
Bishop Peter’s words came at the end of a meeting I had with Episcopalian pastors from various Western Equatorian districts in South Sudan. Packed in the All Saints Church in Yambio, the capital of Western Equatoria State, or WES, I heard many hours-worth of testimony from people who had been victims of the Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, most of them in the past two months.
The village of Yubu, for instance, which is 4 km away from Yambio, was attacked at the end of September. Many people were abducted, some were released but at least six were killed. The remnants of their bodies were collected only a few days before my visit. These events have become common in WES. A report by the U.N. coordination agency estimated 202 LRA related deaths and 131 abductions in September alone.
LRA attacks on the civilian population have been particularly brutal and frequent in and around Ezo, a town close to Sudan’s border with Congo, where the LRA attackers are coming from. As a result, many people have been internally displaced, moving to areas as far as Yambio – a 7 to 10 day trek on foot – trying to escape the LRA.
The displaced people I spoke to in Yambio described how the LRA had destroyed most of their villages around Ezo in search of food. Stories of killings, rape, and looting are again, all too common. There are at least 1,500 displaced people around Yambio living in squalid conditions without much help. An estimated 25,000 people in WES are displaced and most are thought to have fled LRA attacks.
The number of refugees from Congo and Central African Republic are also on the rise. The refugee camp of Makpandu, 45 km northeast of Yambio town, currently houses over 2,500 refugees, and at least 50 people arrive each week, according to the U.N. refugee agency. At least 3,000 refugees are stuck in Ezo town where food distribution is rare due to LRA attacks, but relocation of these refugees to the Makpandu site is on hold until the security situation improves.
In the meantime, LRA attacks in Western Equatoria continue. On October 7, the LRA attacked the village of Nimba near Yambio town. Two women were mutilated and killed.
The attacks have prompted more displacement, misery, and hunger. Food supplies for the local population and the displaced are dwindling because of the looting and destruction. On Wednesday, Governor Jemma Nunu Kumba of Western Equatoria appealed on Radio Miraya FM for swift humanitarian aid to the people of WES. The governor’s plea echoed the words of the director of the Sudanese Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Committee in our meeting: “We had never had people dying of starvation in Western Equatoria until the LRA came.”
- Ledeo Cakaj, Enough Project. Read more of his work at Enough’s blog here.
LRA rebels kill two women in Southern Sudan
By Richard Ruati
October 15, 2009 (YAMBIO) — Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels have killed 2 women during last Wednesday raids near Yambio town in Western Equatoria State, an Arrow member have said.
Around 12 LRA fighters attacked the village across River Uze at about 11:00am (local time) on Wednesday, killing 2 civilians, said Richard Sovura Tambua, Coordinator of Arrow Boys, a local self defense group.
Four hours later the rebels launched a similar assault on the village of Nambia, where the second woman was killed and her body was mutilated by the LRA soldiers.
“They (Arrow Boys) killed three LRA soldiers there, among them a corporal. The LRA had attacked the civilians,” Tambua said.
Tambua added that, “they were with SPLA proper in the attack against LRA bandits.”
He appealed to the Government of Southern Sudan and WES to put an eye on their civilians, as without civilians there will no government.
Combating the small groups of guerrillas – experienced in jungle warfare and able to slip across international frontiers with apparent ease – has become a hard task for the joint military operations.
As purported LRA attacks destroy homes, churches and schools in Western Equatoria, civilians grab their possessions and flee.
A Uganda-led coalition including Congo and South Sudan launched a joint offensive against LRA strongholds in Congo’s isolated Garamba National Park on December 14 after LRA leader Joseph Kony again failed to sign a deal to end his rebellion.
However, despite early bombing raids on the bases and initial claims of success, the offensive has so far failed to locate Kony, a self-styled mystic whose rebels are notorious for kidnapping women and children and forcing children to fight.
Kony is wanted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for war crimes.
The Lord’s Resistance Army is no longer the Ugandan, Acholi-speaking rebel group it once was. Arabic and other languages are now accepted languages as the group forcibly recruits people from Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo and southern Sudan.
(ST)
Obama rolls out new policy on Sudan, weaker than expected
IN SHIFT FOR OBAMA, U.S. SETTLES ON MODULATED POLICY FOR SUDAN
By Colum Lynch and Mary Beth Sheridan
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 17, 2009
After lengthy debate, the Obama administration has settled on a policy toward Sudan that offers a dramatically softer approach than the president had advocated on the campaign trail — but steers clear of the conciliatory tone advocated by his special envoy to the country.
The new U.S. policy, which will be formally unveiled Monday, calls for a campaign of “pressure and incentives” to cajole the government in Khartoum into pursuing peace in the troubled Darfur region, settling disputes with the autonomous government in southern Sudan and providing the United States greater cooperation in stemming international terrorism, according to administration officials briefed on the plan. It also provides Khartoum with a path to improved relations with the United States if it begins to address long-standing U.S. concerns.
The public rollout of the policy brings an end to months of contentious internal debate on how to confront a government headed by an indicted war crimes suspect, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, and blamed in the deaths of more than 300,000 people in Darfur, according to U.N. estimates.
In what is intended as a show of unity for the new policy, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, will announce it at the State Department with President Obama’s special envoy to Sudan, retired Air Force Maj. Gen. J. Scott Gration. Rice and Gration had battled fiercely over the direction of the new policy, with Rice pressing for a tougher line and Gration calling for easing U.S. sanctions.
In an interview last month with The Washington Post, Gration said he wanted to give “cookies” and “gold stars” to Khartoum, infuriating human rights advocates and congressional officials. Under the new policy, Gration will not be authorized to negotiate directly with Bashir, and Sudan will not be removed from the State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism in the immediate future, officials said.
The administration officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the policy ahead of Monday’s announcement.
The review also addresses a long-standing dispute between Rice, who has argued that there is an “ongoing genocide” in Darfur, and Gration over how to characterize the violence in Darfur. From now on, the United States will maintain that genocide “is taking place” in Darfur, officials said. The agreement on genocide represents a setback for Gration, who argued publicly in June that Sudan is no longer engaged in a campaign of mass murder in that region. “What we see is the remnants of genocide,” he told reporters.
But the administration’s policy also marks a significant evolution for the president and close aides such as Rice. During last year’s campaign, Obama and his top advisers had advocated a more confrontational approach to Sudan — including tougher sanctions and the establishment of a no-fly zone that would prevent Sudanese fighter jets from bombing Darfurian villages. “There must be real pressure placed on the Sudanese government,” Obama said last year. “We know from past experience that it will take a great deal to get them to do the right thing.”
DR Congo terror: video shows thousands fleeing LRA
Click HERE to watch the Telegraph’s video report.
The LRA specialises in abducting and murdering children and tens of thousands have fallen into its hands since it began its campaign in Northern Uganda two decades ago. The rebels have now been forced out of Uganda and into neighbouring Congo, where they have escalated a murderous campaign.
Medecins sans Frontières, the aid agency, said that hundreds of thousands of refugees had been displaced in two regions of north-eastern Congo. “The local population is the target of violence: murder, kidnapping and sexual abuse,” said Luis Encinas, the MSF coordinator in Central Africa. “We are talking about tactics of violence aimed at instilling fear in the people. Our patients have told us the most brutal stories about children who are forced to kill their parents and people burnt alive inside their homes.”
A sudden influx of refugees has tripled the populations of some towns. The urban centres of Gangala and Banda near Congo’s north-eastern frontier with Sudan are each hosting more than 20,000 displaced people.
The LRA’s leader, Joseph Kony, has been indicted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court. He is thought to be at large in Congo or the Central African Republic.
BBC News: LRA situation getting worse in Congo
The situation in northern Democratic Republic of Congo where Lord’s Resistance Army rebels operate is getting worse, a medical charity says.
Medecins Sans Frontieres told the BBC hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing renewed rebel attacks.
LRA leader Joseph Kony once operated from Uganda but his fighters now cover a vast area of central Africa.
Analysts says attempts this year by regional armed forces to halt the brutal campaign have so far failed.
The armies of Uganda, southern Sudan and DR Congo have been carrying out offensives against the rebels since Mr Kony refused to sign a peace deal late last year.
The rebels are infamous for carrying out mutilations and have kidnapped tens of thousands of children to be fighters and sex slaves.
Tens of thousands of people have also been made homeless during the LRA’s two-decade insurgency.
‘Living in fear’
MSF says roads in northern DR Congo are now so insecure that aircraft are being used to take supplies and staff to remote locations.
“The situation is really bad: the people are living in constant fear, they’re fleeing,” MSF’s Operational Director Meine Nicolai told the BBC’s Network Africa programme.
“The violence pops up in different areas and it’s really expanding. It came to Congo in 2008 and now it’s going more and more eastwards so the area is expanding and people live in constant fear.”
Ms Nicolai said civilians were being targeted.
BBC Audio on LRA attacks in Central African Republic
Listen to the Story:
The Ugandan Lord’s Resistance Army, the LRA, has been making its presence felt outside Ugandan territory in recent months.
The LRA’s activities in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo have already triggered the mass displacement of civilians.
The LRA has also been in the Central African Republic, targeting villages in the country’s isolated south-east, where it made its first attacks in early 2008.
Uganda has responded by sending it’s army in hot pursuit but the situation is still far from stable.
Our correspondent, Chris Simpson, travelled with the International Committee of the Red Cross, the ICRC to Obo in the south-east to look at the difficulties facing civilians caught up in the recent conflict. He sent us this report.
- BBC News
Global Attention Increases as Rebel Threat Rises
According to the United People’s Defense Force (UPDF) spokesman Lt. Col. Felix Kulayigye, another Senior Commander has been killed in Central African Republic (CAR) due to last week’s attacks. LRA brigade commander Okello Kalalang was “found and positively identified by LRA defectors on Saturday,” Kulayigye said. Within the past few weeks, the UPDF reported that they captured six rebel leaders while jointly operating in CAR.
However, increasingly sporadic LRA rebel attacks and consistent rumors of LRA movement have caused people to flee their homes in southern Sudan, northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, and southeastern Central African Republic. UN spokesperson Ameerah Haq has expressed “grave concern” due to these escalating attacks within the region. Numerous humanitarian organizations have left the region due to the insecurity, which in turn has left many families lacking resources within the displacement camps.
During a recent meeting with the US Ambassador for the UN, President Museveni noted that the UPDF has under 200 combatants in CAR, but commended the US efforts in supporting the UPDF in their fight against the LRA, including training their forces. Similarly, the US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, Johnnie Carson, made a public statement reiterating the notions of President Obama and Secretary Clinton to engage with Africa and its’ hardships. One of the priorities that Carson expressed was to aid many African countries in resolving inter-state disputes and the effects thereafter, but he failed to mention any specific concerns tied to ending the terrors of the Lord’s Resistance Army.
Notable this past week is a new report on children and armed conflict in Uganda issued by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, with recommendations urging the LRA to work with the UN in releasing all children that are associated with their rebel group. The UN Chief goes on to state, “I strongly urge the Government of Uganda to prioritize the protection of children in its military actions against LRA elements, either on Ugandan territory or in joint operations in neighboring countries.”
BBC News: Fear level rises as LRA rebels return
Stephen Taban spent two years fighting for the LRA. The 20-year-old does not need time to think about which parts were the worst.
“Killing people and catching the kids,” he says, looking down at the ground as he speaks.
“It was a bad time. We were told: ‘Go and bring back the small children.’”
He knows what terror that caused: he was conscripted after being snatched from his family’s farm in southern Sudan.
But if the jungle rebels failed to return with food and fresh recruits, commanders would burn them on the back with red-hot metal from a fire.
“I was a soldier, I was carrying a gun,” he says.
“I didn’t like it, but I was forced to fight.”
The fighters – whose leaders originate in northern Uganda – have earned a grim reputation for murder, rape and abducting children.
Mutilating victims, including hacking off noses and lips, is one of their trademark calling cards.
Boys are taken to become fighters, girls as sex slaves for the commanders.
Mr Taban escaped in June, running away through the thick forests and swamps that the guerrillas hide in.
He still wears the green T-shirt with a Ugandan army logo given to him after he surrendered.
Ironically, it was the Ugandan army that the LRA leadership began fighting two decades ago – although the rebels have long since shifted northwards.
Moving in small groups, the machete-wielding rebels now menace a wide region across southern Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic, dragging in recruits from several nations.
While the war is over for Mr Taban, the rebel raids increase.
World Politics Review: Lord’s Resistance Army threatens southern Sudan
David Axe | Bio | 16 Sep 2009
World Politics Review
In August, fighters from the Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group rampaged through Ezo, a county of autonomous South Sudan that borders the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The rebels burned and looted homes, churches and health facilities, killed an undetermined number of civilians and kidnapped as many as 10 young girls, according to press reports. The LRA, which Washington has officially labeled a terrorist group, often forces children to become soldiers or sex slaves.
The violence in Ezo displaced as many as 80,000 people, in a part of the world that’s already over-burdened by an estimated 3 million refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) from overlapping Central African conflicts. In Ezo, the World Health Organization reported two weeks ago that “many IDPs are still hiding in the jungle due to persistent fear of LRA attacks, while most displaced are now living in camps organized by local authorities or host communities.”
The attacks also disrupted the WHO’s plans to immunize Ezo’s children against polio. That and the stress of displacement could result in epidemics that the region’s poor health infrastructure is not equipped to handle.
The raid on Ezo was just the latest example of LRA violence that has plagued South Sudan since the rebel group infiltrated into the now-autonomous region more than a decade ago. The danger the LRA poses is likely to escalate amid regional tensions, bureaucratic waffling and faltering border security.
The LRA began in 1987 as an attempt by founder Joseph Kony, who is now in hiding, to overthrow the Ugandan government and install a Bible-based theocracy. As Ugandan forces gained the upper hand in the early 1990s, the LRA established bases in DRC and South Sudan. The group’s spread was financed by the Sudanese government, which aimed to destabilize secessionist forces in the south. Subsequent LRA attacks in the three countries have killed tens of thousands and displaced many times that number over the past 22 years.
Currently, the LRA “is a problem that is now more Sudanese than Ugandan,” Don Steinberg, deputy president for policy with the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, told World Politics Review. Ugandan forces continue to gain the advantage over LRA forces remaining in that country. Just last month, Ugandan troops captured Okot Atiak, one of Kony’s top lieutenants. But elsewhere, the LRA’s strength is undiminished. Sudanese recruits “now are probably the majority of its fighters,” the International Crisis Group reported about the LRA. The rebel group might play a bigger role in regional politics in coming months, as tensions between Khartoum and the breakaway South mount.
Khartoum supposedly ended direct assistance to the LRA in 2002, but quieter forms of support might continue today. At the very least, Khartoum enables the LRA by refusing to work alongside international forces targeting the group. Sudan seems to consider the LRA a reserve force for a potential southern campaign against the U.S.-backed Government of South Sudan, in the event the GOSS declares full independence from Sudan in a planned 2011 referendum. “If Khartoum isn’t actually supporting the LRA, then they’re at least [alright] with [the LRA] putting added pressure on the south,” Steinberg said.
The LRA benefits from the world’s inability to find what Steinberg calls a “comprehensive” solution to Central Africa’s security problems. The rebel group crosses borders at will and finds safe havens in the seams between incompatible U.N. peacekeeping forces. The U.N. peacekeeping force in the DRC works with DRC forces to pursue LRA fighters, but the U.N. military contingent in South Sudan, codenamed “MONUC,” does not partner with South Sudan for similar operations on the Sudanese side. “To engage in further actions against the LRA, MONUC would need a new mandate,” said Susana Malcorra, a U.N. undersecretary general.
The U.N.’s failure to coordinate its peacekeepers exacerbates the broader lack of security and governance that allows the LRA to take root. “Many countries have limited or unreliable capacities for internal security, law enforcement and border protection,” Theresa Whelan, the U.S. Department of Defense’s top civilian for African affairs, wrote in a 2006 briefing (.pdf). “This lack of governance capacity makes them attractive venues for the development of violent extremism, terrorism and criminal activities.”
Steinberg agreed that better governance is the key to eventually rolling back the LRA. In the meantime, Whelan proposed better coordination between nations affected by armed groups, and a bigger U.S. role in training and supporting governments’ security efforts. The formation of U.S. Africa Command last year coincided with greater U.S. participation in African conflicts. In December, the Pentagon provided intelligence and logistics to assist U.N.-DRC operations against the LRA.
The assistance didn’t prove decisive. But then, nobody expects a quick end to LRA violence, or any of Central Africa’s many conflicts, for that matter. Steinberg stressed this point last month, when an outgoing commander for the U.N. peacekeeping force in Darfur prematurely declared that region’s conflict resolved. With the LRA now deeply rooted in South Sudan, Steinberg said, “what we’re seeing . . . is an increase in the complexity of the problems” in the region.
David Axe is an independent correspondent, a World Politics Review contributing editor, and the author of “War Bots.” He blogs at War is Boring. His WPR column, War is Boring, appears every Wednesday.
The Guardian: Lord’s Resistance Army extends raids in north Congo
An audio-slide show from field reporter Xan Rice. Additional pictures from Reuters.
Click here: The Guardian: LRA
The Guardian: Lord’s Resistance Army terrorises Congo after Ugandan crackdown
by Xan Rice, guardian.co.uk, Monday 14 September, 2009 22.46 BST
1,200 killed and more than 2,000 kidnapped in Democratic Republic of Congo as Joseph Kony’s LRA spreads chaos in central Africa.
The New York Times: U.N. Says Brutal LRA Attacks Increasing In South Sudan
YAMBIO, Sudan (Reuters) – U.N. officials on Friday accused the Ugandan rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) of mounting a growing number of “brutal” attacks in south Sudan, burning villages, killing civilians and abducting children.
“(These) have been increasing rapidly in the last few months. Over the last six weeks there were 11 such attacks,” Ameerah Haq, the Resident Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan, told journalists in the southern town of Yambio.