Is Africas longest war finally ending?

last updated 8 January 2015

Uganda

Uganda may finally end its civil war, said Kenya’s Standard in an editorial. After 20 years, the Ugandan government and the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, have reached a truce, under which the rebels will receive amnesty. It’s not a perfect agreement. Under Joseph Kony, who considers himself God’s personal representative on Earth, the LRA has committed countless atrocities—including, many say, cannibalism. Most of its fighters are children, abducted from their villages in the thousands. Mothers who protested had their lips, ears, or even breasts cut off. Yet the Ugandan army, too, has logged its share of abuses, “flattening villages in the name of destroying rebel hide-outs.” Over the course of the war, more than 2 million people were driven from their homes, ending up in squalid camps where rape, disease, and hunger are endemic.

It didn’t have to go on this long, said Charles Onyango-Obbo in Uganda’s Monitor. Uganda’s civil war dragged on for decades only because of interference from outside powers. The LRA’s predecessor—the Holy Spirit movement, led by Alice Lakwena—was severely weakened in 1987 in a battle with President Yoweri Museveni’s forces. But the movement got renewed life after the end of the Cold War, when Islamic fundamentalism emerged as the new American bugbear. After the fall of Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam in 1991, the U.S. feared “the march of Islamic fundamentalism into Central Africa and southwards in East Africa.” So the U.S. began supporting the rebel Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, which based itself partly in Uganda. In retaliation, Sudan began supporting the LRA. It’s no coincidence that the truce calls for LRA fighters to assemble in southern Sudan for final talks on amnesty and disarmament.