Garang’s death revives threat of LRA rebels
Friday 5 August 2005 01:30.
By Blake Lambert, THE WASHINGTON TIMES
KAMPALA, Uganda, Aug 4, 2005 — The mind of Joseph Kony, the self-styled messianic leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, remains elusive terrain, but he probably celebrated the death of Sudanese First Vice President and southern leader John Garang.
Few doubt that Mr. Kony viewed Mr. Garang, the founder of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, as a nemesis hostile to his interests.
"Garang was opposed to [the LRA] as a freedom fighter and a liberator, and now in his final days as president of southern Sudan, whose people were also under LRA terror," Ugandan army spokesman Lt. Col. Shaban Bantariza said.
The rebels killed nine Sudanese in a camp for internally displaced people near the town of Juba last month.
Before the crash in a Ugandan presidential helicopter killed Mr. Garang and 13 others on board along the Uganda-Sudan border on Saturday, he vowed to expel the LRA from its sanctuary in his region.
"Kony won’t be hiding there for long. It is not only Kony, but also all the militias who have been operating in the area," he told the majority government-owned New Vision daily in his final interview. "We need to provide peace, security and stability."
The threat posed by the LRA, identified by Uganda and the United States as a terrorist group, to civilians on both sides of the border demonstrates how deeply intertwined the fates of two troubled regions have become in the past decade.
Ugandan officials have frequently said that peace in southern Sudan would put an end to the 19-year conflict blighting their country because the rebels would not be able to operate freely, running back and forth across the highly permeable border.
Col. Bantariza said the SPLA and the Ugandan army agreed to cooperate on fighting the rebels and even planned to carry out joint military operations.
But Mr. Garang’s death has at least postponed those plans, deflating the dreams of northern Ugandans.
Roughly 1.6 million of them live in camps for the internally displaced, almost wholly dependent on foreign food handouts to survive, since they’re too afraid of the LRA to live at home.
"[Garang’s death] certainly is going to complicate the peace process in northern Uganda," one well-placed observer in the region said.
Not that anyone would consider negotiating with the LRA, a highly mobile outfit with no stated aims other than establishing rule based on the Ten Commandments, to be an easy task.
Its relationship with Sudan’s Islamist government stands as perhaps the most unique quid pro quo arrangement in recent African history.
In 1993-94, as Uganda gave staunch backing to the SPLA, then fighting the Sudanese government, officials in Khartoum repaid the favor by providing Mr. Kony’s rebels with shelter in southern Sudan and weapons to attack northern Uganda.
But the LRA then increased its reliance on the forced recruitment of children into its ranks.
At least 20,000 of them have been abducted to serve as soldiers, sex slaves and baggage handlers, according to the United Nations.
But the Sudanese government did not flinch, according to the International Crisis Group, a think tank dedicated to conflict prevention.