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| Dr Ruhakana Rugunda, then the Internal Affairs minister, meets Joseph Kony at Ri-Kwangba at the DR Congo-Sudan border in February 2007. FILE PHOTO
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It seems apparently so, according to emerging details.
Mr Francisco Madeira, the African Union’s special envoy on the LRA, told the UN Security Council on November 20, that Central African Republic (CAR) leaders were in touch with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebel group and its overall commander Kony.
Mr Madeira based his briefing on updates received from CAR’s interim president Michel Djotodia during their interface in Bangui at the end of October.
According to various government and diplomatic sources, the LRA in a message promised its fighters would have assembled by November 3 if guaranteed safe passage and supplies.
In other words, the prowling rebels already skipped their own deadline to gather in one place and it was 17 days after this trick that Mr Madeira
notified the UN Security Council - vaulting over the uncomfortable detail that the development had been overtaken by reality on the ground.
A US Department of State official quoted by UK public broadcaster, the BBC, noted that Washington was not persuaded that Kony was on the point of abdicating rebellion.
The US official was not alone, and no concrete information other than loose lines dropped by beleaguered CAR officials, has come to light to validate those serious claims of the intended surrender.
In the past, Kony has told lies or walked back on his commitments to more credible intermediaries, even after persuaded national leaders and international actors bended backwards to accommodate his testy demands.
Mr Paul Ronan, the co-founder of Resolve, a frontline advocacy group on LRA issues, says the surrender talks claims “most likely aren’t true”.
The only confirmation so far is that CAR transitional president Djotodia, noted Mr Ronan, is in contact with an LRA group, and not Kony’s.
Multiple sources have told the Daily Monitor that Otto Laderere, known to be Kony’s former security aide who replaced Caesar Acellam as LRA’s intelligence chief, in late August made contact with one Demane.
Demane is a general in Djotodia’s Seleka group that ousted President François Bozizé Yangouvonda in March this year.
Hideouts
Laderere’s group is hibernating in Nzako in CAR’s remote but mineral-rich south-east, where the rebels and their dependents reportedly also practice subsistence agriculture.
The AU Regional Taskforce, as the regional intervention force supported by about 100 US Special Forces is called, has over the past months destroyed LRA camps and denied the rebels a permanent home.
Unable to roam freely and pillage villages to replenish dwindling supplies, the rebels have once again picked from their bag of tricks the most-tempting sweetener: An offer to renounce rebellion in exchange for a safe haven and food.
The rebels during their initial contact in August put their number together with dependents at 1, 200.
They then increased it to 2,000 and later doubled it to between 4,000 and 5,000 when they got feelers of possible deliveries, an exaggeration calculated to attract bigger quantities of food and medical supplies to last them longer.
Yet independent estimates show LRA’s fighting force is no more than 600, the rank and file being depleted by deaths and a spate of defections encouraged by regional militaries through air-dropped leaflets.
This newspaper understands that Djotodia as well as NGOs, eager to get some credit for getting one of the world’s most wanted men out of the bush, hauled generous portions of food and medicines to the rebels before everything suddenly went silent again.
According to Resolve’s Ronan, the interim leadership separately forced villagers and civil society actors to deliver food to rebel hide-outs, often at great risk to their safety.
By October 31 when UN and AU envoys; Abou Moussa and Mr Madeira met and told CAR leaders not to deliver supplies to LRA without concrete action - say release of children and women in captivity - the rebel group under Laderere had already snapped up substantial rations, leaving the world to guess their next course of action.
Djotodia remains unrecognised internationally as president or head-of-state, eight months after his violent power grab and his authority to preside over the country has significantly been eroded by the recent spiral in violence masterminded by unruly elements among his armed allies.
More troops in CAR
The UN, at the urging of France, CAR’s former colonial master, on Tuesday proposed to deploy a 7,000-strong intervention force to stabilise the country teetering towards full-blown genocide fanned by religious sentiments.
A source at the heart of security matters in the Great Lakes Region says the Seleka rebels “systematically plundered” the wealth of the Catholic Church - one of the richest institutions in
the landlocked country - during the war that brought Djotodia to power in March.
They ransacked missions, stripped removable property and commandeered four-wheel vehicles, including those owned by NGOs, to the distaste of the faithful.
Because Muslims dominate the command, rank and file of Seleka running the struggling transitional government, the previous looting combined with ongoing bloody military operations targeting Bozizé loyalists has tended to be interpreted in religious hues.
Isolated internationally, and beleaguered at home, Djotodia is a desperate man willing to trade off anything except his life to gain credibility.
Stakeholders, including within the African Union, believe the struggling CAR leader tossed up the Kony surrender card to draw international attention and build a clout for recognition.
Others suggest both he and general Demane hope to tap part of or whole $5 million (Shs12.5 billion) US bounty on the elusive LRA chief if he surrendered to them.
Hope flickers in hunt for Kony
The Ugandan, Congolese, CAR and South Sudan forces have been hunting LRA rebels for months under
the aegis of the African Union.
In October 2011, US President Barack Obama assigned about 100 combat-equipped US Navy SEALS as field advisors to help regional armies remove Joseph Kony and other top LRA commanders from the battlefield.
UPDF’s Brig Sam Kavuma replaced Brig Dick Prit Olum as commander of the AU Regional Taskforce in July, around the same time Washington expanded its assistance previously to UPDF to cover other armies on LRA chase.The American assistance includes sharing high-tech intelligence and gathering capabilities, training, and airlifting of troops as well as logistical supplies.
The 3,085-strong Regional Taskforce is headquartered in Yambio, South Sudan, and has tactical bases in Central African Republic’s Obbo; Nzara, South Sudan; and, Ddungu in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“The force is very robust; it has been destroying LRA camps; tracking those fleeing and denied them a permanent base to re-organise from,” said a senior AU official who asked not to be named because they are not authorised to speak to the media.
“There is heightened pressure on LRA and optimism on our part that we are closer than ever before to achieve our ultimate objective: To eliminate the LRA,” the source said.
In mid-September, 2013, AU envoy Francisco Madeira secured diplomatic authorisation from a previously hesitant Kinshasa, allowing the Regional Taskforce (SPLA contingent) to co-hunt LRA rebels inside DR Congo territory alongside 500 FARDC troops who joined the operation only in February this year.
The UPDF has some 2,000 troops on the mission, SPLA 500, adding to CAR’s 85.
From survival revolt to enigma
The rebellion in the northern Uganda began shortly after President Museveni, in January 1986, overthrew the military junta of Gen Tito Okello, himself an Acholi.
The official version of the genesis of the northern armed conflict is that it was masterminded by disgruntled Acholi soldiers to try to topple new-comer Museveni and reclaim lost state power.
In an account to this newspaper in September, exiled renegade UPDF Col Samson Mande, the commander of the National Resistance Army battalion that captured Acholi land, however, said the war was triggered off by revenge killings and indiscriminate looting by some NRA guerrillas.
The first armed resistance, he said, was organised by volunteer Ojuk, a Captain in the vanquished Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA).
It then morphed into the Holy Spirit Movement commanded by Alice Auma Lakwena, who claimed to have mythical powers that could dissolve bullets fired at her fighters. The bullets did not melt, and the NRA outgunned her advancing group in Busoga.
The little-educated Joseph Kony, her close relative and former altar boy with an odd ambition to rule Uganda based on the biblical Ten Commandments, started off the LRA in 1987.
His forces killed for leisure, conscripted and indoctrinated children as core fighters and pillaged villages in his ancestral land.
At the height of the near two-decade insurgency, humanitarian organisations estimated up to 1. 7 million people in northern Uganda huddled in Internally Displaced People’s Camps, living in squalor and dying in tens daily of preventable diseases.
A population escaping Kony’s wrath ran into harm meted by government soldiers, under David Sejusa, formerly Tinyefuza.
The humiliation of a people created jitters and
frustration that translated into venomous political grievance.
Hope flickered when Gen Aronda Nyakairima’s Operation Iron Fist kicked LRA rebels from their hideouts in mountainous parts of South Sudan, forcing them in August 2005 to sprint to Gramba Parkland in northeastern DR Congo.
The collapse of the Juba talks gave UPDF in December 2008 the incentive to pursue LRA inside DRC, flushing them out of the forested hide-out.
Today, a four-country military contingent, the Regional taskforce, keeps the LRA constantly on the run, without a permanent camp to plan or replenish dwindling stock.
LRA TIMELINE
1987: Ex-Altar Boy Joseph Kony starts the LRA group.
1993/4: Betty Bigombe, then minister for Pacification of the North, opens peace talks. Meets face-to-face with Kony, but talks collapse over mistrust.
2004: Bigombe brokers fresh negotiations, and it fails again.
2005: LRA flees to DRC, South Sudan brokers peace talks, warring parties sign ceasefire deal
2006-8. Juba peace talks take place. Kony declines to sign final peace agreement, citing his ICC indictment
and arrest warrant.
Dec. 2008: UPDF launches Operation Lightning Thunder and dislodges LRA from DRC’s Garamba Park
2011 to-date: Regional armies hunt down LRA in Central Africa.
Nov. 20, 2013: AU tells UN Security Council Kony is in surrender talks with CAR leaders.
