President Obama signs US law to help Uganda fight LRA rebels

By Richard Ruati

May 25, 2010 (JUBA) — President Barack Obama on Monday signed a law aimed at helping Uganda and its neighbours to combat the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group that has brutalised Central Africa for decades.

The Ugandan rebel group has killed and abducted people on a regular basis for the last 23 years.

Since the collapse of the Juba truce between the Kampala and LRA rebels in 2007, LRA imported their horrific atrocities to Southern Sudan, DRC and CAR in Central Africa Region.

Obama called the LRA’s actions — killing, raping, and kidnapping children to serve as child soldiers — “an affront to human dignity” that must be stopped. The Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009 is designed to provide humanitarian aid to Uganda and neighbouring countries, to support regional efforts to end the conflict and to bring LRA leaders to justice.

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US President paid special tribute to LRA victims in all affected countries, “Of the millions affected by the violence, each had an individual story and voice that we must not forget,” he said.

He stressed that, “I also want the governments of other LRA-affected countries to know that we are aware of the danger the LRA represents, and we will continue to support efforts to protect civilians and to end this terrible chapter in central African history”.

The Ugandan rebel group has killed and abducted people on a regular basis for the last 23 years, from Uganda, Sudan, Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of Congo, Human Rights Watch noted in a report in March.

Last week, LRA rebels renewed clandestine attacks in south Sudan, recent attacks claimed the lives of three GOSS officials and they abducted close to 10 children and looted assorted food items and non food items from villagers.

LRA carnages in Central Africa have negatively forced thousands of villagers out of their ancestral lands and many continue to bear the brunt of a war they know very little of its objectives.

The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) is alarmed by a dramatic rise in the frequency and brutality of attacks by Ugandan bandits of LRA in Central Africa over the last four months.

The U.N. says the LRA killed more than 1,200 people in a 10-month period throughout 2008 and 2009, while Human Rights Watch said a massacre in the remote northeast killed 321 people in December.

The U.S. military’s African Command (Africom) provides communications, logistical and intelligence support for Uganda’s national army in its pursuit of the LRA.

(ST)