LRA rebels murder three people including two policemen in Sudan’s Tambura
By Richard Ruati
May 29, 2010 (TAMBURA) – Sudan Tribune has uncovered remote villages in Western Equatoria’s Tambura County, where murders took place on Wednesday, leaving at least three dead and few villagers abducted.
Eye witness says this is one of the worst attack carried out by the LRA in part of Tambura. The stench of the three of bodies, hacked to death by the LRA, lingered for long earlier this week. But the world is only hearing about the brutal deaths of one man and two policemen later, due to the remoteness of the villages.
“Mr. Clement Ugali was shot dead on Wednesday by the LRA at Duma , just 7 miles away from Namutina when he was finally going back to transport his family to Tambura. His body arrived Tambura Town and buried immediately,” said Clement Babitimo in Tambura.
The credible source says, “All Farm activities around Tambura have come to a standstill, [we] are just foreseeing great hunger this year, according to what I got was that about 18 people who were going to Namutina to check on their relatives were the ones who fell into the ambush I cannot tell how many where taken
A resident of Tambura said, “villages of Nabaria, Dingimo, Akpa, Duma, Bangaru, Baranga and Namutina Payam on Wednesday have evacuated the village and left in groups of Hundreds heading to Tambura Town for Security”.
The Ugandan Army has deployed additional forces to area villages, after hearing rumors of a LRA attack earlier this week, but the remote villages, deep in the forest were left unprotected. And the tiny Tambura villages paid the price.
President Barack Obama on Monday signed a law aimed at helping Uganda and its neighbors combat the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group that has brutalized Central Africa for decades.
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.
South Sudan’s Western Equatoria state has been the centre of a brutal, reprisal insurgency by a cult-like rebel group that saw over 100 thousand people uprooted from their homes and tens of hundreds kidnapped, mutilated or killed.
Led by self-proclaimed mystic Joseph Kony, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is notorious for massacring civilians, slicing off the lips of survivors and kidnapping children for use as soldiers, porters and sex slaves.
In March this year Anneke van Woudenberg from Human Rights Watch believes the LRA’s is on a concerted campaign of revenge killings:
“Trying to understand the minds of the LRA combatants is just incredibly difficult. What it does seem to me is that they are deliberately maximizing civilian deaths that they are taking out revenge on the Congolese people. In a number of places they attacked there seemed no other objective except to kill people. Why they do this is not clear but it seems to me revenge attacks carried out on multiple occasions. This is planned, this is orchestrated.”
The long conflict has threatened to destabilize the volatile central African region with Kony’s rebels seeking shelter in neighboring countries and violence spilling across borders.
A landmark truce brokered in August 2006 by neighboring south Sudan has brought relative stability to war-weary northern Uganda.
But Kony has repeatedly failed to sign a final peace deal, demanding guarantees that he will not be prosecuted by the International Criminal Court, which wants to try him for war crimes. His rebels are now camped out in Congo where they continue to kill and abduct civilians.
(ST)