Kony's slaughter in Congo

The Washington Post reports:

A Ugandan rebel group known for its horrific cruelties has massacred 189 people and kidnapped at least 20 children over three days in northeastern Congo, U.N. officials reported Monday.
The cultlike Lord's Resistance Army carried out the attacks on three villages between Thursday and Saturday, according to Ivo Brandau, a spokesman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Congolese capital, Kinshasa.
The group killed 40 people in the small town of Faradje on Thursday, and over the next two days, it attacked the villages of Doruma, where rebels massacred 89 people, and neighboring Gurba, where 60 were killed, Brandau said, citing reports that the United Nations received from local authorities.

This report by Stephanie Crummen deserves especial praise for these two paragraphs:

Although the Lord's Resistance Army is associated with the political grievances of the Acholi people of northern Uganda, the group has mostly terrorized the Acholis over the past 20 years, proving to be more of a psychotic cult than a true rebellion. Its reclusive, messianic leader, Joseph Kony, claims to consult spirits and says he aims to establish a theocracy based on the Ten Commandments.
Over the years, however, his movement has earned a reputation as one of the most brutal groups on the continent, sexually enslaving young girls, abducting children and forcing new recruits to machete friends to death during induction ceremonies. The group has killed or disfigured more than 10,000 people -- cutting off victims' lips was a trademark -- and abducted more than 20,000 children, as well as forced more than 2 million people to flee their homes, rights groups say.

Press accounts routinely refer to the LRA as "rebels," which is sort of like calling Charles Manson a "youth adviser." The LRA is, and always has been, a terrorist organization. The Post and Crummen deserve praise for pointing this out.

UPDATE: A report in Uganda's New Vision indicates some of the fleeing LRA have already made it into South Sudan. Doruma is very close to the three-way junction of the borders of Congro, South Sudan and the Central African Republic. It seems obvious that the Dec. 14 joint attack on Kony's base in the Garamba National Park caused the LRA to split up, fleeing in different directions, some heading north and west toward Doruma, others heading east toward Faradje and the Sudanese border.

UPDATE II: Meryl Yourish invokes a comparison between the slaughter in Congo and the situation in Gaza:

I have yet to hear of a special UN Security Council meeting being convened to discuss the crisis in the Congo, where innocent men, women, and children are being murdered for no apparent reason.

Well, yeah. But I don't know if this is an appropriate analogy. Compared to Kony and the LRA, Hamas looks like a Boy Scout troop. (I've actually met two young survivors of an LRA raid.) If anything, the world's willingness to ignore the LRA's horrific savagery bespeaks . . . racism.

Kony on the run

African terrorist Joseph Kony and his "Lord's Resistance Army" flee their pursuers:

Ugandan rebels fleeing a multinational offensive have raided a Congolese village and killed at least 15 people, U.N. peacekeepers said on Friday.
Uganda, Congo and South Sudan launched a joint assault on December 14 against bases of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a Ugandan rebel group, in Democratic Republic of Congo. But they have so far failed to corner its reclusive leader, Joseph Kony.
The United Nations mission in Congo (MONUC) said fleeing LRA fighters attacked the village of Faradje, near Congo's porous border with Sudan, on December 24 and 25.

Looking at a map, Faradje is a crossroads town east-southeast of the Garamba National Park, where the LRA hideout was raided two weeks ago. Faradje is about 30 miles west of the border of South Sudan, but Kony's gang can't expect to gain safety by crossing that border toward Yei. More likely they'll head south.

UPDATE: The Uganda New Vision has a better account, with a map that indicates the LRA has scattered three ways from Garamba:

On Christmas day, the rebels pounced on Bitima village on the Congolese side of the border with south Sudan, killing 13 people. The same day, another group hit Doroma near the Central Africa Republic (CAR), where they killed 12, ransacked homes and looted food and property. Simultaneously, other rebels attacked Faradge village, 150km from the allied forces’ base in Dungu, killing three people and abducting an unspecified number. Uganda, Congo and southern Sudan have a joint base in Dungu. On Christmas Eve, the rebels had ambushed a pick-up truck between Laforo and Mambe roads in South Sudan, along the border with the DRC. The allied forces found five civilians killed Southwest of Sekuru along the DRC-Sudan border.

From this, it appears that part of the LRA left Garama headed west and hit Doroma; another fragment went north and hit Bitima; and the third part went east toward South Sudan, hitting Faradje.

Khartoum still aiding Kony?

The end may be near for Joseph Kony, the African terrorist who has wrought horrible carnage in Uganda and Sudan. Ten days ago, Uganda, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo united in a military raid that destroyed the Congo hideout camp of Kony's "Lord's Resistance Army," which has terrorized the region for 20 years.

Experts on the LRA have long suspected that the Sudan government in Kharthoum had armed and supported Kony's killers in order to destabilize Uganda and undermine the efforts of South Sudan (predominantly Christian) to gain autonomy from the Muslim govenrment in Kharthoum.

In an interview with Uganda's New Vision newspaper, Ugandan Gen. Aronda Nyakairima discussed the LRA raid and suggested that Khartoum may still be aiding Kony:

Of course, it was Khartoum that continued supporting LRA, otherwise we would have defeated them long ago.
When they stopped because of Juba being under the South Sudan government, they were no more.

In other words, once South Sudan (with their capital in the key transportation center of Juba) gained autonomy in 2005, this cut off Kony's supply line to Khartoum. But when asked who is now arming Kony, Nyakairma says:

We don't have intelligence to point at a country X or Y. But one wonders whether the old friends washed their hands clean. I can't prove that. But studying what we captured will tell it all. It is also possible he was disarming people in the CAR. He also raided South Sudanese soldiers and there are hunters in Garamba. He could have picked guns here and there. But we can't rule out supplies from his old friends.

"His old friends" = Khartoum. Fortunately, after two years of fruitless peace negotiations with the LRA, the United Nations Security Council is now fully supporting the military effort to hunt down Kony, who is charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.

More terrorism by Kony

Joseph Kony's LRA terrorists have struck again, this time in South Sudan:

The South Sudanese army (SPLA) clashed with a group of LRA fighters at Nimule, on the border with Uganda, on Sunday, according to UN sources. The SPLA reportedly killed three members of the LRA and captured one. . . .
[Ugandan army] spokesperson Capt. Chris Magezi . . . confirmed the presence of an LRA group in Pageri, 40km north of the Ugandan border, over the weekend.
"On Saturday night, around 30 LRA fighters attacked the village of Pageri. They looted food and abducted two people, a man and a woman. The woman was later released," Magezi said yesterday.
According to army intelligence, the group crossed the River Nile again on Sunday night.
"They moved in the direction of Kajo Keji, heading back towards Garamba National Park (in the eastern DR Congo)," Magezi said. "We think they came to get weapons and food."

The Rev. Sam Childers, whose Angels of East Africa missionary orphanage is at Nimule, reports that the orphanage is safe. Childers is seeking contributions to fund his next trip to Sudan.

Although the Ugandan army is ready to go after the LRA, the spineless State Department continues to urge negotiations with Kony's gang of thugs. Kony's LRA has mercilessly killed, kidnapped and mutilated Ugandan and Sudanese civilians, sending hundreds of thousands fleeing as refugees. If a terrorist had done this to Americans, would we be negotiating?

Uganda aids South Sudan

Important news from Uganda:

The government of South Sudan is discussing a deal in which the country’s students in Ugandan public universities will pay the same tuition as their counterparts.
Yesterday, the South Sudanese media reported that this was one of the issues President Salva Kiir discussed with President Yoweri Museveni during his two-day visit here last week.
“I have signed with the Uganda president to allow all our students to pay the same tuition fees as their natives,” Kiir told Sudanese students at the Imperial Resort Beach Hotel in Entebbe on Friday. . . .
It was, however, not clear whether the deal applied to private universities. Uganda has five public universities: Makerere, Kyambogo, Mbarara, Busitema and Gulu. The arrangement is part of the cooperation that includes pacts on transport and communication, health, culture and the media.

This cooperation between Uganda and South Sudan is a very positive step toward peace and prosperity in the region.

South Sudan (also known as "New Sudan") won autonomy from Khartoum after a 22-year civil war that ending in 2005. That war was caused by radical Islamicist elements in the Khartoum government, which sought forcibly to impose sharia law throughout Sudan. The Christians in southern Sudan -- under the leadership of Col. John Garang -- fought back and paid a heavy price for their freedom. Many from the South were carried away in slavery to the Islamic North, and atrocities were widespread. Khartoum sided with Saddam Hussein after he invaded Iraq in 1990; For five years (1991-96), Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda were based in Sudan.

One consequence of the long civil war was that it produced what has been called a "lost generation" of Sudanese who have had little or no formal education. Among the South Sudan war veterans I met during my February trip to Africa were some who joined the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA) as young as 11.

However, I'm not sure that "lost generation" phrase -- with its overtones of hopelessness -- is entirely fair to the Sudanese. These veterans (such as my Dinka friend Santino, shown in the photo) are Christian men with the kind of personal dignity that befits such military heroes. Their long years of army discipline will surely make them valuable citizens in peace.

Nonetheless, the opportunity for South Sudanese students to attend Uganda's universities at standard tuition will be a tremendous aid to South Sudan's efforts to rebuild its economy and civil society.

The Remarkable Museveni

The mention of Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni in this Monday news story gives me an opportunity to discuss this amazing historical figure. Museveni has been controversial and he definitely has his critics (a Kenyan man who attends our church is one of those critics), but what he has accomplished in Uganda is truly remarkable.

Given that Museveni came to power 22 years ago as the result of a successful "war of liberation," it would be easy for Westerners to think of him as just another of the "strong man" rulers who have been so common in post-colonial Africa. It would be easy to think that, but it would also be ignorant and wrong to do so.

While in downtown Kampala with Sam Childer's assistant, "Nineteen" (his African name sounds exactly like "Nineteen" in English), I visited a street market and asked a used-book vendor if he had a recent history of Uganda. The vendor sold me, for a modest sum, a 1990 paperback book called Mission to Freedom: Uganda Resistance News, 1981-85.

I didn't realize it at the time -- not until I got back to the States and tried to find it online -- but there in that street market, I had purchased quite a rare volume. Mission to Freedom is a collection of original dispatches from what might be called the "underground newspaper" of the National Resistance Movement, which was then an outlaw guerrilla resistance effort against the dictatorship that ruled Uganda.

A very brief history: When Uganda gained its independence in 1962, a guy named Obote became the prime minister. In 1966, Obote effectively made himself dictator and pursued a socialist economic policy, with predicably bad results. Obote's dictatorship was dependent on the support of the military. In 1971 (again, predictably) the military decided it didn't need Obote, so while he was out of the country, there was a coup that installed as the new dictator Obote's longtime military henchman, Idi Amin. Of course, Amin became one of the most heinous dictators in history. He was finally deposed in 1979, and in 1980, Obote returned to power in an election that was widely considered fraudulent.

Museveni had been one of the Ugandans who went into exile in Tanzania during Amin's dictatorship, and was a key figure in the alliance of Ugandan exiles and Tanzanian army troops that deposed Amin. After Obote's fraudulent election, Museveni went into the countryside and organized a resistance movement. In February 1981, Museveni led a daring raid on a Ugandan military installation, seizing weapons and equipment, thus starting the five-year "war in the bush" that eventually made Museveni president.

OK, standard Third World "war of liberation" stuff, right? So it seems, until you read Museveni's declarations of his principles, written during the war, as reprinted in Mission to Freedom.

Though he had been a campus Marxist leader in the late '60s, and had written his senior thesis on the nihilistic intellectual Franz Fanon, clearly Museveni's worldview had changed in the intervening decade -- probably from the experience of watching the dictatorship of Amin in action. Museveni's writings in Mission to Freedom deal chiefly with military and political affairs, but he also condemns tribalism and "backwardness," and emphasizes "the rule of law" and "economic revitalization."

If he were an American academic, the Museveni of Mission to Freedom would be right at home at a Cato, AEI or Heritage seminar. As I was reading this book, I had the distinct impression that at some point Museveni had spent part of his exile reading Hayek.

Museveni & Uganda today

Uganda's gross domestic product ranks 13th in Africa, although a good bit lower (24th among 59 African nations) when calculated on a per-capita basis. However, considering that it is a relatively small landlocked country, considering that it has only recently suppressed the terrorist depradations of Joseph Kony, and considering that its northern neighbor Sudan has been embroiled in civil war so long, Uganda's economic situation is very good.

Uganda's economic situation is especially good if you keep in mind the historic context: First, the socialist insanity of the Obote regime, then the barbaric despotism of Amin, and then the five-year guerrilla war that brought Museveni to power in 1986. Recovering from such a history takes a long time. Even if Uganda's per-capita GDP of $1,800 a year doesn't sound impressive (although it's double the per-capita GDP of neighboring Tanzania), the country has obviously made great strides, and the stability of Museveni's government is a big reason for that.

Politically, Museveni's government has held true to its declaration during its "resistance" years, seeking to eliminate "backwardness" and discourage tribalism.

Like many of my conservative friends in America, I understand tribalism as being in some sense intrinsic to the human experience, and I suspect some of my America friends will look askance at the phrase "discourage tribalism." Trust me, friends: What the Ugandan government is doing is perfectly Burkean. I'd need 5,000 words to explain it, but it's a good thing.

I could (and eventually plan to) write a lot more about Museveni's policies, but it's getting late, so let me just give you one brilliant example. This is a photo I took of a roadside sign near downtown Kampala put up by the Uganda election commission:

"For Democracy, Reject Ignorance: Listen, Analyze and Choose." I don't know about you, but I'd sure like to see some signs like that in America.

Finally, to any of my American friends who might wish to visit Uganda, let me offer some travel advice:

• Fly British Airways. They're the best, and you'll just love listening to the crew speak with those cool Brit accents.
• Don't get freaked out by all the recommended vaccinations. Get the shots, but don't get the idea that you're heading to a rendezvous with certain death. Also, beware of medication interactions. About four or five days into my trip, I stopped taking my anti-malaria medicine because of the weird side effects.
• Also, don't get freaked out by the "traveler's advisories" from the State Department. The U.S. State Department is evidently run by a bunch of neuraesthenic, agoraphobic, hypochondriac scaredy-cats who get paid to convey the official U.S. government position that a trip to Uganda is a rendezvous with certain death.
• After arrival at Entebbe Airport, take the shuttle bus to the Kampala Serena Hotel. It's a five-star resort, located adjacent to the central government offices in downtown Kampala, and thus within a security perimeter similar to what you'd find at the White House or the Capitol. It's $375 a night, but wait until you see the fabulous gardens, the beautiful swimming pool with its dramatic waterfall, the poolside cafe, the dinner buffet, et cetera. We visited the Serena mainly to use their business center and Wi-fi service, but I also got a bit of leisure relaxation time there. It's excellent.
• Of course, smart travelers know never to drink tap water or any beverage with ice in a foreign country. The bottled water in Uganda is fine (Perrier is available), but if you prefer stronger beverages, allow me to recommend Bell Lager, a fine Ugandan beer.
• For shopping, I recommend the Garden City Mall in downtown Kampala -- it's the only mall I've ever seen that also includes a casino. I didn't visit the casino, but I did visit an ice cream shop, clothing store, grocery store and Internet cafe at the mall. Internet service in Uganda is much slower than what I used to in the States, but the Internet cafe at the mall had a connection as fast as the one in the business center at the Serena Hotel, for a lower cost.
• Your first day in Uganda, study the currency and exchange rate, so (a) you've got some idea what things actually cost, and (b) you'll be able to properly tip waiters, bellhops, etc. You will find that if you make a point of learning the name of your waiter your first day at the place, and give him a healthy tip (i.e., 20%), your service on all subsequent nights will be excellent. (Of course, this is true wherever you travel; I'm just pointing out that this principle applies in Africa, too.)