Who and What is "The Lord's Resistance Army"?

Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord's Resistance

The Lord's Resistance Army (also Lord's Resistance Movement or Lakwena Part Two) is a sectarian religious and military group, which operates in northern Uganda and South Sudan.

The LRA was formed in 1987 and until about 2007 it was engaged in an armed rebellion against the Ugandan government. It is led by Joseph Kony, who proclaims himself the "spokesperson" of God and a spirit medium, primarily of the Holy Spirit, which the group believe can represent itself in many manifestations.

The group is based on a number of different beliefs including local religious rituals, mysticism, traditional religion, Acholi nationalism and Christianity and claims to be establishing a theocratic state based on the Ten Commandments and local Acholi tradition.

The LRA is accused of widespread human rights violations, including murder, abduction, mutilation, sexual enslavement of women and children and forcing children to participate in hostilities.

The group used to operate mainly in northern Uganda and also in parts of South Sudan, Central African Republic and DR Congo. The LRA is currently listed as a terrorist organization by the United States.

In 1988, Alice Lakwena established the Holy Spirit Movement, a resistance movement claimed to be inspired by the Holy Spirit of God. She portrayed herself as a prophet who received messages from the Holy Spirit of God. She believed that the Acholi could defeat the government run by Museveni by casting off witchcraft and spiritualism embedded in their culture. According to her messages from God, her followers should cover their bodies with shea nut oil as protection from bullets, never take cover or retreat in battle, and never kill snakes or bees.

Joseph Kony would later preach a similar superstition encouraging soldiers to use oil to draw a cross on their chest as a protection from bullets. During an interview with Jimmie Briggs, Alice Lakwena distanced herself from Kony, claiming that the spirit doesn’t want them to kill civilians or prisoners of war. Meanwhile, Kony gained a reputation as having been possessed by spirits. He became a spiritual figure or a medium. Lakwena scored several key victories on the battlefield and began a march towards Kampala. Kony seized this opportunity to recruit members of the Ugandan People's Democratic Army (UPDA) and Holy Spirit remnants. In 1988, when Lakwena was defeated in Jinja and fled to Kenya, Kony became the leader of the Holy Spirit Mobile Force II some years later.

At times the Ugandan government army has also committed atrocities, which has benefited Kony's credibility. The government has also recruited children in the army, and its army has been accused of mass rapes both in Uganda and in Congo.

According to UPDF spokesman Lt. Col. Shaban Bantariza, mediation efforts by the Carter Center and the Pope have been spurned by Kony.

The LRA's ideology is disputed amongst academics. Although the LRA has been regarded primarily as a Christian militia,the LRA reportedly evokes Acholi nationalism on occasion, but the sincerity of this behaviour and the loyalty of Kony to either ideology is considered extremely dubious by many observers.

Robert Gersony, in a report funded by United States Embassy in Kampala in 1997, concluded that "the LRA has no political program or ideology, at least none that the local population has heard or can understand." The International Crisis Group has stated that "the LRA is not motivated by any identifiable political agenda, and its military strategy and tactics reflect this."

IRIN comments that "the LRA remains one of the least understood rebel movements in the world, and its ideology, as far as it has one, is difficult to understand." UPDF Lt. Col. Shaban Bantariza has said that "you can't tell whether they want political power. Its only aim is to terrorize and brutalize the civilian population and to loot their homes."
During an interview with IRIN, Vincent Otti was asked about the LRA's vision of an ideal government, to which he responded

"Lord’s Resistance Army is just the name of the movement, because we are fighting in the name of God. God is the one helping us in the bush. That’s why we created this name, Lord’s Resistance Army. And people always ask us, are we fighting for the [biblical] Ten Commandments of God. That is true – because the Ten Commandments of God is the constitution that God has given to the people of the world. All people. If you go to the constitution, nobody will accept people who steal, nobody could accept to go and take somebody’s wife, nobody could accept to innocently kill, or whatever. The Ten Commandments carries all this.

In a speech delivered by James Alfred Obita, former Secretary For External Affairs And Mobilisation, and Leader of Delegation of the Lord's Resistance Army, he adamantly denied that the LRA was "just an Acholi thing" and stated that claims made by the media and Museveni administration asserting that the LRA is a "group of Christian fundamentalists with bizarre beliefs whose aim is to topple the Museveni regime and replace it with governance based on the Bible's ten commandments" were false.

In the same speech, Obita also stated that the LRA's objectives are:
1.To remove dictatorship and stop the oppression of our people.
2.To fight for the immediate restoration of competitive multi-party democracy in Uganda.
3.To see an end to gross violation of human rights and dignity of Ugandans.
4.To ensure the restoration of peace and security in Uganda.
5.To ensure unity, sovereignty and economic prosperity beneficial to all Ugandans
6.To bring to an end to the repressive policy of deliberate marginalization of groups of people who may not agree with the NRA ideology.
The government of Uganda claims that the LRA has only 500 or 1,000 soldiers in total, but other sources estimate that there could be as many as 3,000 soldiers, along with about 1,500 women and children. The bulk of the soldiers fighting for the LRA are children. According to Livingstone Sewanyana, executive director of the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative, Yoweri Museveni was the first to use child soldiers in this conflict.since the LRA first started fighting in 1987 they may have forced well over 10,000 boys and girls into combat, often killing family, neighbors and school teachers in the process.

Many of these children were put on the front lines so the casualty rate for these children has been high. They have often used children to fight because they are easy to replace by raiding schools or villages. The soldiers are organized into independent brigades of 10 or 20 soldiers. Sudan has provided military assistance to the LRA, in response to Uganda lending military support to the Sudan People's Liberation Army.
In May 2009, U.S. President Obama signed into law the Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act, legislation aimed at stopping Joseph Kony and the LRA. The bill passed unanimously in the Senate on March 11, 2010 with 65 Senators as cosponsors, then passed unanimously in the House of Representatives on May 13, 2010 with 202 Representatives as cosponsors. On November 24, President Obama delivered the strategy to disarm Joseph Kony and the LRA.
Since the United States diplomatic cables leak began on 28 November 2010, when the website WikiLeaks started to publish classified documents of detailed correspondence between the U.S. State Department and its diplomatic missions around the world, releasing further documents every day, we have learned that, "Sudan's neighbor, Uganda, blames Khartoum for paying and harboring Ugandan rebel Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a brutal rebel group that has waged the longest-running insurgency in Africa. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni told U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Jendayi Frazer in September 2007 that `Sudan, Sudan, Sudan, Sudan' was behind the rebellion's longevity. `[Museveni] said that even if the Khartoum Government could not supply the LRA at previous levels, he believed it was in constant touch with the LRA and smuggling supplies.'"

On October 14, 2011, President Obama announced he was sending about 100 U.S. troops to Africa to help hunt down the leaders of the LRA.
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Purely by coincidence the movie'Machine Gun Preacher' ~ a Film about an American who fought Kony to Free Abducted Children in Uganda & Sudan was released earlier this month.(UNAATimes).

Machine Gun Preacher is the inspirational true story of Sam Childers, a former drug-dealing criminal who undergoes an astonishing transformation and finds an unexpected calling as the savior of hundreds of kidnapped and orphaned children.
Gerard Butler (300) delivers a searing performance as Childers, the impassioned founder of the Angels of East Africa rescue organization in Golden Globe-nominated director Marc Forster’s (Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland) moving story of violence and redemption. When ex-biker-gang member Sam Childers (Butler) makes the life-changing decision to go to East Africa to help repair homes destroyed by civil war, he is outraged by the unspeakable horrors faced by the region’s vulnerable populace, especially the children.

Ignoring the warnings of more experienced aide workers, Sam breaks ground for an orphanage where it’s most needed–in the middle of territory controlled by the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a renegade militia that forces youngsters to become soldiers before they even reach their teens. But for Sam, it is not enough to shelter the LRA’s intended victims. Determined to save as many as possible, he leads armed missions deep into enemy territory to retrieve kidnapped children, restoring peace to their lives–and eventually his own.

The explosive, real-life tale of a man who has rescued over a thousand orphans from starvation, disease and enslavement, Machine Gun Preacher also stars Michelle Monaghan (Due Date), Kathy Baker (Cold Mountain), Madeline Carroll (Mr. Popper’s Penguins), Academy Award(R) nominated Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road) and Souleymane Sy Savane (“Damages”).