LRA Truce

lly bowing to pressure and reaching some sort of compromise with a terrorist organisation, and that’s the way it’s usually presented. Like the British government and the IRA, for instance. But really, there’s no comparison. Although the LRA’s Joseph Kony adopts the language of the freedom fighter – as in this interview with the BBC – he has no realistic demands in terms of, say, independence for the Acholi people of Northern Uganda. He is, basically, a religious maniac of the most despicable kind, whose vision, as far as one can make any sense of it, is some kind of warped Biblical millenarianism. To achieve his ends he’s tortured raped and murdered his way through Northern Uganda and Southern Sudan, backed, in the days of the Sudanese civil war, by the government in Khartoum. His preferred method is the abduction of young children, who are then brutalised, often by forcing them to kill – perhaps even their own parents – and who then become sex slaves to the older LRA troops.

That Uganda’s president Museveni isn’t exactly Nelson Mandela, or that Ugandan troops, in their efforts against the LRA over the last 20 years, haven’t always acted with the decorum one might hope for in the forces of law and order, shouldn’t detract for a moment from the fact that there is only one side in this war which has any legitimacy whatsoever. On the one hand there’s a (reasonably) democratic government, on the other there’s a brutal psychopathic maniac. There should really be only one end to this story: the trial of Joseph Koby and his crew for crimes against humanity.