Violence and Viruses: How a Poorly Armed Insurgency in the Congo Poses a Global Threat

Andrew McGregor

Terrorism Monitor

November 2, 2018

Angry locals filled the streets of the Congo’s Nord Kivu province town of Beni on October 21, torching the post office, destroying parts of the town hall and throwing stones at vehicles belonging to health workers fighting a deadly outbreak of the Ebola virus. Eventually driven off by tear gas and live ammunition fired into the air, the demonstrators were enraged by the inability of Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) troops and UN peacekeepers to prevent yet another terrorist strike in the town that saw 11 people hacked to death and 15 others (including children) abducted by militants of the Allied Democratic Front (ADF) (Radio Okapi [Kinshasa], October 21; AFP, October 22, 2018).

Nord Kivu province borders Uganda and Rwanda to the east and has absorbed defeated militant groups from both countries. Scores of armed groups are active in the region now despite the presence of large numbers of UN peacekeepers and troops of the Forces armées de la république démocratique du Congo (FARDC – Armed Forces of the DRC).

After two decades of ADF activity in the Uganda-DRC border region, ADF operations are now centered round the Nord Kivu town of Beni, a hub for regional trade routes. Beni is close to Virunga National Park, the Ituri Forest and the Rwenzori Mountains, all used at some point as bases for ADF activities. The region is rich in gold, tin, timber and diamonds.

The Allied Democratic Forces

The ADF has its roots in the Ugandan chapter of the Tabliqi Jama’at, an Islamic revival movement which began to claim political persecution in the 1990s. Many of the jama’at’s members left Kampala for the wild Rwenzori Mountains of western Uganda, where they formed the ADF by allying themselves with remnants of the Rwenzori separatist movement, fugitive Idi Amin loyalists and the National Army for the Liberation of Uganda (NALU), a group drawn from the Nande ethnic group of the Rwenzori Mountains. Today, most ADF members are locally recruited residents of Nord Kivu.

The ADF’s leader, Jamil Mukulu, was arrested in Tanzania in April 2015 and extradited to Uganda. When he was arrested, Mukulu was carrying no less than nine passports (Le Monde, May 15). Mukulu is a convert from Christianity who became involved in the Tablighi Jama’at and eventually adopted a Salafi-Jihadist stance with alleged ties to al-Qaeda (The Independent [Kampala], May 17, 2015).

The ADF was able to obtain Sudanese arms and training during the proxy war fought between Khartoum and Kampala, but this came to an end when the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement with South Sudan brought a finish to the proxy war.

The ADF has a low-profile and highly isolated leadership. Mukulu’s successor as leader of the main ADF faction is believed to be Imam Seka Musa Baluku, the subject of an Interpol red notice (Daily Monitor [Kampala], September 24, 2015). As the prospect of ever actually overthrowing the Ugandan government grows ever more distant, the movement has splintered, losing any sense of ideological cohesion in favor of extortion, illegal taxation and resource exploitation.

The ADF resents interference in it local economic operations; a 2014 statement made their approach clear:

You, the population, we are going to kill you because you have provoked us too much. The same goes for the FARDC with whom we used to live without any problems…  Don’t be surprised to see us killing children, women, elderly… In the name of Allah, we will not leave you alone.” [1]

Other ADF factions include the Feza Group (more religiously inclined than the others), the Matata Group, the Abialose Group (commanded by “Major” Efumba) and the ADF-Mwalika. [2] Factional leaders have often married the daughters of local chieftains to strengthen local ties.

The Uganda Peoples’ Defence Force (UPDF) succeeded in expelling the ADF from Uganda in 1999 and the rebels re-established themselves across the border in the DRC’s lightly governed but resource rich Nord Kivu province. The ADF has posed little threat to Uganda since suffering heavy losses in battles with the UPDF in 2007-2008.

The situation in Nord Kivu, however, is different. Some 700 civilians have been killed by the ADF since violence intensified in the region in October 2014 (Le Monde, September 9). Well over 200 civilians have been killed by armed groups in over 100 attacks in the region around Beni this year. [3] Hundreds of thousands have been displaced. The poorly-armed ADF typically relies on the use of machetes and axes in its attacks on civilian population centers and relies on raids on military bases to obtain more advanced weapons. Fighters often abduct civilians and take them to their bases in the bush for use as sex slaves or porters. Children are trained to become ADF fighters. Women and children participate in ADF attacks, looting and finishing off wounded victims, including other women and children. [4]

Jamil Mukulu used to issue cassette tapes to condemn Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni and the leaders of the West while urging violence against non-Muslims. Since his detention, the movement has drifted from jihadist rhetoric, or, indeed, any rhetoric at all, making its current aims something of a mystery.

FARDC Troops Targeting ADF Positions

MONUSCO and the ADF

The UN’s Mission de l’Organisation des Nations unies pour la stabilisation en République démocratique du Congo (MONUSCO) was founded in 1999-2000. It is now the UN’s largest peacekeeping mission, with 17,000 troops and an annual budget of $115 billion. [5] The ADF, who travel light and known the difficult terrain intimately, have proven far more mobile than MONUSCO forces.

Fifteen Tanzanian peacekeepers and five Congolese troops were killed at Semuliki in the Beni region in a December 2017 ADF attack (Reuters, January 13).  The assault followed earlier attacks on the Tanzanians in September and October2017. A UN investigation of the incident identified a number of weaknesses in MONUSCO: “The mission did not have an actionable contingency plan to reinforce and extract its peacekeepers… Issues of command-and-control, leadership and lack of essential enablers such as aviation, engineers and intelligence were also major obstacles and need to be addressed urgently” (Reuters, March 2).

The UPDF claimed to have killed over 100 ADF fighters in cross-border artillery and jet-fighter strikes (Operation Tuugo)  on ADF positions following the attack on the peacekeepers (New Vision [Kampala], December 22, 2017; Observer [Kampala], December 28, 2017). Uganda is suffering a wave of assassinations and murders mostly tied to local tensions, though Museveni (without evidence) has blamed the ADF for many of the killings, including those of seven Muslim shaykhs between 2012 and 2016. He has also blamed the DRC and the UN for harboring and supporting ADF terrorists (AfricaNews, June 6).

Insurgency and Disease

Ebola is a viral hemorrhagic fever with an extremely high fatality rate. The virus is spread through contact with the infected bodily fluids of people or primates (the latter is known as “bushmeat” by those who eat it, including ADF militants). Ebola emerged in the DRC in the 1970s and has since killed thousands across West Africa.

Nord Kivu Health Workers (AFP)

The epidemic was announced on August 1, shortly after an Ebola outbreak in the DRC’s Equateur Province. The epidemic might have been detected earlier, but local health workers were on strike after not having been paid for seven months (Actualité.cd [Kinshasa, August 2).

Though health officials have initiated a vaccination program, there are other factors besides the conflict that inhibit its implementation, including the region’s often difficult topography and a strong degree of resistance to vaccination in some communities, resulting in flight into the forest where health workers cannot reach them.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned the virus could spread to Uganda and/or Rwanda at any time. In a worrying trend, the organization notes the 19 health workers who caught the disease by October 11 had all been infected outside health facilities, pointing to Ebola’s spread in the larger community (Al-Jazeera, October 11).

In August, seven people were reported to be suffering from hemorrhagic fevers at Mboki, a village in the heavily forested southern region of the Central African Republic, close to the border with the DRC. The lightly inhabited area is frequented by a number of armed groups who often rely on bushmeat. Tests done on rebels arrested in the DRC and extradited to the CAR revealed 80 per cent of them had Ebola antibodies in their system, suggesting both contact with the disease and their potential role as transmission vectors. Emmanuel Nakoune Yandoko, head of the CAR’s Pasteur Institute, has met with leaders of some of these cross-border militant groups and believes they could be usefully integrated into a disease surveillance system as they also fear Ebola and other fatal diseases in the region (Le Monde, August 17).

A recent OXFAM report identified several challenges to combating Ebola in Nord Kivu, including:

  • The need to change culturally-entrenched burial practices to reduce infection; Attempts by health workers to take over the burial of Ebola victims provoked attacks on them, forcing security forces to accompany health workers on such missions (Al-Jazeera, October 10).
  • The need to solve the puzzle of how to provide security for health-workers in a conflict zone while using as few FARDC and UN troops as possible in order not to provoke local flight into the forest;
  • Establishing health education programs in remote communities where Ebola is often ascribed to witchcraft;
  • Given the security situation, it is important to avoid gathering civilians in large numbers for vaccinations or other distributions.

The threat to health workers is serious; two nurses were killed on October 19 and there are three to four attacks a week against medical personnel fighting the virus. Many experience being stripped by the people they are trying to help and having their clothes burned in front of them (Radio Okapi [Kinshasa], October 23).

On September 23, 18 people and four soldiers were killed in the streets of Beni. Most were the victims of machete attacks in an incident that again revealed the inability of the Congolese Army to secure even Beni’s urban center against the ADF, which looted shops until FARDC reinforcements arrived (AFP, September 24, Anadolu Agency, September 23). This attack and a second one on Oicha, a village about 12 miles north of Beni where Ebola cases have been identified, led to a 48-hour suspension in efforts to treat the spreading disease (AFP, September 25). FARDC and MONUSCO troops, who arrived well after the Oicha attack despite being based just outside the town, were met by stone-throwing civilians (AFP, October 11). In July 2016, 19 people were slaughtered only 300 meters from a Nepalese MONUSCO base at Eringeti despite an informant warning MONUSCO officers of the attack the day before (Le Monde, July 1, 2016).

FARDC Weakness and the Role of the UPDF

FARDC is far from a cohesive entity, being composed of both integrated and non-integrated former rebel factions with different languages and customs. President Kabila, who regards his army as a potential threat, relies for his own personal security on the three brigades of the Garde Républicaine. Pay problems are endemic and encourage trade and economic cooperation with the rebel movements they are intended to fight. There is little incentive to venture into the bush without remuneration.

With ADF militants wearing FARDC uniforms and operating with apparent immunity at times, there are major suspicions locally of FARDC corruption and collusion in the attacks. There is growing anger in the region at the military’s inability or unwillingness to bring armed groups under control. Locals arrested as suspected insurgents are often subject to summary executions. Many of the FARDC units operating in Kivu region are from western provinces of the DRC and tend to behave more as an occupation force than defenders of Kivu civilians.

General Marcel Mbangu

Led by General Marcel Mbangu, FARDC launched its own anti-ADF operations independent of MONUSCO in January. Though the military promised a conclusive campaign, local residents have noted lethargy and inefficiency in FARDC’s efforts, which often appear to be focused on self-preservation rather than protecting the community. [6] Belief in collaboration between the two supposed antagonists is strong enough that locals refer to “the ADF FARDC” (Le Monde, March 6, 2017). Both FARDC and MONUSCO suffer from poor intelligence work due to the suspicion and fears of the Nord Kivu community.

Military cooperation between FARDC and the UPDF is limited to a UPDF presence on the border to prevent ADF militants from escaping Congolese operations. A Ugandan presence in the DRC is unwanted in Kinshasha, as tensions between the two countries have remained high since the 1998-2003 civil war.

Brigadier General Muhindo Akili Mundos

Brigadier General Muhindo Akili Mundos, an ally of President Joseph Kabila and commander of the anti-ADF Sukola 1 (Lingala – “cleanup”) operation, was alleged by a confidential UN report to have recruited, financed and armed ADF elements and others to carry out attacks on local civilians over 2014-2015. Included in the supplies were FARDC uniforms. The Brigadier denied the allegations, pointing out killings had continued after his transfer from North Kivu (Reuters, May 14, 2016). The UN imposed sanctions on General Mundos in February on the grounds he had incited killings in Nord Kivu (Jeune Afrique, February 2).

Other FARDC officers suspected of working with the ADF have been tried by the North Kivu Military Operational Military Court. Colonel David Lusenge was tried on charges of supplying arms and ammunition to the ADF, as well as participating in the planning of attacks on Beni civilians (Radio Okapi [Kinshasa], February 15, 2017). A former senior ADF military instructor testified that Colonel Shabani Molisho and other FARDC officers supplied the ADF with ammunition in 2014 (Radio Okapi [Kinshasa], February 11, 2017). Colonel Katanzu Hangi was sentenced to 12 month in prison after being found guilty of collaborating with the ADF (Radio Okapi [Kinshasa], June 6, 2017). Though three colonels were eventually convicted, there was a marked reluctance by the court to pursue allegations against more senior officers.

Conclusion

Over the last decade, the ADF leadership has avoided any public proclamation of their aims or intents, expressing themselves solely through their direction of uninhibited violence. The last negotiations with the ADF came in 2008, but were even then complicated by divisions within the movement.

Growing public anger in Nord Kivu with the government and its security forces works against local cooperation with health workers or the Congolese military. President Joseph Kabila’s term expired last December, but his refusal to step down has ignited violence across the vast DRC, taxing the resources of both FARDC and the UN. With little chance of a negotiated settlement or a military victory in Nord Kivu, the international community must address the question of how to tackle epidemics of disease in failed or failing states before they spread across borders in a shrinking world.

Notes

  1. Report of the United Nations Joint Human Rights Office on International Humanitarian Law Violations Committed by Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) Combatants in the Territory of Beni, North Kivu Province, Between 1 October and 31 December, 2014, https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/CD/ReportMonusco_OHCHR_May2015_EN.pdf
  2. United Nations Security Council, “Letter dated 23 May 2016 from the Group of Experts on the Democratic Republic of the Congo addressed to the President of the Security Council, May 23, 2016, http://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=S/2016/466
  3. “DR Congo: Upsurge in Killings in Ebola Zone,” Human Rights Watch, October 3, 2018, https://reliefweb.int/report/democratic-republic-congo/dr-congo-upsurge-killings-ebola-zone
  4. Report of the United Nations Joint Human Rights Office, op cit.
  5. https://monusco.unmissions.org/en/facts-and-figures
  6. “DR Congo: Upsurge in Killings in Ebola Zone,” op cit.

 

This article first appeared in the November 2, 2018 issue of the Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor.

Designed to Fail: The Congolese Army’s Sham Offensive against FDLR Rebels

Andrew McGregor

From Tips and Trends: The AIS African Security Report

Aberfoyle International Security, April 2015

 Despite positive reports from the Ministry of Defence, the Congolese Army’s offensive against Hutu rebels of the Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR) in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is yielding little in the way of tangible results.

FDLR 1FARDC Tank on Operations in the Eastern Congo

Operation Sokolo II was launched in South Kivu province on February 24, 2015, with the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC) deploying troops into the highlands of South Kivu near Uvira. Further deployments were made in North Kivu two days later. FARDC forces carrying out the offensive consist of three regiments with a total strength of approximately 7500 men. So far, the campaign has resulted in the death of only 13 FDLR insurgents, while a recent FDLR ambush in North Kivu killed ten Congolese soldiers, including two colonels (Reuters, April 8, 2015).

FARDC’s command has reported the capture of several dozen villages, but in many places in North Kivu there is no apparent movement by the Congolese army and unit commanders in the region have not received orders to engage the rebels (Reuters, March 22, 2015). Despite inflicting a small number of casualties on FDLR personnel, all indications suggest that most of the movement has melted into the region’s dense forests to outwait the offensive, knowing that FARDC is incapable of a prolonged field operation and has failed to arrange for sufficient numbers of troops to occupy those towns taken from the FDLR. Already there are reports that FARDC is forced to withdraw to larger centers at night, leaving FDLR the freedom to resupply themselves by night and remind locals of where true power lies in the region (Reuters, March 22, 2015).

Operation Sokolo II was intended to be a joint effort between FARDC and better equipped UN peacekeepers operating in the Congo, but the DRC government’s insistence that two Congolese generals suspected of various war crimes be included in the operation’s command structure led to a UN decision to withdraw from the offensive.

The FDLR

The FDLR was formed in September 2000 from the remains of earlier Hutu militant movements, including the Interahamwe organization responsible for the 1994 genocide of Rwandan Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus. By this point, twenty years later, few members of the FDLR outside the leadership played any role in the Rwandan genocide. As of December 2009, Major General Sylvestre Mudacumara was the FDLR’s overall military commander. Mudacumara, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes, has a rival within the leadership in Victor Byiringiro, who has a greater interest in a political resolution with Rwanda (African Arguments, March 2, 2015).

Based in North Kivu, the FDLR cannot easily be brought to battle – it typically chooses a time and place of its own, prefers guerrilla-style strikes to conventional tactics and is highly integrated with the local population. Congolese Chief of General Staff of the Army, General Didier Etumba, estimates the FDLR’s strength as consisting of a maximum of 1400 fighters (Radio Okapi [Kinshasha], January 29, 2015).  A recent report from the Enough Project summed up the strategy used by the FDLR:

The FDLR’s current strategy is consistent with its long-time pattern of responding to military pressure. In this pattern, the group promises to disarm and reiterates its political aspirations for recognition as a Rwandan opposition group. The FDLR then uses any reprieve to regroup by building military alliances and increasing economic activity and recruitment. [1]

The FDLR has been relatively inactive in the last year, though keeping a low profile might be part of an effort to avoid the fate of the rebel M-23 organization (a.k.a. the Revolutionary Army of the Congo), which was eliminated by joint FARDC-MONUSCO operation in November 2013. Under an agreement supervised by regional organizations (including the International Conference for the Great Lakes Region and the Community of States of Southern Africa), the FDLR had pledged to conduct a voluntary demobilization and disarmament by January 2, 2015, but the small number of old and sick men who surrendered and the insignificant number of weapons that came with them was judged insufficient to mark compliance, thus opening the way for offensive operations against the remainder of the movement.

FDLR 2The Kivu region is rich in gold and minerals used in consumer electronics such as wolframite, coltan and cassiterite, though the 2012 implementation of the U.S. Dodd-Frank Act has made it more difficult for rebel groups to profit from the sale of the last three minerals (gold is nearly untraceable and finds ready buyers everywhere) (Mail & Guardian [Johannesburg], November 18, 2014).  However, like al-Shabaab in Somalia, the FDLR has turned to the environmentally harmful but lucrative charcoal trade as its greatest source of financing.

In the midst of the offensive, Major Zitunga Seraphin, the FDLR’s spokesman for international affairs, told a gathering of journalists that his movement has several demands for the FDLR’s peaceful return to Rwanda. These included justice for all Rwandan citizens and a willingness by the international community to look beyond the crimes of the Hutu to recognize those crimes allegedly committed by Rwanda’s ruling party, the Front Patriotique Rwandais (FPR) (La Rédaction [Kinshasha], March 6, 2015).

MONUSCO

On March 26, the UN Security Council voted to extend the mandate of the Mission de l’Organisation des Nations unies pour la stabilisation en République démocratique du Congo (MONUSCO – United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo) to March 31, 2016. The mission began its work in the DRC in 1999.

India is the largest contributor of the 30 nations that have sent troops to the 20,000 man MONUSCO force; other leading contributors include Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Egypt, Pakistan, South Africa, Tanzania and Uruguay.  Indian troops have been accused of abuses towards the civilian population as well as conducting illicit commercial exchanges with the FDLR. MONUSCO’s most capable component is its Force Intervention Brigade (FIB), formed by 3,000 elite troops from Tanzania, Malawi and South Africa. It is likely that the FIB’s impending deployment against the FDLR prompted that group’s sham surrender prior to the January 2, 2015 deadline as a means of buying time or discouraging an offensive by UN units. MONUSCO forces in the Congo come under the military command of Brazilian General Carlos Alberto dos Santo Cruz.

UN support for a successful operation is indispensable to the logistics and transport-challenged FARDC forces, as is MONUSCO’s ability to provide surveillance from drones and tactical support from South African Rooivalk attack helicopters. Without such support, even unilateral successes by FARDC will ultimately prove unsustainable in the medium to long-term. The Congolese government has suggested that MONUSCO can run its own operation against the FDLR if it wishes.

FARDC

The Congolese Army consists of 14 brigades of fighters from various pro and anti-government factions that were integrated into the regular army after undoing a process known as brassage (“mixing”).

As in many African countries, the DRC’s regular forces are ill-paid and poorly supplied, with available resources devoted mainly to the Republican Guard (personally loyal to the president) to deter efforts at mounting a military coup d’état. Indiscipline and poor maintenance of arms and equipment are among FARDC’s weaknesses. Logistics is an especially weak component of the FARDC, so the more efficient logistical services of the UN mission will be well missed as the Congolese troops move further into the contested regions of North and South Kivu.

There are many FARDC officers for whom the elimination of the FDLR would mark the end of a profitable collaboration based on poaching, ivory, timber, cannabis (chanvre) and the illegal extraction of gold and other minerals from the Kivu region. Arms and intelligence have in turn flowed from FARDC to the Hutu rebels. According to a MONUSCO report to UN headquarters in New York, the FDLR makes over $70 million annually by doing business with FARDC commanders and implementing illegal taxation. According to the report, the wives of senior FARDC officers acted as trading agents, while their husbands handled the transport of goods in and out of the region (News of Rwanda [Kigali], August 28, 2014; Mail & Guardian [Johannesburg], November 18, 2014). It should be noted that the contacts that ultimately led to such collaboration were forged when the weak Congolese Army was compelled to seek allies in the border region in the face of repeated Rwandan incursions

Collaboration with the FDLR and other rebel movements in the Kivu region goes to the highest ranks of the Congolese Army. Major General Gabriel Amisi Kumba (a.k.a. Tango-Four) recently returned to duty after serving a two-year suspension that followed charges he was selling arms to militant groups in the eastern DRC (Radio Okapi [Kinshasha], August 6, 2014). General Amisi’s rehabilitation has taken place despite further charges that he oversaw the Kinsangani massacre of 2002 and later withdrew a superior FARDC force from the eastern city of Goma in November 2012, allowing the much smaller rebel M-23 movement to take the strategic city without a fight. [2]

Much of the military’s poor performance in northeast Congo to date has been due to the failure of officials in Kinshasha to see that the troops are paid on a regular basis. In 2009, the Rwandan military cooperated with FARDC in an offensive targeting the FDLR inside the Congo. Operation Umoja Wetu (“Our Unity”) was judged a partial success, but left 900,000 people displaced and 1,000 dead. According to Zeno Mutimara, the chairman of the Rwandan Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, MONUSCO has done nothing since it arrived in the DRC. Mutimara suggested regional military cooperation (as in 2009) would produce better results than reliance on international peacekeepers: “Umoja Wetu is better than the idea that Monusco will do anything. The biggest threat of the FDLR is the spread of genocide ideology; we have to deal with that, we should take responsibility for our own issues” (New Times [Kigali], March 28, 2015).

Operation Sokolo II

Regarding the contentious participation of Congolese Generals Bruno Mandevu and Sikabwe Fall in the current operation, a UN spokesman maintained “the clear point is that in accordance with our human rights due diligence policy, we cannot extend the support if we believe that support will contribute to a course of action in which human rights will be violated” (Inner City Press, March 20, 2015). Nonetheless, despite allegations of war crimes, the two generals were given exemptions to the policy during earlier operations against the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). DRC officials maintain that they are not aware of human rights violations by the two generals and have not received documentation of such violations from the UN, even though the UN insists the exemptions could not be renewed due to the failure of Congolese authorities to investigate the allegations (Medafricatimes.com, February 24, 2015; Reuters, March 26, 2015). The allegations include crimes such as rape and summary executions. After the UN withdrew its support for the operation, DRC government spokesmen maintained that it had only chosen its best officers to lead the operation against the FDLR (BBC, March 11, 2015). DRC Information Minister Lambert Mende recently characterized the UN’s decision to withhold support as an “attempt to transform our country into a colony” (VOA, March 30, 2015).

Kinshasha’s attitude on the matter suggests a provocative intent; the Kabila government is seeking a cut of 6,000 troops from the 20,000 man force, effective immediately, followed by a complete withdrawal in the near future, possibly before Kabila seeks a third (and so far unconstitutional) presidential term in elections scheduled for November 2016. The UN Security Council responded on March 26 by agreeing to cut 2,000 troops from the force while renewing MONUSCO’s mandate to March 2016. Despite the lackluster performance of FARDC, the DRC’s Foreign Minister Raymond Tshibanda insists that his nation is ready to take “full responsibility for its own security” (AFP, March 26, 2015).

While the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan government appears determined to eliminate the threat from unreformed genocidaires, the presence of the FDLR and similar Hutu formations across the border justifies the ongoing political domination of Rwanda by its Tutsi minority (15% of the population) and the government’s use of anti-genocide laws to suppress dissent. Maintaining the status quo also prevents or at least postpones any power-sharing initiatives designed to re-integrate the Hutu refugee community living in the DRC. The continued existence of internal enemies like the FDLR provides Kinshasha a useful excuse for its mismanagement of the economy and the evaporation of state revenues by a deeply corrupt regime, though it also invites occasional sovereignty-threatening incursions by foreign militaries, especially that of Rwanda. In the meantime, Rwanda’s justice system has been aggressively pursuing prosecutions against dozens of individuals accused of facilitating the importation of arms into Rwanda for use by the FDLR, with sentences ranging from 10 years to life (Reuters, March 13, 2015).

FDLR rebels were spotted moving through South Kivu’s Itombwe forest on March 16, 2015 (Radio Okapi [Kinshasha], March 17, 2015). Elsewhere, FARDC has reported seizing a FDLR base in Virunga National Park (Medafricatimes, March 10), an environmentally important region of 7800 square kilometers that has suffered greatly from becoming a refuge for all manner of regional militant groups. Large swathes of the park’s forest disappear every day as militants turn wood to charcoal for sale in nearby markets.

The light resistance encountered by FARDC, its own minimal casualties, the relatively low number of civilians displaced by the current operation and FARDC’s apparent inability to draw the enemy to battle or eliminate or capture any of its command structure suggests that Operation Sokola II may be little more than a politically inspired exercise designed to demonstrate the DRC’s ability to mount a counter-insurgency operation on its own and thus encourage greater and faster drawdowns of MONUSCO personnel. The lack of resistance may indicate that the FDLR understands the operation’s sham nature, and thus merely has to wait it out before re-assuming control of the region and resuming the commercial operations that support it (likely including those carried out in cooperation with FARDC). Unfortunately, the reoccupation of villages now in the hand of FARDC will prove to be a disaster for their residents, who will inevitably be accused of cooperation with government forces regardless of their innocence.

Projections

Without UN support, there is a certain inevitability regarding the ultimate failure of FARDC’s campaign against deeply-rooted Hutu militants, though there are a number of possible scenarios:

  • The FDLR may be counted upon to do their best to avoid battle at this time. Kinshasha’s expectations of an early and complete withdrawal of UN forces works in the FDLR’s favor and would significantly reduce the military threat to the movement, which has settled somewhat comfortably in the North and South Kivu regions. Remaining in Kivu is a positive alternative to possible repercussions if members of the movement are expelled to Rwanda.
  • Despite best intentions on the part of both FARDC and the FDLR, there is always a significant danger of escalation whenever two bodies of undisciplined and heavily armed troops are operating in close proximity. Should Sokola II turn into a real battle with units of the FDLR or any of the other militant groups operating in the same region, there is the very real possibility of FARDC being embarrassed in the field through loss of ground and/or heavy casualties. If FARDC commanders conclude such losses are the result of insufficient support from the Kabila government, they might turn against Kabila, or at the very least oppose his future presidential aspirations.
  • While the UN has said it will remain in the DRC until successful operations have lowered the threat level to civilian populations, there may be those in the UN and its financial backers that will welcome the apparent snub from Kinshasha as proof there is little point in continuing to maintain the expensive peacekeeping mission in the Congo, currently the world’s largest.

Notes

  1. “How to Dismantle a Deadly Militia: Seven non-military tactics to help end the FDLR threat in the Congo,” The Enough Project, November 2014, http://www.enoughproject.org/files/FDLRReport-HowToDismantleADeadlyMilitia-EnoughProject-Nov2014.pdf
  2. Jean-Jacques Wondo Omanyundu: “Who’s who: Le Général Amisi ‘Tango Four,’ le boucher de l’Est du Congo,” Desc-Wondo, October 3, 2014, http://desc-wondo.org/whos-who-le-general-amisi-tango-four-le-boucher-du-kivu-jj-wondo/

 

New Offensive Expected against Mai-Mai Militias in Mineral-Rich Katanga

Andrew McGregor

April 3, 2014

With combined UN-Congolese Army operations meeting some success in their efforts to clear armed militant groups from the Nord-Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), it is almost certain that these forces will turn their attention next to the politically sensitive but mineral-rich southern province of Katanga, where rebel activity has destabilized the region while displacing hundreds of thousands of people. Most affected is a region in north Katanga between the towns of Manono, Mitwaba and Pweto known as “the Triangle of Death” (Radio Okapi [Kinshasa], March 28).

Martin Kobler, the head of the UN’s mission in the DRC, the Mission de l’Organisation des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en RD du Congo (MONUSCO), described the situation in the south as “a humanitarian catastrophe”: “I feel an element of guilt when I think of Katanga because we have concentrated our military activity on the [north and south] Kivus but it is important not to neglect Katanga” (Guardian, January 30).

Kuyunga Mutanga Gédéon

Much of the insecurity experienced in Katanga can be ascribed to two bush militias with shadowy connections to regional politicians, the Mai Mai Gédéon (led by Kyungu Mutanga Gédéon) and the Kata Katanga (Kiswahili for “cut Katanga off [from the DRC]”), led by Ferdinand Tanda Imena. The two movements are often conflated in media reports. Mai Mai groups are typically named after their commander (Bakata Katanga being an exception). “Mai Mai” is a term applied to a wide variety of militias that often have little in common other than a nominal emphasis on indigenous rights. The Mai Mai gather for large operations like the occupation of Lubumbashi, but usually operate in smaller groups, terrorizing villagers, looting food, engaging in mass rapes, killing village elders and combatting FARDC patrols (IRIN, February 7). Many Mai Mai groups have ties to officers of the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC) and some are known to wear FARDC uniforms that they doff during attacks, which they typically carry out naked. [1]

After terrorizing the Katangan countryside from October 2003 to May 2006, Gédéon surrendered to UN peacekeepers in May, 2006. In 2008, Gédéon claimed innocence when facing charges of war crimes, insurrection and murder before a military tribunal in Kipushi (35 kilometers southwest of Lubumbashi) (Radio Okapi [Kinshasa], February 20, 2008). Despite being sentenced to death in 2009, Gédéon was able to flee the Lubumbashi prison during a mass jail-break engineered by his followers that freed roughly 1,000 prisoners. Immediately after his escape, Gédéon formed the Mai Mai Gédéon and resumed his earlier campaign of rape, robbery and murder. Meanwhile, Bakata Katanga commander Ferdinand Tanda Imena was arrested by Zambian authorities in 2004 and transferred to Kinshasa, where he was eventually released.  Bakata Katanga is said to be responsible for two attacks on Katanga Airport in the last year (Radio Okapi [Kinshasa], January 14).

Both the Mai Mai Gédéon and the Bakata Katanga call for Katanga to secede from the DRC, but also condemn what they perceive as an unequal distribution of wealth between north Katanga and south Katanga, where the largest resource extraction operations are located. Cobalt, copper, tin and coltan (an important element in electronics) are all found in abundance in Katanga. A good part of the national budget relies on mineral exports from Katanga.

Katanga’s natural wealth led to a much earlier post-independence secession movement in 1960 that relied on Belgian military assistance and foreign mercenaries, quickly becoming part of the larger international Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union before the ultimate defeat of the secessionists in 1963. However, secessionist efforts were unpopular in parts of northern Katanga, where the local Baluba tribe was strongly divided over the issue.

Mai Mai Fighters in the DRC

President Joseph Kabila’s fortunes are very much tied to the stability and prosperity of Katanga, with much of the DRC’s political elite hailing from that province and having substantial business interests there. Kabila’s father, the late president Laurent-Désiré Kabila, was a member of an anti-secession Baluba militia in Katanga in his youth, having had a Baluba father. The Baluba, mostly from northern Katanga, had a long history of rebellion against Belgian authorities that saw many Baluba prisoners being sent as forced labor to the mines of southern Katanga. Historically and economically, Katanga has closer ties to nearby Zambia than the more distant regions of the northern DRC. Northern Katanga, the home of the Baluba, remains largely impoverished and undeveloped compared to the more prosperous southern half of Katanga.

The powerful Katangan politicians in Kinshasa used to be handled by presidential advisor Katumba Mwanke (from southern Katanga), but since his death in a 2011 accident, Kabila has encountered difficulties in managing this influential group, which has in turn become dissatisfied with the president’s inability to provide security in Katanga or sufficient electrical power to supply southern Katangan mining operations (Oxford Analytica, February 15, 2012). Unemployment caused by mine shutdowns or slowdowns only exacerbates the security problem as former workers take to the bush. There are persistent rumors that Gédéon’s Mai Mai and the Bakata Katanga are secretly backed by Katangan politicians, with the UN accusing former national police chief John Numbi of supplying arms to Bakata Katanga and allowing the movement to use his farm outside Lubumbashi as a base (IRIN, February 13). Kabila must also contend with Moïse Katumbi, the popular governor of Katanga, who makes a public show of support for the president but tends to run his own show in private.

Much of the anti-government anger in Katanga is related to Kabila’s failure to implement the decentralization elements of the 2006 federal constitution that call for the provinces of the DRC to retain 40% of mining revenues. The decentralization plan would also see Katanga divided into four smaller provinces. The proposed move, recently revived by Kabila, would ensure a flow of wealth to the Katangan south while ignoring the impoverished north. The decentralization plan has met with strong opposition from the Baluba of northern Katanga as well as the provincial governor, who also hails from northern Katanga.

On March 23, 2013, the Katangan capital of Lubumbashi was occupied by fighter from Bakata Katanga who raised the old flag of independent Katanga in the city’s main square. More embarrassing for Kinshasa was the composition of the force that so easily occupied the DRC’s second-largest city – a group of fewer than 300 fighters (some of them children) largely armed with machetes and bows and arrows and covered with charms and amulets to ward off bullets (AP, March 24, 2013; BBC August 11, 2013). After a battle with security forces that killed 35 people, the militants forced their way into a UN compound where 245 of them surrendered. Though the army had been able to defeat the militia in a relatively short time, the occupation nonetheless raised concerns in Katanga over the government’s ability to establish and maintain security in the region. MONUSCO presently maintains a 450-man brigade from Benin in Katanga, which was reinforced in 2013 by an Egyptian Special Forces unit. The Congolese army maintains only one battalion in the area, far from enough manpower to begin restoring order.

Lubumbashi was occupied again on January 26, this time by fighters belonging to Mai Mai Gédéon who were defeated after an eight-hour battle (BBC January 7, Reuters, January 7). Some 26 soldiers and rebels were killed before the militia was driven roughly 25 kilometers from the city

Amnesties and attempts at assimilating Mai Mai fighters into the FARDC often come to naught as the life of a soldier in the Congolese is not necessarily better than the life of a bush fighter. In many cases, the DRC has simply failed to provide demobilized fighters the promised means to return home or start new lives (IRIN, February 7). The customary brutality of the militias precludes the development of popular followings of any significance, leaving the groups with little other option than replacing losses through abductions of young people. Bakata Katanga has kidnapped hundreds of children, some as young as eight-years-old (al-Jazeera, August 17, 2013).

In one sense, the secession issue provides political cover to criminal groups like Kantanga’s Mai Mai militias, which otherwise have little in the way of a political ideology and do little to gather popular support as a legitimate secession movement might be expected to do. Though evidence has not been produced, there is a general feeling in the DRC that the Katangan militias are manipulated by local politicians to pressure the Kabila regime. Given the importance of Katanga both to the DRC’s economy and the personal political fortunes of President Kabila, it is likely that a major offensive will soon begin in the region involving FARDC forces backed by elements of the recently formed UN Intervention Brigade (IBDE), a capable group of 3,000 troops drawn from the militaries of Tanzania, Malawi and South Africa. This combined force may gather intelligence through the use of UN-owned drones currently deployed in Nord-Kivu province.

Note

1. “The Mai-Mai Lumumba: Okapi killers or self-defense forces?” September 6, 2012, http://congosiasa.blogspot.ca/2012/09/guest-blog-mai-mai-lumumba.html

This article first appeared in the April 3, 2014 issue of the Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor.

Congolese Forces Take the Offensive against Uganda’s ADF-NALU Militants

Andrew McGregor

March 20, 2014

Fresh from a victory over the rebel troops of the Mouvement du 23 Mars (M23) in the unsettled but resource-rich Nord-Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Congolese army has launched an offensive against the self-described “Islamists” of the Allied Democratic Forces-National Army for the Liberation of Uganda (ADF-NALU) who have operated in that region since 2004. [1] After several years of dormancy, ADF-NALU renewed operations in July 2013 with a wave of raids, kidnappings, massacres of civilians and attacks on security forces and UN peacekeepers. The once poorly-armed ADF-NALU militants appear to be newly supplied with machine-guns, mortars and rockets to replace their previous reliance on machetes and knives. According to the UN, M23’s defeat was followed by large-scale surrenders by thousands of members of various militant groups in the Nord-Kivu region, but few of these came from ADF-NALU (IRIN, January 27).

ADF-NALU Militants

Operation Sokola

The operation against ADF-NALU was intended to begin in December 2013, but was delayed after the intended leader of the campaign, Colonel Mamadou Moustafa Ndala, was killed by a rocket in an ambush originally attributed to ADF-NALU fighters in early January (Uganda Radio Network, February 1). Ndala was the Muslim commander of the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC) in the eastern DRC and the successful leader of Congolese Special Forces operations against M23. The loss of the capable and popular colonel represents a serious blow to the Congolese army, a situation made worse by the claims of a bodyguard who survived the attack that the attackers were uniformed members of FARDC. Two individuals have been arrested in connection with the incident, including Colonel Tito Bizuru, who is described as a Tutsi, the same ethnic-group that formed the base of the rebel M23 movement (AFP, January 3; Africa Review [Nairobi], January 7; Jeune Afrique, January 22). [2]

FARDC launched its operation against ADF-NALU in the Beni region of Nord-Kivu on January 16. As operations began, Uganda’s military confirmed that it would not play a direct role in the campaign, preferring to only share intelligence with FARDC while maintaining a sufficient presence on the border to prevent fleeing elements of the ADF from entering Uganda (Reuters, January 13; IRIN, January 27). On February 14, the Congo government announced the destruction of the ADF’s headquarters in the ongoing offensive and the death of 230 ADF militants opposed to the loss of 22 members of FARDC (AP, February 14). The elimination of the ADF HQ brought about a personal call of congratulations to DRC president Joseph Kabila from long-time rival Yoweri Museveni, the president of Uganda (Observer [Kampala], February 10).

A new UN Intervention Brigade (IBDE), formed mainly by 3,000 troops drawn from Tanzania, Malawi and South Africa under the broader command of the Mission de l’Organisation des Nations Unies pour la stabilisation en RD du Congo (MONUSCO), has been deployed to the Nord-Kivu region with an offensive mandate enabling them to participate in operations designed to end the presence of a number of local and cross-border militant groups in the region.  Acting in support of FARDC troops, the combination has so far been effective in ending the once-potent M23 threat and has begun to turn its attention to the Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda (FDLR, a Hutu rebel group from Rwanda) as well as the ADF, though Rwanda recently complained MONUSCO was not committed to taking the fight to the FDLR (New Times [Kigali], March 14). Other MONUSCO forces are opening operations further south in Katanga province, where a company of Egyptian Special Forces troops has joined some 500 MONUSCO troops in operations against the Mai Mai Kata-Katanga militia. MONUSCO, with a strength of 18,000 troops, has also deployed two Italian-made Falco surveillance drones based in Goma (capital of Nord-Kivu) to track ADF and FDLR movements in the area (VOA, December 4, 2013).

On March 1, two MONUSCO attack helicopters struck an ADF-NALU base northeast of Beni, an isolated town in North Kivu that has become a center for ADF activities (AFP, March 2). The aircraft involved were likely South African Rooivalk combat support helicopters, previously used against M23 and deployed several days after the ADF-NALU operation in support of a successful FARDC attack on a base of the Alliance des patriotes pour un Congo libre et souverain (APCLS), a militant group based on the Hunde ethnic group of Nord-Kivu province. Support from the Rooivalk gunships has been instrumental in the recent and unprecedented success of the FARDC forces in Nord-Kivu. The Rooivalk is a formidable weapon in skilled hands, with stealth capabilities, a nose-mounted, dual-fed 20mm gas-operated cannon capable of firing 740 rounds a minute and 70mm folding-fin aerial rockets. There are reports that ADF-NALU fighters have broken into small groups headed further north to the Ituri Forest in Orientale Province to evade the ongoing FARDC-UN offensive (IRIN, January 27).

Rebels in Exile: The ADF

The ADF has its roots not in the western Uganda region, but in Kampala and central Uganda, where a number of Ugandan Muslim followers of the Indo-Pakistani Tablighi Jama’at (a normally non-violent Salafist religious reform movement) became radicalized in the early 1990s, claiming political persecution after they opposed the government’s appointment of a new national mufti (chief interpreter of Islamic law). Under pressure from security forces, members of the group took refuge in the wild Rwenzori mountains along the Uganda-DRC border, where they formed the ADF as a means of resisting the Museveni government in Kampala with the assistance of the Sudanese military, which was seeking a proxy to combat Uganda’s support of the independence struggle of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). The ADF absorbed remnants of an earlier Rwenzori separatist movement and were joined by a number of Idi Amin loyalists who had sought refuge in southern Sudan and were likely encouraged by Sudanese intelligence to join the ADF.

An alliance was also created between the ADF and the National Army for the Liberation of Uganda (NALU), a group drawn from the Nande ethnic group of the Rwenzori Mountains. This alliance may have followed introductions provided by Sudanese intelligence officers (al-Jazeera, December 24, 2013). NALU was a relatively inactive movement at the time that had once been responsible for regional raids and a suicide bombing on a Kampala bus that killed 30 people. The ADF-NALU alliance was very active in the 1990s, attacking Ugandan security forces, bombing buses in Kampala and carrying out a number of massacres in their home territory.

However, Ugandan operations in the DRC in 1999 weakened the group and by 2004, operations by the Uganda Peoples Defense Force (UPDF) had forced the movement out of its western Uganda bases and across the border into the lightly governed Nord-Kivu province of the DRC. The discovery of oil in Bundibugyo, a small district at the foot of the Rwenzori Mountain range along the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), appeared to revive the movement. The ADF attempted to destroy new oil facilities in western Uganda in 2007, but a powerful response from the UPDF eliminated nine of the group’s commanders and temporarily ended the ADF threat (New Vision [Kampala], June 19, 2007).

FARDC Fire Missiles at ADF-NALU Positions

ADF leader Jamil Mukulu is a convert to Islam from Catholicism and is believed to have been part of Osama bin Laden’s group in the Sudan in the mid-1990s, followed by training in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Military operations are led by Hood Lukwago and commanders Amis Kasadha, Muhammad Kayira and Filipo Bogere Muzamil (Observer [Kampala], January 10, 2013). Mukulu is rumored to spend his time in London, the Eastleigh neighborhood of Nairobi (known as “Little Mogadishu”) and the coastal region of Tanga in Tanzania (desc-wondo.org, July 20, 2013). Most ADF leaders come from Muslim-dominated regions of central Uganda. Muslims are a minority in Uganda, forming about 15 percent of the total population.

Though the Muslim leadership of the ADF adopts an Islamist stance, it has never released anything in the way of a political program and now relies heavily on non-Muslim recruits from the DRC. The ADF relies on illegal timber-cutting and gold mining in Nord-Kivu for revenues, as well as funds raised in the Muslim communities of east Africa. In the Beni region, ADF fighters had settled into the local community, running car and motorcycle taxis and marrying local women (al-Jazeera, December 24, 2013).

Like other groups active in the northeastern Congo that have experienced difficulty in recruitment from their original core (in this case Ugandan Muslims) through physical isolation or failure to establish a popular following, ADF-NALU enlarged its following through abductions, the use of kadogos (child-soldiers) and financial enticements for local Congolese youth who may now form up to 50% of the movement. Other recruits appear to have been lured from Kampala by promises of employment in western Uganda (New Vision [Kampala], April 11, 2013). ADF-NALU can likely field some 1200 to 1600 fighters, of whom only 800 could be regarded as effectively trained, but their intimate knowledge of the inaccessible Nord-Kivu border region and deep roots in the local non-Muslim Bakonjo community will complicate efforts to eliminate the movement.

The Ugandan Role

Ugandan military adventures in the DRC have proved lucrative in the past; the Ugandan military presence in the Congo from 1998 to 2002 allowed senior ranks to make small fortunes from illegal mining and timber exports, but ultimately resulted in a 2005 International Court of Justice ruling against Uganda that found that state guilty of grave human rights abuses and the plundering of the northeastern Congo’s wealth. While Kinshasha is looking for $10 billion in reparations, Uganda has yet to make any payments (Daily Monitor [Kampala], July 21, 2013; IWPR, July 31, 2007).

Uganda has become a heavily militarized state that requires continuous threats to justify the continued diversion of a large part of the nation’s budget to support a large military base and its various operations.  The UPDF’s lead role in the African Union’s military mission in Somalia has provided Uganda with a well-trained, well-equipped core of troops with significant combat experience. Some Ugandan opposition figures fear the revival of ADF-NALU activities and anecdotal allegations of ADF cooperation with Somalia’s al-Shabaab Islamists will lead to new military activities in the cross-border Rwenzori region (for alleged ADF ties to al-Shabaab, see New Vision [Kampala], July 12, 2013, Observer [Kampala], July 14, 2013). Asuman Basalirwa, leader of the largely Muslim Justice Forum party (popularly known as “Jeema”), maintains that the ADF has no relationship with political Islam and suspects Uganda’s powerful military establishment of exaggerating the Islamist element of the ADF to attract US funding: “Reports of war are commercial projects by security agencies… They are used to justify increased budgetary allocations and supplementary budgets” (Daily Monitor [Kampala], July 21, 2013).

Conclusion

The resumption of military activities by newly armed ADF-NALU fighters last year suggests that the group has found a new sponsor. Uganda’s military has suggested Sudan is still supplying the group, but cannot yet provide evidence to support this claim (al-Jazeera, December 24, 2013). Sudanese-Ugandan relations entered a steep decline several months before the militants resumed operations. However, the Ugandan military has become too strong for groups like ADF-NALU or the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) to operate on Ugandan soil. Under military pressure in Nord-Kivu from combined Congolese/UN forces and facing UPDF troops along the Ugandan border, ADF-NALU has little choice but to disperse into the Ituri Forest and wait out operations. Kinshasha’s challenge in the region is to provide a permanent security regime to establish its sovereignty in the region and prevent the re-entry of militants into areas where they had previously been cleared. FARDC appears to be gaining confidence through its joint operations with the UN Intervention Brigade; the question is whether it will have the trained manpower, equipment and funding to secure this resource-rich region once UN forces have stood down.

Notes

1. For earlier assessments of the ADF, see Andrew McGregor, “Oil and Jihad in Central Africa,” Terrorism Monitor, December 20, 2007 and “Ugandan Rebel Movement Reemerges along Oil-bearing Ugandan/Congolese Border,” Terrorism Monitor, July 24, 2007.

2. Video of the incident can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6hPwdgwH0E For the Mouvement du 23 Mars (M23), see Terrorism Monitor, January 4, 2013; Terrorism Monitor July 26, 2012; a profile of M23 leader General Bosco Ntaganda is available in Militant Leadership Monitor, August 31, 2012.

This article first appeared in the March 20, 2014 issue of the Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor.

Ugandan Rebel Movement Re-emerges along the Oil Bearing Ugandan-Congolese Border

July 25, 2013

Andrew McGregor

The once moribund Allied Democratic Forces (ADF), a Ugandan rebel movement now operating out of remote bases in the North Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), has returned to life by taking a series of small towns in the region near the border with Uganda before launching an assault on the larger center of Kamango that displaced over 60,000 people (Daily Monitor [Kampala], July 13). The sudden rebirth of the ADF is concurrent with the rapid decline in Ugandan-Sudanese relations since January, when Kampala hosted a conference of Sudan’s political opposition and armed rebel movements. Khartoum countered by claiming it is in contact with various Ugandan opposition groups, though it declined to name them. Conflict in the region is further complicated by the fact it is close to oil-bearing areas near the western border of Uganda that Kampala is eager to develop, potentially shipping its production east to Kenya’s Lamu Port by connecting to a planned new pipeline that will divert South Sudan’s oil production from Port Sudan with a concurrent loss to Khartoum of valuable and much needed oil transit fees.

UPDF Patrol along the DRC Border (AFP)

The ADF made an earlier and ill-fated attempt to destroy the new oil facilities in western Uganda in March 2007. The attackers were driven off with heavy losses (including senior commander Bosco Isiko) and in the following three months nine ADF commanders were killed by the Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF), rendering the group largely leaderless and dormant until recently (Radio Uganda, April 3, 2007; Daily Monitor [Kampala], November 20, 2007).

The ADF is only one of ten major militant movements and a number of smaller armed groups active in North Kivu Province, a poorly developed region rich in various minerals such as gold and Coltan (a.k.a. Tantalite), an ore containing two elements widely used in modern electronic products. The region is currently the scene of heavy fighting using tanks and heavy artillery between the Mouvement du 23 Mars (M23) rebel movement (a.k.a. the Revolutionary Army of the Congo) and the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC, the DRC national army) that saw at least 130 people killed in mid-July (New Vision [Kampala], July 16; for the M23, see Terrorism Monitor Brief, July 26, 2012; Terrorism Monitor, November 30, 2012; Militant Leadership Monitor, August 31, 2012). The UPDF says it is supplying intelligence to FARDC regarding the activities of the ADF, which the Ugandan army claims is busy recruiting and training for new attacks on Uganda (Daily Monitor [Kampala], July 12).

After the clash at Kamango (which was retaken by the FARDC on July 12), the UPDF sent reinforcements to the border region to prevent ADF infiltrators from entering Uganda disguised as refugees. An estimated 60,000 refugees crossed from the DRC into Uganda’s remote Bundibugyo regon following the ADF seizure of Kamango, 15 kilometers from the border. The severely impoverished Bundibugyo region in western Uganda at the foot of the Rwenzori mountain range became the main theater of operations for the ADF in 1991 after the group was driven from the Muslim districts of Kampala and the towns of central Uganda.  In the wilderness of western Uganda, the ADF absorbed a number of poorly organized militant groups in the region with grievances against the Museveni regime, including the National Army for the Liberation of Uganda (NALU), remnants of the shattered Rwenzori separatist movement and even former Idi Amin loyalists based in South Sudan.

With an estimated strength of 1,200 to 1,600 fighters operating from several bases in the DRC, the ADF continues to build its numbers through the abduction of young people and children as it has never established the popular appeal necessary to entice voluntary recruitment in significant numbers (Xinhua, July 15; Daily Monitor [Kampala], July 16). The result is that the DRC-based ADF, despite being described in Kampala as a Muslim extremist group, is in fact largely non-Muslim and to a significant degree, even non-Ugandan (for the development of the ADF, see Terrorism Monitor, December 20, 2007). Muslims are a minority in Uganda, forming about 15% of the total population. The UPDF has described the ADF as a “real threat” to Uganda with ties to Somalia’s extremist al-Shabaab movement (New Vision [Kampala], July 12). According to UPDF spokesman Paddy Ankunda, “The link to al-Shabaab could give [the] ADF new skills and explosives might sneak into the country. They have been opening up new camps in Bundibugyo and they are training; this might cause insecurity” (Observer [Kampala], July 14).

A recent Ugandan intelligence report indicates that the ADF headquarters is located in Makayoba, in the Eringeti District of North Kivu Province, with principal bases in Mwalika (Isale District) and Kikingi, close to the Rwenzori mountain range. The report says the group is largely armed with light infantry weapons suitable to use in the region, such as sub-machine guns, light and medium machine guns and mortars of the 60mm and 82mm varieties (Daily Monitor [Kampala], July 16).

ADF Leader Jamil Mukulu

The political and overall leader of the ADF is Jamil Mukulu, with military affairs coming under the command of Hood Lukwago, Amis Kashada and Muhammad Kayira. The rarely-seen Mukulu, a convert to Islam from Catholicism, was part of Osama bin Laden’s group in the Sudan in the 1990s and is believed to have obtained training in Pakistan and Afghanistan before launching his first attack on Uganda in 1996. Attempts to obtain Iraqi support for the ADF as the core of an “African mujahideen front” prior to the 2003 U.S. invasion of that country appear to have been a failure (Christian Science Monitor, April 18, 2003; Daily Telegraph, April 17, 2003). Ugandan authorities have subsequently claimed that the ADF has been trained and financed both by al-Qaeda and Sudanese intelligence. Al-Qaeda’s involvement in the ADF remains unconfirmed by evidence and the description of Mukulu as “the African Bin Laden” seemed calculated to draw U.S. military and financial assistance, but there are stronger indications that Khartoum supported the group prior to the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement with South Sudan that brought an end to the proxy war being carried out in the region by Khartoum and Kampala.

The UPDF leadership is currently in a state of flux since Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni made sweeping changes in the UPDF command in May after delivering a speech highly critical of many of his military commanders but heavy in praise of his son, Brigadier Muhoozi Kainerugaba, whose spectacular rise through the ranks and command of Uganda’s Special Forces has done little to alleviate Ugandan concerns that Museveni is preparing a dynastic succession. The Ugandan president used the opportunity to condemn criticism of his son: “To vilify, demonize, castigate, or harangue in a demented way against such an officer is sickness in a metaphorical sense. If you have no objectivity to see value, then your [own] leadership qualities are in question” (Independent [Kampala], June 21; for Muhoozi, see Terrorism Monitor Brief, May 2).

With a full understanding of the intractability of insurgencies in the lawless and inaccessible region where the borders of Uganda, Rwanda and the DRC meet, Kampala has indicated its willingness to keep the option of a negotiated settlement open: “The Government is ready to talk to anybody who has grievances, including the ADF. If there is any genuine political group that wants dialogue, we are ready to do so because war is not an option” (New Vision [Kampala], July 16). Some 50 ADF fighters, including Hassan Nyanzi, the son of the ADF leader, have taken advantage of an amnesty offered by the Ugandan government over the last five years.

A new UN Intervention Brigade formed mainly by troops drawn from Tanzania, Malawi and South Africa has been deployed to the North Kivu region but has not yet participated in the fighting (New Vision [Kampala], July 16). Rwanda has accused the UN Intervention Brigade of seeking to form an alliance with Hutu rebels of the Kivu-based Forces Démocratiques de Libération du Rwanda (FDLR) to combat the allegedly Rwandan-supported M23 rebels of the northern Kivu region (New Vision [Kampala], July 16). Otherwise, the UPDF has declared it will not cross the border to attack the ADF without permission from the DRC (New Vision [Kampala], July 12).

This article was first published in the July 25, 2013 issue of the Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor

 

The Return of War to Africa’s Great Lakes Region: Can the Revolutionary Army of the Congo be Contained?

Andrew McGregor

November 30, 2012

The seizure last week by mutinous Congolese soldiers of the city of Goma in the midst of the mineral rich Kivu province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has brought the deaths of hundreds of people and displaced hundreds of thousands of others. The ineffective response of the DRC military and the UN troops intended to support it has nourished fears that the mutineers might continue their march through the Congo, plunging the war-wracked state into yet another round of uncontrollable violence.

Great Lakes AfricaNow calling itself the Revolutionary Army of the Congo (RAC), the group of mutineers formerly known as M23 had pledged to march on the DRC capital of Kinshasha if DRC president Joseph Kabila failed to agree to discuss their demands, which include calls for national talks to be hosted by President Kabila, the release of political prisoners (including leading opposition politician Etienne Tshisekedi), the dissolution of the national electoral commission (believed by the ARC to have arranged Kabila’s re-election in 2011) and the investigation of military corruption (New Vision [Kampala], November 27, 2012).

The RAC/M23 movement has its origins in the largely Tutsi Congrès national pour la défense du peuple (CNDP), an ethnic-defense militia based in the DRC province of Nord-Kivu. [1] The movement was believed to have been sponsored by Rwanda as a proxy force for use against the Kivu-based Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda (FDLR), a Hutu militia determined to finish the genocide of Tutsis and moderate Hutus that ravaged Rwanda in 1994. The FDLR appears to have stepped up cross-border operations into Rwanda in recent days and has renewed clashes with RAC/M23 (AP, November 27, 2012). The ICC issued a warrant in July for the arrest of FDLR commander Sylvestre Mudacumura, a Rwandan Hutu facing nine counts of war crimes.

General Bosco “The Terminator” Ntaganda, a Rwandan Tutsi wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes committed while both a rebel and an officer in the DRC national army, took control of the CNDP in 2009. [2] The peace agreement that followed in that same year resulted in the integration of most of the CNDP into the DRC army, known as the Forces armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC).  Colonel Ntaganda led a mutiny of up to 600 soldiers in Nord-Kivu in March after orders came for the ex-CNDP troops to be redeployed from Kivu, where ex-members of the CNDP had made a comfortable living by exploiting and taxing the numerous mining operations in the area. The Mouvement du 23 Mars (M23) was named for the March 23, 2009 peace agreement that movement leaders claim Kinshasha failed to honor (East African [Nairobi], July 16, 2012).

Colonel Ntaganda, who has always denied being the M23 commander despite abundant evidence to the contrary, has kept a low profile since April, allowing the movement’s leadership to pass into the hands of its official commander, Colonel Sultani Makenga. Makenga (now a RAC brigadier) is a former CNDP commander who is believed to have played a major role in massacres carried out in the region in 2007 and 2008. Colonel Makenga denies Ntaganda is being harbored by the RAC (East African [Nairobi], October 22, 2012). At the time of his desertion from FARDC in May, Colonel Makenga was the second-in-command of DRC operations against the Hutu FDLR. Makenga was designated for asset seizure by the U.S. Treasury Department on November 13 in relation to his alleged use of child soldiers and being a recipient of arms and material related to military activities in the DRC.

Under a deal forged by Uganda, a RAC spokesman announced on November 29 that the movement would hand over the town of Sake to UN forces on November 30, to be followed by a withdrawal from Goma to a point 12 miles north of the city, though 100 RAC fighters would be allowed to remain at the Goma airport (AFP, November 29, 2012). In return, Kinshasha has agreed to negotiate with the rebels and hear their grievances, once they have retreated to 20 kilometers (12 miles) north of the city.

The Assault on Goma

A three-month truce was shattered on November 15 as RAC and Congolese forces clashed at daybreak, both sides claiming later to have acted in self-defense. Tanks belonging to the UN’s Mission de l’Organisation des Nations Unies en République Démocratique du Congo (MONUSCO) rolled into defensive positions outside Goma, ready to support the defense of the city of one million people close to the Rwandan border. On November 18, UN attack helicopters, provided by the Ukraine and operated by Ukrainian pilots ran ten strike missions against the rebels outside Goma (AFP, November 18, 2012). The night before the assault on Goma, Rwandan General Joseph Nzabamwita reported that the DRC army had bombarded the Rwandan border region with T-55 tank shells, mortars and anti-aircraft missiles. A FARDC spokesman said an investigation was under way but countered that Rwanda had also fired mortars across the border (AFP, November 19, 2012).

RACongoPatrol of the Revolutionary Army of the Congo near Goma

RAC forces continued to advance and took the city in the morning of November 20 after a few hours of light resistance from FARDC and UN forces based in Goma. With the RAC on the outskirts of Goma, DRC forces engaged in some tough talk, with the local Republican Guard commander promising to “die with the population” rather than leave them to the hands of the rebels (Agence Congolaise de Presse, November 19, 2012). Residents of Goma reported that the Republican Guard (which reports to the president directly rather than to FARDC command) did offer some resistance to the insurgents while FARDC troops busied themselves with looting before abandoning the city (AFP, November 19, 2012). A FARDC spokesman claimed later that DRC armor came under fire from Rwandan artillery every time they tried to shell RAC positions, but a Rwandan spokesman replied: “Every time [FARDC] gets beaten on the ground, they use the RDF [Rwandan Defense Force] as an excuse” (AFP, November 17, 2012). Many of the Congolese troops shed their uniforms before fleeing into the bush. The precipitate departure of Congolese forces from Goma appears to have provided the ARC with an arms windfall of as much as 1,000 tons of arms and ammunition, including heavy artillery (AP, November 27, 2012).

After the attack, the DRC government reported that the rebels had been reinforced by 4,000 Rwandan troops and had been provided with night-vision goggles that gave them an advantage in the fighting (Agence Congolaise de Presse, November 19, 2012; November 20, 2012). The DRC had earlier claimed to have found bodies wearing Rwandan Army uniforms after clashes with the RAC on November 15, but a Rwandan army spokesman retorted: This an old propaganda gimmick; it’s easy to try to draw Rwanda into this mess” (AFP, November 15, 2012; November 18, 2012, Jeune Afrique, November 17, 2012).

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius expressed his disappointment with the performance of the UN’s 1,500 man peacekeeping force in Goma: “MONUSCO’s mandate should be revised. MONUSCO was not in a situation where it could prevent what happened when faced with a few hundred men” (AFP, November 20, 2012). The UN has stated its Goma contingent, part of a force of 6,700 UN troops in Nord-Kivu, would remain in Goma, though their role in the current situation remains undefined.

UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous defended the MONUSCO contingent in Goma, pointing out that their mandate called for support of FARDC troops, but given the fact that government forces fled from Goma shortly after fighting began this was “hardly achievable… and clearly it is not the role – not the mandate of MONUSCO – to directly hit the armed groups…” (Xinhua, November 21, 2012).

MONUSCO’s ineffective defense of Goma sparked large demonstrations in several cities, including Kisangani, where UN vehicles were set on fire and stones thrown at UN offices. Protesters also targeted the government and the ARC for their roles in the continuing violence (Agence Congolaise de Presse, November 21, 2012; November 22, 2012).

After a “strategic withdrawal” from the Goma area, FARDC troops are now based around the town of Minova, 36 miles from Goma. On November 22, FARDC launched an offensive to retake the town of Sake, west of Goma. The Goma Airport remains under the control of UN forces.

Regional Involvement in the Crisis – Rwanda

A UN report on foreign military involvement in the Kivu region was leaked earlier this month, creating a diplomatic crisis in the Great Lakes region. Much of the report appeared to confirm the DRC’s claims that neighboring Rwanda and Uganda were providing arms, intelligence and logistical support to RAC/M23. The DRC is now demanding that Rwanda and Uganda be targeted by U.S. and UN sanctions for its support of RAC (AFP, November 18, 2012). Some of the fallout was internal, however; General Gabriel Amisi Kumba, the chief of DRC land forces, was dismissed by President Kabila on November 22 after having been accused in the report of trafficking arms to various militant groups, including suspected RAC allies in the local Maï-Maï and anti-Hutu Raia Mutomboki groups (JournaldeKin.com [Kinshasha], November 23, 2012; AFP, November 22, 2012).

Based partly on MONUSCO radio intercepts, Rwanda was identified in the report as playing a major role in creating and backing RAC/M23, with Minister of Defense General James Kabarebe accused of directing the movement’s activities with the assistance of Army chief-of-staff Lieutenant General Charles Kayonga and Lieutenant General Jacques Nziza. Rwandan troops fought in the Congo during the rebellion against President Mobutu Sese Seko in 1996-1998 and again from 1998 to 2003. Rwandan troops returned to the DRC with permission in 2009 to pursue the Hutu FDLR militia.

Rwanda’s activities in the border region have led to the cancelling of an important training agreement with the Belgian military; according to Belgian foreign minister Didier Reynders: “We will not train soldiers who could contribute to the destabilization [of the Congo]” (Radio Télévision Belge Francophone, November 11, 2012). The DRC, seeing an opportunity, dispatched Prime Minister Augustin Matata Ponyo to Brussels to urge greater military assistance and training from the Belgians.

Regional Involvement in the Crisis – Uganda

Uganda, which President Kabila describes as “the bad boy” of the region, was also identified as a major backer of RAC/M23, much to the outrage of Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni (Sunday Monitor [Kampala], October 29, 2012). Ugandan police chief Lieutenant General Kale Kayihura and the President’s brother, General Salim Saleh, were singled out in the UN report for providing  military assistance and troops to RAC/M23 (Daily Monitor [Kampala], November 5, 2012).

Uganda has intervened in the DRC before, particularly in 1996-1998, when Ugandan troops backed Laurent Kabila’s efforts to depose President Mobutu Sese Seko and again in 1998-2003 during a vast civil war that dragged in many other African countries. Ugandan generals, some related to President Museveni, made enormous profits by pillaging the eastern Congo’s mineral industry.

Ugandan premier Amama Mbabazi described the leaked report as the work of “UN amateurs” and asked:

Why should we continue involving Uganda where the only reward we get is malignment? Why should the children of Ugandans die and we get malignment as a reward? Why should we invite retaliation by [Somalia’s] al-Shabaab by standing with the people of Somalia, only to get malignment by the UN system? (Daily Monitor [Kampala], November 2, 2012).

After the release of the UN report, Uganda announced it was considering three options before taking action:

  • Withdrawing from regional peacekeeping operations in Somalia (where they form the core of the African Union Mission in Somalia – AMISOM)  and the Central African Republic
  • Continuing with these operations despite the UN report
  • Demanding a withdrawal of the allegations contained in the UN report before allowing Ugandan peacekeeping operations to continue (Daily Monitor [Uganda], November 26, 2012).

After Uganda made its threat to abandon UN-backed peacekeeping operations in Somalia, UN officials quickly began to back away from the report, saying that the views expressed therein “did not necessarily reflect those of the United Nations” (Africa Review [Nairobi], November 5, 2012).

During an interview with a local newspaper, Ugandan defense minister Dr. Crispus Kiyonga admitted that Ugandan authorities had conducted secret meetings with RAC/M23 to urge them to stop fighting and suggested that these meetings might have been misinterpreted as support for the group (Daily Monitor [Kampala], November 12, 2012).

Pursuit of the largely moribund Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) rebel group is often cited by the government as the reason for its cross-border military operations in the eastern DRC. Museveni claims that a recent series of assassinations of prominent Muslim clerics in Uganda is the work of ADF operatives based in the DRC (Observer [Kampala], September 17; for the ADF, see Terrorism Monitor, December 20, 2007). In an interview with Ugandan journalists, Kabila said joint DRC-Ugandan operations against elements of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) based in the Congo had been successful and that further joint operations against Ugandan rebels of the ADF based in the Kivu region would have followed if they hadn’t been pre-empted by the new outbreak of violence in the region (Sunday Monitor [Kampala], October 29, 2012).

As leader of the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (ICGLR), President Museveni is officially leading regional efforts to quell the fighting in Kivu and appears to have some influence over RAC/M23. [3] Despite the claims that Uganda is arming and facilitating the RAC/M23 rebellion, Uganda says it still has the “moral authority” to continue as a mediator in the conflict (IRIN [Nairobi], November 23, 2012). The ICGLR has proposed forming a “neutral” international force of 4,000 troops under AU and UN supervision to eliminate armed groups in the eastern DRC, but it will be difficult to find solid commitments of trained and capable troops for this force. The neutral force is intended to include 4,000 troops from Angola, Tanzania, Kenya and the DRC, although only Tanzania has committed a small force of 500 men in the three months that have passed since the creation of the force was announced, and funding remains unconfirmed. It was intended to deploy the force by December, but this now appears unlikely (Daily Monitor [Kampala], November 1, 2012). DRC Prime Minister Ponyo has stated his preference for a “reinvigorated” MONUSCO as a “credible and realistic alternative” to the proposed “neutral international force” (Agence Congolaise de Presse, October 26, 2012).  President Museveni, who favors the new force, has said that what is required is a “new hybrid of troops who are ideologically committed and loyal” (Observer [Kampala], September 17, 2012).

Conclusion

The struggle for the wealth of Kivu Province continues without regard for the residents of the region, who are buffeted one way or another by offensives and counteroffensives. For now, however, it appears that RAC has stepped back from its announced intention of taking the war to Kinshasha, which was always more of a threat than a potential reality due to the great distances, difficult terrain and hostile groups that would be encountered on any march to the national capital. If the RAC actually withdraws from Goma in the coming days (which is by no means guaranteed), it has still emerged from the latest round of fighting with greater wealth, more arms and a degree of respect for their military capabilities when matched with FARDC. The question is whether RAC can translate their new situation into an agreement by a largely unwilling DRC government to consider or even discuss their demands. For the moment, FARDC, even with the support of UN forces, is almost certainly incapable of driving RAC from its lucrative bases in the mining regions of Nord-Kivu and Sud-Kivu. The region’s notorious volatility and reputation as a haven for every type of bandit and would-be revolutionary does not hold much promise that a truce with one group will prevent other groups from continuing to rampage across the eastern Congo. In the end, Rwanda, Uganda and the DRC all value their proxy militias too much to be expected to take decisive steps to bring peace to a region bearing impressive mineral wealth for those willing to bend international protocols to exploit it.

Notes

1. For background on the M23, see Andrew McGregor, “M23: A New Player in the Proxy Wars of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Terrorism Monitor, July 26, 2012.

2. For Ntaganda, see Andrew McGregor, “War Crimes, Gold Mines and Mutiny in the North-East Congo: A Profile of General Bosco Ntaganda,” Militant Leadership Monitor, August 31, 2012,

3. The ICGLR consists of 11 member-states: Angola, Burundi, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania and Zambia.

This article was originally published in the Jamestown Foundation Terrorism Monitor

M23: A New Player in the Proxy Wars of the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Andrew McGregor

July 26, 2012

The Congolese province of Nord-Kivu, which borders both Rwanda and Uganda on its eastern side, is a land of active volcanoes, mountain gorillas, valuable minerals, warring militias and over 200,000 displaced people. It is also home to M23, a new and powerful militia composed of veteran rebels and professional soldiers. Well-armed and apparently more capable than local units of the national army, M23 poses a new challenge to efforts to restore stability to a region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) that has been in a state of upheaval since the genocide in neighboring Rwanda in 1994. 

Colonel Bosco Ntaganda in the hills of Nord-Kivu

M23 has its origins in the Nord-Kivu-based Congrès national pour la défense du peuple (CNDP) of General Laurent “The Chairman” Nkunda, a Congolese Tutsi. The largely Tutsi CNDP is believed to have been sponsored by Rwanda to fight a proxy war with the Hutu supremacist Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda (FDLR), a militia formed partly by former Hutu genocidaires. With the CNDP under pressure from an offensive by Congolese and Rwandan troops, the movement’s leadership split in January 2009. Nkunda was arrested and detained in Rwanda while General Bosco “The Terminator” Ntaganda, a Rwandan Tutsi wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes committed while both a rebel and an officer in the DRC national army, took control of the movement. Ntaganda agreed to integrate his forces with the Congolese national army, the Forces armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC),  according to the terms of the March 23, 2009 peace agreement, which also ensured Kinshasha would not pursue the ICC warrants against Ntaganda and other CNDP officers. The ICC issued a fresh arrest warrant against Ntaganda on July 13 related to crimes against humanity, murder, rape, pillaging, recruitment of child soldiers and sexual slavery (AFP, July 13). Thomas Lubanga, Ntaganda’s former commander in the Union des Patriotes Congolais (UPC) / Forces Patriotique pour la Liberation du Congo (FPLC), was sentenced to 14 years in prison by the ICC earlier this month for recruiting and using child soldiers in the early 2000’s.

M23 is named for the March 23, 2009 peace agreement that movement leaders claim Kinshasha has failed to honor (East African [Nairobi], July 16).  The movement was born when Colonel Ntaganda led a March mutiny of up to 600 soldiers in Nord-Kivu. Though poor living conditions, pay interruptions and other reasons were cited, it is likely that the main causes of the military revolt were a plan to transfer the former CNDP troops under Ntaganda’s command to another part of the DRC and a rumor that President Joseph Kabila had taken a new interest in enforcing the ICC warrant against Ntaganda. Colonel Ntaganda and other Tutsi officers profited from their control of rich mining areas of Nord-Kivu and by trading in tropical hardwoods grown in the region. The Tutsi officers and their men have opposed any transfer from the lucrative Kivu provinces and pose locally as the “protectors” of the Banyamulenge, Congolese Tutsis who live in the region. In the field with Ntaganda are three other senior officers, Colonel Baudouin Ngaruye, Colonel Innocent Zimurinda and Colonel Innocent Kaina, all of whom are accused of massacring civilians, mass rape, mutilations, and other crimes while profiting from illegal taxes on charcoal production and mining operations (IRIN [Nairobi], June 23; AFP, July 13).

M23 Fighters in Bunangana

The M23 movement can be viewed as a revival of the CNDP under a different name, but including many of the same individuals, leading Kinshasha to accuse Rwanda of resuming military and financial assistance to the militia. Congolese concern on this point is understandable – Rwandan forces have invaded the eastern DRC twice since 1998. Kigali in turn believes that Kinshasha has resumed support for Hutu extremists in the FDLR who are allegedly planning terrorist attacks in Rwanda.

A recent M23 offensive in a region bordering the Virunga national park captured the border town of Bunangana on July 6 and drove some 600 FARDC troops and thousands of refugees into Uganda (East African [Nairobi], July 16). The soldiers were disarmed and eventually returned to the DRC. Days later, a M23 spokesman announced the movement had pulled out of the area taken, saying the movement sought to bring the government to negotiations rather than control territory (AFP, July 13). The towns of Kiwandja and Rutshuru were handed over to local police and troops belonging to the UN peacekeeping force, the Mission de l’Organisation des Nations Unies en République démocratique du Congo (MONUSCO). When the towns were re-occupied by FARDC troops the M23 warned the army to get out “or be held responsible for all the consequences” (AFP, July 13).

Believing that M23 was intent on seizing the Nord-Kivu capital of Goma, MONUSCO and the Congolese army deployed over a dozen tanks on the road to Goma. The M23, however, denied it had any such intentions: “Our mission is not to go to Goma. We are strong but we are also disciplined. We know what we are doing” (AFP, July 12; Xinhua, July 13). Three UN and two DRC MI24 and MI25 helicopters flown by Ukrainian pilots strafed M23 positions in the hills of southeast Virunga National Park with rockets and 30mm rounds (AFP, July 13).

In a recent meeting of the 11 nation International Conference on the Great Lakes Region (which includes Rwanda and the DRC), it was agreed to accept a “neutral international force” to eradicate M23, the FDLR and other armed groups in the region ( Daily Monitor [Kampala], July 16AFP, July 15).  [1] The idea was then endorsed by the African Union. As of yet, however, potential contributors to this force have not been identified. Meetings on this issue are planned for Kampala at an August 6-7 summit of Great Lakes states (Agence Rwandaise d’Information, July 16). In the meantime, there are reports that the Rwanda Defence Forces (RDF) and the Congolese troops of the FARDC have agreed to mount joint patrols along their common border (Africa Review, July 17). Plagued by indiscipline, FARDC is often viewed as nearly as great a threat to Congolese security as the militias it is supposed to be fighting.

In mid-July, roughly two dozen M23 fighters deserted and surrendered to UN forces, saying they had been recruited in Rwanda and sent to the DRC. However, when the UN took these individuals to the Rwandan border for repatriation, Rwandan authorities refused to accept them, saying there was no evidence they were Rwandan nationals. Rwanda did accept the return of seven members of the Hutu FDLR (AFP, July 15). The ICC issued a warrant this month for FDLR commander Sylvestre Mudacumura, a Rwandan Hutu facing nine counts of war crimes.

Much of the community in Nord-Kivu views the ongoing violence in the region through a prism of tribal rivalries. With M23 being composed largely of Tutsis, senior members of the DRC’s ruling party have used public rallies broadcast on state TV to threaten to hunt down all Tutsis in the DRC and send them to Rwanda. Street children and taxi drivers in Goma have used such threats as a license to attack anyone who looks like a Tutsi (IRIN [Nairobi], July 14).

Note

1. The ICGLR is composed of 11 states: Angola, Burundi, Central African Republic, Republic of Congo, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania and Zambia.

This article was first published in the July 26, 2012 issue of the Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor.

Rebellion without Reason: The Strange Survival of Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army

Andrew McGregor

November 23, 2011

After decades of carrying out unspeakable atrocities and thousands of kidnappings in Central Africa, the elusive commander of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), Joseph Kony, appears to have narrowly escaped capture by the Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF) twice in recent weeks, with the UPDF emerging from the bush with only some of his clothing and his wash basin to show for their efforts (Daily Monitor [Kampala], October 16).

LRA Commander Joseph Kony

Following in the footsteps of the George Bush administration (which once announced elimination of the LRA as an administration priority), President Barack Obama has turned the attention of his administration towards eliminating the LRA by sending roughly 100 Special Forces and other military specialists to aid Ugandan/South Sudanese/Congolese efforts to destroy the dispersed LRA groups still living in the bush of the Central African Republic (CAR) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).  The deployment has been described as a short term effort that is expected to use lessons learned in the U.S. aided 2009 Operation Lightning Thunder fiasco to protect isolated communities from the LRA while military forces hunt down the group’s estimated 200 remaining fighters.  The new weapons to be used against the LRA and its erratic commander, Joseph Kony, are improved communications and military coordination. Villagers will be provided with high-frequency radios to report LRA movements and military commanders from the DRC, South Sudan and Uganda will be given U.S. intelligence gleaned from communications intercepts and satellite imagery (Los Angeles Times, October 25). In addition, both military and civilians will be able to follow the militia’s movements through the “LRA Crisis Tracker” website, funded by U.S. charities (BBC, October 4). [1]

The Acholi Alienation

Kony’s LRA has its roots in the conflict between the Acholi tribe of northern Uganda and other tribes in Uganda’s south that began during the regime of Idi Amin Dada (1971-1979). The Acholi are a sub-group of the Luo people of South Sudan’s Bahr al-Ghazal region who migrated to northern Uganda several centuries ago.

The troubles in Acholiland may be traced back to 1971, when Ugandan president Idi Amin conducted a ruthless purge of Acholi troops in the Ugandan Army. Many of the survivors went into exile, returning to Uganda in 1979 as part of the Tanzanian forces that expelled Idi Amin. A young Ugandan rebel from western Uganda’s Banyankole tribe named Yoweri Museveni was also part of the invading force. A year later Milton Obote returned to power in Kampala, only to preside over atrocities that surpassed anything committed by Idi Amin. Obote unleashed the Acholi troops in the Luwero Triangle region north of Kampala, where they quickly gained a reputation for looting, rape and murder.

By 1985 Uganda was on the verge of collapse, and Obote was overthrown by an Acholi commander, General Tito Okello with the help of fellow Acholi, Brigadier Bazilio Olara-Okello. The general’s rule was short-lived, however, as Museveni broke a pact with his government and seized power, leaving the Acholi troops to flee north to their homeland. Southern troops happily took retribution in Acholiland for the atrocities committed in the Luwero Triangle. By the late 1980s, most Acholi military formations had folded or joined the new religiously inspired Holy Spirit movement led by Alice Lakwena (a.k.a. “The Messenger,” a.k.a. Alice Auma). The young Joseph Kony, who had dropped out of school to become a traditional healer, was also attracted to the movement.

With a mix of pagan and Christian beliefs, Alice Lakwena promised redemption to the Acholi soldiers while organizing them into local defense forces. Ritual observances were intended to make the men bullet-proof, while Lakwena arranged to have them assisted in battle by snakes, bees and legions of spirits while they attacked their enemies in a cross formation. Strategic decisions were often taken while Lakwena was possessed by spirits, including that of an Italian soldier who had been dead for 95 years. On her way to take Kampala, Lakwena was defeated near Jinja. She escaped and died at a refugee camp in Kenya in 2007, aged 50. [2]In the meantime the Acholi and other northern tribes were forced into IDP camps which have helped neutralize the armed opposition to the Museveni regime, but also maintain a high degree of hostility among displace northerners living in miserable conditions towards the government.

With little of coherence emerging from the LRA in terms of political aims and beliefs, it has been left to Acholi living in the international diaspora (especially London) to provide an intellectual/political framework for the LRA’s activities. These exiled supporters of the movement maintain, like Kony, that atrocities are the work of UPDF troops in disguise with the intention of discrediting the LRA. While their statements contain criticism of Museveni’s “one-party rule” and call for Ugandan federalism, free elections and political reform, the Ugandan government has been more successful in providing a counter-narrative that characterizes the LRA leadership as erratic, purposeless and obsessed with bizarre religious beliefs. [3]

The LRA and the Bush Kingdom of Joseph Kony

Kony is known for rapid and continual changes of mood. It is clear that he regards most peace negotiations as a trap or a cover for attack. The barely literate LRA commander is known for delivering a steady stream of convincing sermons with creative interpretations of bible verses that justify his violence. Like his Acholi predecessor, Alice Lakwena, Kony is frequently possessed by spirits.

Kony turns to the Bible for precedents to vindicate his preference for polygamy, abductions and amputations. In particular he cites Matthew 5, 29-30 to defend the common LRA practices of severing limbs, lips and noses: “If your right eye is your trouble, gouge it out and throw it away! Better to lose part of your body than to have it all cast into Gehenna [i.e. hell]. Again, if your right hand is your trouble, cut it off and throw it away! Better to lose party of your body than to have it all cast into Gehenna.” LRA massacres are intended to show that government security forces are incapable of defending the populace. Kony’s three main stated objectives may be described in the following way:

  •  Impose the Ten Commandments on Ugandan society
  •  Restore Acholi culture
  • Overthrow the Museveni regime.

Kony’s dreadlocked warriors are forbidden to smoke or drink alcohol. The consumption of mutton, pork (Kony considers pigs to be ghosts) and pigeon are all prohibited. There are also a number of standing orders concerning water, such as a prohibition on shouting while crossing rivers. Total obedience to Kony is mandatory for his fighters but excellent performance in carrying out his wishes is rewarded by the presentation of kidnapped girls. Pre-pubescent girls are a favorite target for abduction due to the belief they are less likely to be infected with AIDS. Male children are abducted to replace fallen fighters, their youth providing a clean slate for Kony to impose his own vision of morality. In the fashion of most religious cults, the LRA now provides these youth with family and purpose. Adults are used for forced labor and may be released or killed when no longer needed – some in the region have been subject to multiple abductions. Due to battlefield losses, desertion and the movement’s extended absence from north Uganda, it is probably safe to say that most members of the LRA now have no connection to the Acholi people.

The local Acholi often support the LRA to earn cash by selling the group marked-up goods or out of concern for abducted relatives. Others support the LRA’s opposition to Museveni, who has very little support in northern Uganda. Supplies of food, arms and other materiel from Khartoum as part of a proxy war with Uganda allowed the LRA to grow in the bush to a force of over 10,000. From their bases in South Sudan the LRA were encouraged to make local attacks against South Sudanese civilians and even to cross the Ugandan border to attack South Sudanese refugee camps there.  Thanks to the patronage of Khartoum, the LRA found itself well-armed with a variety of Soviet/Russian made equipment, including recoilless rifles, anti-tank weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, landmines and the ubiquitous AK-47 assault rifle. At the height of the struggle between Khartoum and the Ugandan-backed SPLA, Kony’s group was even allowed to open offices in Juba and Khartoum. [4]

Life is precarious in the LRA, dependent entirely upon Kony’s moods and the current state of his paranoia. The LRA commander killed one of his chief lieutenants, Alex Otti Lagony, in 1999, opening the door to a series of murders of top LRA commanders who no longer had Kony’s full trust. According to Ugandan journalist Billie O’Kadameri, “When you are with him, it’s like he cannot kill a fly, yet he has a reputation as the deadliest of all commanders. He would give orders to kill as if he was giving orders to serve food.” [5] At the same time, however, many ex-members of the movement, including abductees, have spoken of the sense of purpose they found through a movement that gave them ranks and rewards they could never achieve otherwise.

Operation Iron Fist

In 1999, Sudan and Uganda reached an agreement to stop supplying each other’s rebel factions in their long-standing proxy war. However, Sudan’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) continued to supply Kony as Khartoum sought to keep its options alive.

With serious negotiations finally underway in Sudan in 2002 to bring an end to the two-decade old Sudanese civil war, Khartoum gave the Ugandan military permission to pursue the LRA across the border and attack their bases in South Sudan. The operation was not a success, however, with Kony fleeing to the remote Imatong Mountains where his forces massacred 400 people. LRA activities in northern Uganda actually intensified during Operation Iron Fist.

Unable to defeat the LRA in the field, Kampala referred Kony’s case to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in December, 2003. The ICC eventually charged Kony and four others (Okot Odhiambo, Vincent Otti, Dominic Ongwen and Raska Lukwiya) with war crimes and crimes against humanity. The move was opposed by many in northern Uganda who preferred traditional methods of conflict resolution and Kony has repeatedly cited the ICC’s charges of war crimes as the main issue preventing him from coming in from the bush. Once the ICC becomes involved, however, it is nearly impossible to ask it to abandon its prosecution efforts. Under ICC rules, Kampala cannot request the suspension of arrest warrants once issued, even if Uganda were to reverse the ratification of its agreement to sign on to the ICC. In the meantime, attrition seems to be taking care of at least some of the problem; Odhiambo and eight other commanders were massacred by Kony in April 2008, Otti and a number of his followers were killed in a gunfight with Kony loyalists in October, 2007, and Lukwiya was killed by the UPDF in August, 2006. Despite committing a series of horrific crimes, Ongwen (a.k.a. “The White Ant”) has received support from various academics in the West as a “victim” who is not responsible for his actions since he was abducted and integrated into the LRA while only ten-years-old. [6]

Riek Machar meets with LRA Commanders

Operation Lighting Thunder

After the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) took effective control of South Sudan in 2005, it became a priority for the acting government in the southern capital of Juba to drive the LRA out of South Sudan. Kony’s surrender seemed tantalizingly close in April 2008 following several years of efforts by South Sudanese vice president Riek Machar to bring an end to LRA rampages. Kony, however, failed to show up for the signing of the Final Peace Agreement (FPA) after keeping Machar and a number of dignitaries and observers waiting for days in a bush clearing in Western Equatoria (see Terrorism Monitor, April 16, 2008).

In February 2009, Kony led some 200 followers into the southeastern Central African Republic (CAR). With this area effectively out of the control of the weak central CAR authorities the UPDF was invited in to eliminate Kony’s group, which had begun using a base at Gbassiguri for raids into South Sudan’s Western Equatoria province (New Vision [Kampala], February 27, 2009; September 7, 2009). The LRA was also quick to attack its new neighbors, abducting over 100 children and adolescents from the CAR village of Obo in March, 2009 (Daily Monitor [Kampala], March 12, 2009; April 10, 2009). Fighting in Western Equatoria between the LRA and the local “Arrow Boys” self-defense groups became increasing brutal. With the LRA short on ammunition, Kony’s fighters used amputations and mutilations to terrorize the local population while the Arrow Boys began treating LRA captives in kind (Sudan Tribune, March 6, 2009).

Like the earlier Operation Iron Fist, Operation Lightning Thunder only succeeded in making things worse. Backed by American advisers working out of Uganda, the operation was a major undertaking by the armed forces of Uganda, South Sudan and the DRC. As the shattered LRA scattered into the thick bush the pursuing militaries lost most of the tactical advantages provided by better arms and equipment, finding themselves reduced to splitting up into platoon-sized groups hunting even smaller groups of LRA through the DRC’s Garamba Forest. Groups of LRA fugitives expressed their displeasure at being chased by their usual methods of massacre, mutilation and abduction in the isolated communities of the eastern DRC. As the operation ground to a close in mid-2009, it was generally recognized as a setback in the elimination of the LRA rather than a triumph, despite the elimination of most of the LRA’s bases and several of its leaders.

The SPLA, however, had not given up on the hunt for Kony, and decided to deploy its Special Forces in the hunt for Kony. In Juba it was widely believed that the ruling Islamist National Congress Party (NCP) was continuing to provide covert aid and assistance to the LRA (Daily Nation [Nairobi], September 4, 2009; see also Terrorism Monitor Brief, September 10, 2009). In December, 2009 LRA forces under the command of Dominic Ongwen are believed to have been responsible for the massacre of roughly 300 civilians in the DRC village of Makombo after locals objected to acts of rape, murder and hundreds of abductions carried out by the group (New Vision, March 28, 2010; Daily Monitor, March 29, 2010). [7]

Conclusion

Kony’s forces no longer fight on behalf of the Acholi, nor do they fight in their interests.  Forced from Uganda and their bases in Sudan, the sole remaining cause of the LRA is the preservation of the LRA.  The vague ideology of the movement has always served as little more than a mask for the personality cult surrounding Joseph Kony despite the efforts of some to cloak the movement in the guise of Acholi liberation. To fight, to murder, to mutilate – these are ways to satisfy Kony and live to kill another day. The rewards for loyalty and success are tangible, while the penalty for failure and disloyalty is an ever real threat.

Despite being one of the world’s most incommunicative rebel leaders and never having shown particular indications of ideological brilliance, Kony has nevertheless survived by masterfully manipulating those who would seek to use him, whether as a pawn in Sudan’s civil war or as a means of maintaining just the right amount of insecurity in the expanding military state of Uganda.  American military cooperation for the Ugandan effort against the LRA will further cement ties between the two militaries, which already cooperate closely in Somalia.

Both the war in Uganda and the aid programs that sustain it have become a kind of industry. The Ugandan Army is very much a profit-making institution, whether through diverting public funds to provide for thousands of “ghost soldiers” (in which arms, food, clothing and salaries for non-existent troops are collected by corrupt officers for resale, sometimes to the LRA), or through the exploitation of natural resources in areas where the Ugandan Army operates, such as the teak wood of South Sudan or the minerals of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Efforts have even been made to tie the LRA to the wider global “War on Terrorism” in an attempt to tap U.S. funding for counterterrorism campaigns; according to Robert Masolo, the Directorf-General of Uganda’s External Security Organization (ESO), Osama bin Laden trained “the LRA into killer squads in Sudan, along with other al-Qaeda terrorists…” (New Vision, June 12, 2007).

The continuing threat posed by Kony’s LRA helps preserve the Museveni regime and the Ugandan military budget. Northern victims of the LRA now gathered in IDP camps have never supported Museveni or his party, so there is little political cost inside Uganda for a prolonged counter-insurgency. Peace talks have often been interrupted by government attacks or offensives, often on the grounds that Kony was using the talks to regroup or re-arm. Kony has also walked out of many negotiations, some of which seemed frustratingly close to bringing an end to the LRA’s depredations. However, the introduction of new tracking technology and military assistance from U.S. Special Forces may soon spell the end of Joseph Kony unless the “spirits” that possess him can once more save the LRA leader from imminent destruction.

Notes

1. http://www.lracrisistracker.com/.

2. Heike, Behrend, Alice Lakwena and the Holy Spirits, War in Northern Uganda, 1985-97, Ohio University Press, 2000.

3. Mareike Schomerus, “The Lord’s Resistance Army in Sudan: A History and Overview,” Small Arms Survey, Geneva, 2007.

4. Matthew Green, The Wizard of the Nile: The Hunt for Africa’s Most Wanted,: London, 2008, p. 175.

5. Quoted in Green, 2008, p.186

6/ See the statement of University of British Columbia professor Erin Baines, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56XadQ32lkw, and “Complicating victims and perpetrators in Uganda: On Dominic Ongwen,” Justice and Reconciliation Project Northern Uganda/ Liu Institute for Global Issues Field Note, 7 October 2008, http://www.humansecuritygateway.com/documents/JRP_dominicongwen.pdf.

7. See http://lracrisistracker.theresolve.org/media/video/makombo-massacres.

This article first appeared in the November 23, 2011 issue of the Jamestown Foundation’s Militant Leadership Monitor.

Somali Islamists and Congo-Based Rebels Threaten Security in Burundi

Andrew McGregor

November 18, 2010

Shaykh Fu’ad Muhammad Qalaf “Shongole,” a leading member of Somalia’s al-Shabaab Islamist militia, told a gathering in Mogadishu on November 4 that Bujumbura and Kampala would be the target of al-Shabaab attacks if Burundi and Uganda did not immediately withdraw their troops from Mogadishu (Sunday Vision [Kampala], November 6; Garowe Online, November 4). Al-Shabaab forces have been strongly pressured in recent weeks by a Transitional Federal Government (TFG) offensive supported by Burundian and Ugandan troops of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM).

Burundi 1FNL Leader Agathon Rwasa

A more immediate threat comes from the Forces nationales de liberation (FNL – National Liberation Front), formerly known as the Parti pour la libération du peuple hutu (PALIPEHUTU), a Hutu rebel movement formed in 1980 in Hutu refugee camps in Tanzania. Agathon Rwasa, leader of the FNL, is a former Hutu militia leader who took control of the party in 2002. Rwasa fled Bujumbura in July after the opposition accused the government of rigging local polls in May. Rwasa later claimed in an audiotape that he had feared for his life in Burundi, but is believed to be preparing a new round of armed opposition to the Tutsi-dominated government of Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza from bases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) (Daily Nation [Nairobi], August 1).

FNL members who remain engaged in the political process deposed Rwasa as party leader in late July, saying the FNL had “lost a lot by pulling out of the electoral process” (Daily Nation [Nairobi], August 1). Rwasa was replaced by Emmanuel Miburo as the party’s new chairman.

Security appears to be breaking down in the Burundi capital as well as along the northwest frontier with the DRC. On the evening of October 25 one group of gunmen attacked a police post in the capital while another group attacked the guards of intelligence chief General Adolphe Nshimirimana (AFP, October 26). Though observers saw Rwasa’s hand behind the attacks, Burundian authorities lay the blame for all such attacks on “unidentified bandits.” The renewed violence has raised fears that a new civil war could be in the offing – Burundi suffered a thirteen year conflict between Hutus and Tutsis that claimed 300,000 lives from 1993 to 2006. Rwasa’s movement was involved in two notorious atrocities – the 2000 “Titanic Express” massacre of 21 civilians on a bus and the 2004 Gatumba massacre of 152 Banyamulenge (Congolese Tutsis).

Burundi 2General Adolphe Nshimirimana

Despite the careful language used by Bujumbura, a senior government official recently told the French press that Rwasa was reorganizing and rearming in the Sud-Kivu province of the DRC and had reached terms with a Hutu rebel movement led by Rwandan genocidaires active in the eastern DRC, the Forces démocratiques de libération du Rwanda (FDLR). There are also suggestions that Rwasa may be cooperating with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), best known for its mass atrocities in northern Uganda. Rwasa’s deputy described the allegations as an attempt to “demonize” the movement (AFP, October 22).

The army has also engaged armed gangs in the Rugazi Commune of Bubanza Province (Burundi’s provinces are divided into “communes” and further sub-divided into “collines”), a stronghold of the FNL (AFP, November 10; AfricaNews.com, November 11). The Rukoko Marshes and the neighboring Kibira forest near the border with the DRC have also been the sites of repeated engagements between insurgents and government forces (AFP, November 2). The marshes are only a few miles north of Bujumbura and have become largely depopulated due to attacks on the civilian population by gunmen (AFP, September 18). FNL fighters also clashed recently with troops of the DRC south of Bukavu, the capital of Sud-Kivu province (AFP, November 6; Net Press [Bujumbura], November 9; RFI, November 9).

This article first appeared in the November 18, 2010 issue of the Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor

Cracks Begin to Show in the Lord’s Resistance Army

Andrew McGregor

November 13, 2009

A sustained cross-border campaign by Uganda’s Special Forces to eliminate the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in cooperation with the military of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) of South Sudan appears to be yielding results nearly a year after Operation Lightning Thunder began.

LRA PatrolLRA Patrol

The perilous condition of the scattered LRA forces was best revealed by the surrender of senior LRA commander Charles Arop, notorious for his supervision of a typically senseless LRA massacre of 143 Congolese civilians in the village of Faradje using axes, clubs and machetes on Christmas Day, 2008 (New Vision [Kampala], November 5; AFP, November 5).  Continuing in a means of propagating itself, the LRA kidnapped 160 children for use as labor, sex-slaves or fighters (the latter must usually murder their own parents as part of the LRA’s method of breaking the mental resistance of its recruits). Arop recently commanded a force of over 100 fighters, but continuous attacks by the Ugandans devastated his command. Referring to Arop’s surrender, Lieutenant-Colonel Felix Kulayigye of the Ugandan People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) noted, “He was only left with one fighter, so what choice did he have?” (AFP, November 5).

Among those to come in recently was the last of the four wives of feared LRA Brigade Commander Okello Kalalang, who was killed in a September bombardment of LRA positions in the Central African Republic (CAR).

Other rebels are reportedly eager to surrender due to the deteriorating conditions in LRA camps, though all are aware that escape attempts are punished by the LRA with instant death. The breakup of the LRA into smaller units following the onslaught of Operation Lightning Thunder has weakened the movement’s capabilities, with the small units constantly on the move. According to the recently surrendered Lieutenant Francis Opira; “Life has become hard. We are few, which forces us to do a lot of work. Walking in the long bushes has also become tiresome” (New Vision, November 3). The large number of LRA officers and NCOs that have turned themselves in demonstrates a loosening of the iron discipline that once kept the LRA in the field despite a distinct absence of popular support. Without constant indoctrination, many of the abductees who form the majority of the LRA’s strength have begun to think of a return home under the lenient conditions being offered by Kampala.

A group of nine LRA members who surrendered following a late October battle in the Central African Republic cited a power vacuum in the leadership and a shortage of food in the bush as the main reasons behind their submission. All nine were under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Otto Malaba and Lieutenant Ochen, who continue to operate along the DRC-CAR border (Daily Monitor [Kampala], November 2).

This article first appeared in the November 13, 2009 issue of the Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Monitor