| | In early February 2004, members of Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) attacked a camp of internally displaced persons near Lira and killed over forty civilians, leaving charred bodies and over a hundred smouldering huts in their wake. The event garnered minimal international coverage in large part because such attacks have become almost regular features of life in northern Uganda.
The LRA is led by Joseph Kony and has been active in destabilising northern Uganda since 1987. Very little more is actually known about the LRA, but numerous theories abound. An earlier paper (Dunn, 2003) seeks to examine the merits of the main theories seeking to explain the causes and continuation of the conflict. In the first of these, Kony is described as a 'madman' who is engaging in an irrational campaign of violence and terror with no purpose or ultimate goal. Second, the conflict is regarded as the result of the serious and legitimate complaints the Acholi and other peoples in the north have against the central government of Uganda. Third, the conflict is understood as the by-product of the larger geopolitical rivalry between the Sudanese government and Uganda. Within this theory, Kony and his soldiers are seen as hired guns who are used by the Sudanese government to destabilise Uganda, as a tit-for-tat of Uganda support for the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). Fourth, it is held that the army and government of Yoweri Museveni actually have no interest in defeating the LRA at all. Either the government doesn't consider it a major concern, or they are in fact exploiting the conflict for their own political purposes.
Finally, there is the view that a 'political economy of conflict' has emerged in northern Uganda, where various actors in the conflict are economically benefiting from the continuation of the war, and thus have no interest in bringing about its conclusion. None of these on their own provides an explanation of all the circumstances surrounding the conflict, and readers need a more nuanced understanding of what is a rather complicated conflict. |
