Lords resistance army strategic response: an international strategy for a regional threat - Term Paper Example

Download file to see previous pages... The attacks on LRA have splintered the group into small units scattered across broad areas of Central African Republic (CAR), South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).Nevertheless, LRA fighters continue to commit terrible atrocities against civilian populations in these three countries. The LRA has reportedly killed over 2,400 and abducted over 3,400 people since 2008 alone. As of September 2011, the LRA has displaced an estimated 440,000 people in the Central Africa region. While the LRA does not constitute a direct threat to the United State’s national security interests, it does poses a direct threat to regional stability in the Central Africa region.Strategic Estimate of the Situation.Since the early 1990’s, the Sudanese government has used the LRA as a proxy force against Uganda in retaliation for Uganda’s support for the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), then a southern Sudanese-led rebel group.The Sudanese government provided the LRA with arms and basis in South Sudan to attack Uganda Defense Forces (UDPF) and southern Sudanese rebels. In 1999, Uganda and Sudan reached an agreement to not support rebel groups from each other's territories, and in 2002, Sudan allowed Ugandan troops to enter South Sudan to hunt down the LRA militias. Since 2006, Joseph Kony and his followers, now reduced to a few hundred, scattered in the Central African region of South Sudan, Central African Republic and the DRC. ...
eting between an LRA delegation and Sudanese authorities, as an indication to request assistance, including safe passage and asylum for Kony.5 However, the State Department saw no evidence to corroborate allegations of continued Sudanese support for the LRA6. There is a general consensus among analysts that without Sudanese support in the past, the LRA would have ceased to exist as earlier as 1990’s. Historical and Political From the 1890’s up until 1962, Uganda was under British colonial rule. The Ugandan military was exclusively drawn from northern Uganda and particularly from Acholi’s tribe. However, when the British granted Uganda independence in 1962, northerners assumed power and excluded southerners from power sharing, which let Yoweri Museveni, a southerner, to form the National Resistance Army (NRA) to fight the northern rule. In 1986, Yoweri Museveni took power, ending nearly a decade of rule by northerners.7 Following Museveni’s victory, Alice Lakwena, an Acholi spiritual leader, emerged as a leader among northern rebel factions who sought to overthrow the new government. Lakwena’s Holy Spirit Movement (HSM) was defeated by the Ugandan military in 1987 and Joseph Kony took over the leadership as a successor rebel in the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Kony’s LRA began to target civilians in northern Uganda as part of the drive to recruit civilians into it military by force, which led to mass displacement and erosion of popular support from the community. Since the 1990’s, the LRA political ideology, which originality sought to overthrow Museveni’s government and reinstate democratic rule in Uganda, began to degenerate into a cult-like religion. Its ideology became mysterious, politically disoriented, and reclusively Acholi’s in its ...Download file to see next pagesRead More