Forgotten Victims of the LRA

Lucia Amara, the mother of two boys aged 14 and 16, is among the forgotten thousands of refugees in Southern Sudan who fled their villages in the face of brutal attacks from Uganda’s rebel Lord’s Resistance Army.



Originally from the village of Sindiru some 130 kilometres south of Juba, the capital of South Sudan, she and her sons James and Hillary trekked to the Mondikolog camp for internally displaced refugees in 2006.



“We walked in a group of 20 people after the LRA [Lord’s Resistance Army] attacked our village,” Amara told IWPR. “It took us two days to reach Mondikolog camp.”



“The LRA attacked our village, abducted people, and looted all our properties,” she complained. “We were only left with the clothes we had on our bodies during the time of attack.”



Officials in South Sudan suspect that the attacks may have been carried out not by the Ugandan rebels, but by renegade Sudanese militias consisting of disaffected soldiers from both sides of the 20-year war between South Sudan and the Khartoum government.



Despite that, Amara insisted the LRA was to blame.



“They were speaking in Acholi,” she said, referring to a language spoken in both northern Uganda and South Sudan, and used by LRA members.



Amara noted that when the Sudanese peace agreement between was signed in January 2005, the region briefly had peace.



“We never experienced any attack in our village,” Amara said. “We were living in peace until these LRA came and displaced us.”



Amara dates the upsurge in violence to late 2005 and 2006, when the LRA retreated from northern Uganda and crossed South Sudan to reach Garamba Park in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo.



Some of those who were abducted but later escaped said the attackers were the LRA, she explained.



“My husband is among those abducted, and up to now, I don’t know whether he is alive or dead.”



Like the more than 1.7 million internal refugees displaced by the war in northern Uganda, Amara and other Sudanese refugees at the Mondikolog camp are looking forward to a formal peace deal between Uganda and the LRA.



Peace talks have been going on in Juba since July 2006, but have recently been halted as LRA representatives toured northern Uganda for discussions on reconciliation. No date for a resumption has been set.



Among those worried about security in the region is Alesio Emor Ojetuk, the governor of the Sudanese state of Eastern Equatoria, who said the ambushes, attacks and abduction of civilians in his province were the handiwork of Ugandan rebels.



Ojetuk believes the trouble in his state came after LRA units gathered at a designated assembly point at Owingkibul in Eastern Equatoria, but then refused to surrender as agreed.



Instead, the rebels “continued looting food from my citizens”, he said. “That was why l told the [autonomous] government of Southern Sudan that l never wanted the LRA to assemble in my state any more.



“If the LRAs were to again assemble in Eastern Equatoria State, I was going to attack them for their wrongdoings to the innocent civilians.”



As a result, the LRA then agreed to reassemble at Ri-Kwangba, in Western Equatoria on the border with DRC. But that gathering has not yet happened, Ojetuk noted.



Clement Wani Konga, the governor of Central Equatoria State, also blamed the LRA for attacks in 2006 on Gumbo, a small town just six kilometres south of Juba, as well as on other villages in his state.



But the situation has been quiet for most of the past year, he said, a fact which he attributed to several factors, “Since the LRA were told to assemble in Western Equatoria, and the remaining Sudanese Armed Forces redeployed to the north, attacks have stopped and civilians displaced are now returning back home.”



Because the population in South Sudan is mobile, officials say it is difficult to estimate the exact number of refugees displaced by LRA activity.



More than 3,000 people moved into the Mondikolog camp in 2006. Four other camps - Igulla, Okitiri, Lobonok and Rajaf – also contain large numbers of refugees from around Juba, all displaced by the LRA, officials say.



Life in the camps has been difficult, and the refugees struggle to meet their most basic needs.



“We don’t know what to do,” complained Venesto Ladu, one of the camp elders. “The United Nations has forgotten about us since we ran to this place.”



Although most refugees have cultivated plots of land around the camps, their crops and vegetables are unprotected and are often trampled and eaten during the night by wandering herds of livestock belonging to the local communities.



Because of the poverty in the region, the local villagers are unable to compensate the refugees for their losses, Ladu said.



While parents struggle to grow food, their children must battle the elements to get an education.



At the Okitiri primary school near the Egulla refugee camp some 200 kilometres south of Juba, about 75 refugee children are taught with only the trees to shade them, and they have to run for cover at the first sign of rain.



“Pupil’s performances are very poor because there is no food and water supply for feeding them in the camp,” said head teacher Christine Abu.



Despite the lack of classrooms, she said, “We shall continue to operate here until the government guarantees our security in [our home village] Parajok.”



Most of those in the Egulla camp were displaced in December 2006 from Parajok and another village, Panyaquara, she explained. The refuges are ethnic Acholi, like the LRA rebels, but are natives of Eastern Equatoria.



Emilio Igga, the commissioner of Magwi County, said the LRA attacks on villages like Parajok stopped in April 2007 after he complained about them in a phone call to former LRA deputy commander Vincent Otti.



“Since our discussion, no attacked have happened,” Igga said.



Otti, however, was reportedly killed by LRA commander Joseph Kony in October 2007.



Igga said the Sudan Peoples’ Liberation Army – the former guerrilla movement that fought a long war against Khartoum before the 2005 peace deal - was deployed in the county, and this has helped secure the area.



The recent quiet has allowed people like Amara and her two boys to return to their home village after two years in the refugee camp, but now they wonder whether they made a good decision.



“Today at home we are still facing similar problems like in the camp. We love staying at home,” she said, but added that facilities like schools, hospitals, water and roads are no longer available.



Hamid Taban is an IWPR contributor in Juba.