Mutilation Sparks Uganda Outrage Over War

LIRA, Uganda (Reuters) - Sophia Apio dared not utter a sound as Ugandan rebels sliced off her lips and ears with a razor blade. They had threatened to hack her to death with machetes if she cried.

Apio, her husband Ojede and six others were captured by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) while scavenging for food in northern Uganda, where a 17-year-old war has forced about 1.5 million people to flee their homes.

Shadowy LRA rebels led by Joseph Kony, a former altar boy turned self-proclaimed mystic, typically target civilians in their brutal war against the government. snip

"Then he told his boys to take off my blouse and he ordered me to have intercourse with my dead husband," Apio whispers amid the clamour of a busy hospital ward where she is recovering. snip

"A lot of southerners say 'Oh, it's just those savages fighting each other again,' when they talk about things up here," said one Catholic missionary working in northern Uganda.

* Joseph Kony, the LRA’s messianic leader, has mixed traditional Acholi beliefs with smatterings of Christianity and even Islam to hold his followers in an evil vice. Both children and adult followers believe that he is imbued with spirits that allow him to see into your mind and predict the future. “You take a terrified, traumatised 11-year-old child, you force them to kill and you brainwash them and you have a monster,” Father Carlos said. “This is one the reasons why the LRA are so brutal. There is a reward system and the children want to impress their peers.” Geofrey’s tale bears this out. He says that he was older than the children who have ruined his life, but remembers an older commander in the background.- "‘They tied me up and hacked off my lips’ ; An army of child tyrants is terrorising nothern Uganda," by Jonathan Clayton, The Times (U.K.) 07/19/03

1997 - 2000 : (UGANDA : AL QAEDA TRIES TO ESTABLISH TERRORIST CELL WITHIN UGANDA ; SEE ALSO LORD'S RESISTANCE ARMY) Ugandan intelligence is aware that terrorists of the Al-qaeda tried to create a cell in Uganda, between 1997 and 2000. But they failed, partly because of the efforts and intelligence capabilities of Uganda, and secondly, Uganda has no natural suicide bombers. "We are aware that they tried to use local people, but we were able to arrest many of them before they could establish themselves," Mayombo says. The Kenyan al-Qaeda cell was much easier to set up because Kenya has got a sizeable number of people of Arabic origin in its population, compared to Uganda. The Arabs are the natural suicide bombers. Actually, no blacks or Westerners have been reported in suicide bombings. First, they tried to connect up with Kony's Lord's Resistance Army.
(* My note: Hmmm, al Qaeda fundamentalists tried to connect with the mishmash that is the LRA?)
However, Kony had other ideas and turned out to be difficult to deal with. Although, he was given initial funding, and some of his men were trained in al-Qaeda camps. - "Can Uganda Handle Terrorism?," OPINION, by Joshua Kato, Kampala, New Vision (Kampala), May 22, 2003 ,Posted to the web May 23, 2003

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Other trivia about Uganda:

APRIL 2001 : (BEKKAH ABDUL NASIR, 'CHIEF OF DIPLOMACY' OF A UGANDAN GROUP TIED WITH ISLAMIST ORGANIZATIONS KNOWN AS THE 'ALLIED DEMOCRATIC FORCES,' aka ADF, ALLEGEDLY SENT A LETTER TO THE HEAD OF THE IRAQI INTELLIGENCE SERVICE INFORMING THEM OF PROGRESS MADE IN TRYING TO ESTABLISH AN INTERNATIONAL MUJAHADEEN TEAM TO SMUGGLE ARMS TO JIHADISTS WORLDWIDE - LETTER REFERS TO BAGHDAD AS "HEADQUARTERS FOR INTERNATIONAL HOLY WAR NETWORK") In a letter to the head of the Iraqi spy agency, a senior ADF operative outlined his group's efforts to set up an "international mujaheddin team." Its mission, he said, "will be to smuggle arms on a global scale to holy warriors fighting against U.S., British and Israeli influences in Africa, the Middle East, Asia and the Far East."
The letter, dated April 2001, was signed: "Your Brother, Bekkah Abdul Nassir, Chief of Diplomacy ADF Forces." [Bekkah Abdul] Nassir offered to "vet, recruit and send youth to train for the jihad" at a center in Baghdad, which he described as a "headquarters for international Holy Warrior network." It was not clear whether the center was established. "We should not allow the enemy to focus on Afghanistan and Iraq, but we should attack their international criminal forces inside every base," the letters said. The authenticity of the letters, however, could not be verified. - "Papers connect Iraqi spies to African terrorist group," BY PHILIP SMUCKER AND ADRIAN BLOMFIELD, Chicago Sun-Times, April 18, 2003

1980s LATE : (UGANDA : THE LORD'S RESISTANCE ARMY [LRA] IS FOUNDED ) Founded in the late 1980s with the ostensible goal of overthrowing the government, the Lord’s Resistance Army has always been steeped in cultlike mysticism that, although proclaiming to be Christian in origin, is often more like witchcraft in practice.

In 1986, the government experienced a coup d’etat that removed then-President Tito Okello from power. Okello was an ethnic Acholi, the dominant group in the north, and the Acholi feared not only their loss of power in the government and military, but reprisals for the army’s actions stamping out a counterinsurgency earlier in the 1980s, a long-running operation estimated to have cost the lives of up to 300,000 people.

Among the many popular insurgency groups formed after the coup was the Holy Spirit Movement, led by Alice Auma, a local Acholi spirit medium and healer who was said to have been possessed by a dead Italian army officer named Lakwena. The spirit directed her to become a military commander and to overthrow the capital of Kampala. The Holy Spirit Movement was initially very successful and was led by a vanguard of different spirits, all of whom possessed Auma at various times during the campaign.

Although the rebels were soundly defeated on the edge of the capital by government forces in late 1986, the insurgency’s initial successes led to a boom in those who suddenly claimed the ability to channels spirits for military purposes. One such practitioner was Joseph Kony, who claimed possession by the spirit of Juma Oris, a former government minister under former President Idi Amin [a muslim], the dictator believed to be responsible for the torture and murder of as many as half a million Ugandans since the 1970s.

------------ Into Africa: Fort Collins missionaries prepare to challenge Ugandan rebels’ concept of God , Fort Collins Weekly ^ | August 9. 2006 | Greg Campbell , Posted on ‎8‎/‎20‎/‎2006‎ ‎8‎:‎49‎:‎47‎ ‎PM by TheConservativeCitizen

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