AU, UN take stand against Kony

As Rwanda marks the 18th Anniversary of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, the menace posed by the Ugandan fugitive Joseph Kony and his ragtag Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has once again sent senior officials from the United Nations and African Union (AU) to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and the Central African Republic (CAR) to strengthen a newly-launched joint initiative to counter the threat of the rebels.In the DRC, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Central Africa, Abou Moussa, and the AU Special Envoy on the LRA issue, Francisco Madeira, held a working session in Kinshasa with authorities and regional and international partners involved in the fight against the LRA, which the AU has declared a “terrorist group.” During the six-day visit, which began earlier this week, the two officials also traveled to Dungu in the DRC’s north-eastern Orientale Province, where the DRC component of the Regional Task Force (RTF), authorised by the AU to track the LRA, will be based. “We are very concerned about the repeated attacks by the LRA in this region and elsewhere,” said Moussa, who is also the head of the UN Regional Office for Central Africa (UNOCA), in a statement sent to media houses. “It must stop now.” More than 4,200 people have been displaced as a result of LRA activity in Orientale Province since the beginning of this year. The group was formed in the 1980s in Uganda and for over 15 years its attacks were mainly directed against Ugandan civilians and security forces, which, in 2002, dislodged the rebels. It then exported its activities to Uganda’s neighbouring countries, with practices that include the recruitment of children, rapes, killing and maiming, and sexual slavery. From Dungu, the UN-AU delegation will today travel to Obo in south-eastern CAR, where another RTF contingent will be based. The officials will meet with the CAR and Ugandan soldiers who are currently participating in anti-LRA operations, with the support of a military unit from United States. “We learned that the situation has improved in Obo,” said Moussa. “But we must remain vigilant, especially since several other cities in the south-east continue to suffer from the attacks of the LRA.” The joint UN-AU mission to the DRC and CAR follows the March launch in Juba, South Sudan, of the UN-supported and AU-led Regional Cooperation Initiative against the LRA (RCI-LRA) and its military component, the RTF. The RTF will comprise 5,000 soldiers drawn form the four countries affected by the LRA – Uganda, DRC, CAR and South Sudan. The task force has set up its headquarters in Yambio, South Sudan. It will have bases in Dungu, Obo and Nzara, South Sudan.