Congo carnage as US-backed raid backfires

Published on Saturday 7 February 2009 18:32

THE American military helped plan and pay for a recent attack on a notorious Ugandan rebel group – but the offensive went wrong and scattered the rebel fighters, who carried out a wave of massacres as they fled, killing up to 900 civilians.

The December operation was led by Uganda and aimed to crush the Lord's Resistance Army, a brutal rebel group that had been hiding out in a Congolese national park. But the rebel leaders escaped, breaking their fighters into small groups that continue to ransack towns in north-eastern Congo, hacking, burning, shooting and clubbing civilians to death.

No US forces were involved in the ground fighting in this rugged corner of Congo, but human rights advocates and villagers complain that the Ugandans and the Congolese troops did little or nothing to protect nearby villages, despite a history of rebel reprisals against civilians.

The US has been training Ugandan troops in counter-terrorism for several years, but its role in the operation has not been widely known. It is the first time the US has helped plan such a specific offensive with Uganda, said senior American military officials. They said 17 advisers and analysts from the Pentagon's new Africa Command worked closely with Ugandan officers, providing satellite phones, intelligence and $1m in fuel.

The troops did not seal off the rebels' escape routes or deploy soldiers to many of the nearby towns where the rebels slaughtered people in churches and even tried to twist off toddlers' heads.

"The operation was poorly planned and poorly executed," said Julia Spiegel, a Uganda-based researcher for the Enough Project, which campaigns against genocide. The massacres were "the LRA's standard operating procedure, and the regional governments knew this".

American officials conceded that the operation did not go as well as intended, and that villagers had been left exposed. "We provided insights and alternatives for them (African forces] to consider, but their choices were their choices," said one US official. "In the end, it was not our operation."

The rebel units are now moving from village to village, leaving a wake of scorched huts and crushed skulls. Witnesses say they have kidnapped hundreds of children and marched them off into the bush, the latest conscripts in their slave army.

The LRA started more than 20 years ago as a cultish rebellion to overthrow the Ugandan government. The fighters hailed their leader, Joseph Kony, as a saviour for the historically oppressed Acholi people. But it soon devolved into something more sinister, with the LRA killing tens of thousands of people in northern Uganda, slicing off lips and terrorising children, before the Ugandan Army drove it out about five years ago. Kony then marched his prepubescent death squads and dozens of teenage brides to Garamba National Park.

Kony, already indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague for crimes against humanity, refused to sign a peace treaty. After that, said Ugandan army spokesman Major Felix Kulayigye, "the only option left open to us was the military option".

Ugandan asked the US for help, which was authorised by President George Bush in November last year, a former senior Bush official said.

The plan was for the Ugandan military to bomb Kony's camp and then cut off his 700 fighters with more than 6,000 Ugandan and Congolese troops.

On December 14, fog delayed the attack, Ugandan officials said, and they lost the element of surprise. By the time Ugandan helicopters bombed Kony's hut, it was empty.

On Christmas Day, villagers in Faradje, a town near the national park, walked out of church as 50 to 70 armed men emerged from the bush.

The armed men spoke a strange language, probably Acholi, but there was no misunderstanding them after the first machete was swung. Around 150 were killed. Several other villages were simultaneously attacked. In one town, after the rebels killed 80 churchgoers, they ate the villagers' Christmas feast and then dozed among the corpses, according to Human Rights Watch, which documented the massacre.

And the killing continues. "These guys are just moving around, doing whatever they want, killing, raping, whatever," said Charles Gaudry of Doctors Without Borders, which says more than 50 villages in the area where it works have been attacked. "There's zero protection."