Lord's Resistance Army
The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) is a militant movement, which is described by some as a new religious movement or a cult which is based on a mix between African mysticism and Christian fundamentalism.
LRA operates in Uganda and South Sudan. Since 2005 there have been claims that the group has entered the Democratic Republic of Congo, but in 2007 it was reported that they were in Central African Republic. Since then it is belived that they have returned to DR Congo.
Approximately 25 000 children have been abducted by the Lord's resistance army.
HISTORY
In the mid-1990s, the LRA was strengthened by military support from the government of Sudan, which was retaliating against Ugandan government support for rebels in what would become South Sudan. The LRA fought with the NRA army which led to mass atrocities such as the killing or abduction of several hundred villagers in Atiak in 1995 and the kidnapping of 139 schoolgirls in Aboke in 1996. LRA are famous for their child-abductions, but that is far from all they do.
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the LRA attacks and the government's counter-insurgency measures have resulted in the displacement of nearly 95 percent of the Acholi population in three districts of northern Uganda.
The Ugandan government and the LRA signed a truce on 26 August 2006. Under the terms of the agreement, LRA forces would leave Uganda and gather in two assembly areas in the remote Garamba National Park area of northern Democratic Republic of Congo that the Ugandan government agreed not to attack.
In December 2008-March 2009, however, the armed forces of Uganda, the DR Congo and South Sudan launched aerial attacks and raids on the LRA camps in Garamba, destroying them, but the efforts to inflict a final military defeat on the LRA were not fully successful. Rather, the U.S.-supported Operation Lightning Thunder resulted in brutal revenge attacks by scattered LRA remnants, with over 1,000 people killed and hundreds abducted in Congo and South Sudan, and hundreds of thousands were displaced while fleeing the massacres. The military action in the DRC did not result in the capture or killing of Kony, who remained elusive.
Eyewitness accounts from park rangers, Lord's Resistance Army escapees and recent senior defectors report that the fugitive warlord Joseph Kony ordered African forest elephants to be killed in Garamba national park in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the tusks sent to him. LRA fighters are trading ivory for arms, ammunition, and food.
Watch Kony's Ivory for details.
Accused by the UN of murder, abduction, mutilation, child-sex slavery and forcing children to participate in hostilities among other things.
Kony's Ivory
The illegal wildlife trade is annually worth more than
19 billion US dollars.
The Western Black Rhino was declared extinct in 2013.
Don't let this happen to the elephants as well.
