Uganda's north and south are politically divided. The south and east are largely inhabited by
Bantu-speakers, such as the
Baganda people, who were historically agriculturists. Uganda's north is largely inhabited by the
Nilotic-speaking Acholi, who had engaged in hunting, farming, and livestock herding in the past. The ethnic and cultural tensions within Uganda grew with time following the creation of the
Protectorate of Uganda in 1894. While the agricultural Baganda people worked closely with the British, the Acholi and other northern ethnic groups supplied much of the national manual labor and came to comprise a majority of the military. The southern region became the center of commercial development. The livestock-raising Acholi from the north of Uganda were resented for dominating the army and police. Following the country's
independence in 1962, Uganda's ethnic groups continued to compete with each other within the bounds of Uganda's new political system.
1986–2000 In 1986, the armed rebellion led by
Yoweri Museveni's
NRA won the
Ugandan Bush War and took control of the country. The victors sought vengeance against ethnic groups in the North of Uganda. Their activities included Operation Simsim, which engaged in burning, looting, and killings of locals. Such acts of violence led to the formation of rebel groups from the ranks of the previous Ugandan army, the
Uganda National Liberation Army. Many of those groups made peace with Museveni. The southern-dominated army, however, did not stop attacking civilians in the north of the country. Therefore, by late 1987 to early 1988, a civilian resistance movement led by
Alice Auma was formed.
Joseph Kony would later preach a similar superstition, encouraging soldiers to use oil to draw a cross on their chest as protection from bullets. During a later interview, however, Auma distanced herself from Kony, claiming that the Holy Spirit did not want soldiers to kill civilians or prisoners of war. Kony sought to align himself with Auma and, in turn, garner support from her constituents, even going so far as to claim they were cousins. Meanwhile, he gained a reputation as having been possessed by spirits and became a spiritual figure or a medium. He and a small group of followers first moved beyond his home village of Odek on 1 April 1987. By August 1987, Auma's Holy Spirit Mobile Force scored several victories on the battlefield and began a march toward the capital,
Kampala. In 1988, after the Holy Spirit Movement was decisively defeated in the
Jinja District and Auma fled to
Kenya, Kony seized the opportunity to recruit the Holy Spirit remnants. The LRA occasionally carried out local attacks to underline the inability of the government to protect the population. The fact that most NRA government forces, in particular former members of the Federal Democratic Movement (FEDEMO), In March 1991, the Ugandan government started Operation North, which combined efforts to destroy the LRA, while disrupting popular support for the group through heavy-handed tactics. As part of Operation North, the army created the "Arrow Groups", village guards mostly armed with bows and arrows. The creation of the Arrow Groups angered Kony, who began to feel that he no longer had the support of the population. After the failure of Operation North,
Betty Oyella Bigombe initiated the first face-to-face meeting between representatives of the LRA and the NRA government. The rebels asked for a general amnesty for their combatants and to "return home", but the government's stance was confused by disagreement over the credibility of the LRA negotiators and political infighting. which was retaliating against Ugandan government support for rebels in what would become
South Sudan. The LRA fought the NRA, leading to mass atrocities such as the
killing or abduction of several hundred villagers in
Atiak in 1995 and the
kidnapping of 139 school girls in
Aboke in 1996 that were forced to become soldiers and also sex slaves to the soldiers. The government created the so-called "protected camps" beginning in 1996. The LRA declared a short-lived ceasefire for the duration of
1996 Ugandan presidential election, possibly in the hope that Yoweri Museveni would be defeated. Based on 1999
UNICEF data, over 6,000 children were held by LRA rebels in Northern Uganda.
2001–2006 In March 2002, the NRA, now the
UPDF, launched a massive military offensive code-named Operation Iron Fist against LRA bases in southern Sudan, with agreement from the
National Islamic Front. In retaliation, the LRA attacked the refugee camps in northern Uganda and the
Eastern Equatoria in southern Sudan (now South Sudan), brutally killing hundreds of civilians. By 2004, according to the UPDF spokesperson
Shaban Bantariza, mediation efforts by the
Carter Center and
Pope John Paul II had been spurned by Kony. In February 2004, the LRA unit led by
Okot Odhiambo attacked the
Barlonyo internally displaced person camp, killing over 300 people and abducting many others. In 2006,
UNICEF estimated that the LRA had abducted at least 25,000 children since the conflict began. (IDP) camps, such as this Labuje IDP camp near
Kitgum, Uganda, in 2005. According to the
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the LRA attacks and the government's counterinsurgency measures resulted in the displacement of nearly 95 percent of the Acholi population in three districts of northern Uganda. By 2006, 1.7 million people lived in more than 200 IDP camps in northern Uganda. These camps had some of the highest mortality rates in the world. The
Ugandan Ministry of Health and partners estimated that, through the first seven months of 2005, about 1,000 people were dying weekly, chiefly from
malaria and
AIDS. During the same time period of January–July 2005, the LRA abducted 1,286 Ugandans (46.4 percent of whom were children under the age of 15 years), and violence accounted for 9.4 percent of the 28,283 deaths, occurring mostly outside camps.
2007–present In 2006–2008,
a series of meetings were held in
Juba, Sudan, between the government of Uganda and the LRA, mediated by the south Sudanese separatist leader
Riek Machar. 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 in the northern DR Congo that the Ugandan government agreed not to attack. During December 2008, the LRA
massacred at least 143 people and abducted 180 at a concert celebration sponsored by the Roman Catholic church in
Faradje in DR Congo. The LRA struck several other communities in near-simultaneous attacks: 75 people were murdered in a church near
Dungu, at least 80 in Batande, 48 in
Bangadi, and 213 in
Gurba. By August 2009, the LRA attacks in DR Congo resulted in displacing as many as 320,000 Congolese, exposing them to famine and disease, according to UNICEF director
Ann Veneman. Also in August 2009, the LRA attacked a Catholic church in
Ezo, South Sudan, on the
Feast of the Assumption, with reports of victims being
crucified, causing Ugandan Archbishop John Baptist Odama to call upon the international community for help in finding a peaceful solution to the crisis. In December 2009, the LRA forces under
Dominic Ongwen killed at least 321 civilians and abducted 250 others during a four-day attack in the village and region of
Makombo in DR Congo. In February 2010, about 100 people were killed by the LRA in
Kpanga, near DR Congo's border with the
Central African Republic and Sudan. Small-scale attacks continued daily, displacing large numbers of people and worsening an ongoing
humanitarian crisis, which the UN described as one of the worst in the world. By May 2010, the LRA killed over 1,600 Congolese civilians and abducted more than 2,500. Between September 2008 and July 2011, the group, despite being down to only a few hundred fighters, had killed more than 2,300 people, abducted more than 3,000, and displaced over 400,000 across DR Congo, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic. In March 2012, Uganda announced it would head a new four-nation
African Union military force (a brigade of 5,000, including contingents from DR Congo, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan) to hunt down Kony and the remnants of the LRA, but asked for more international assistance for the task force. In 2012 the LRA was reported to be in Djema, Central African Republic, but forces pursuing the LRA withdrew in April 2013 after the government of the Central African Republic was overthrown by the
Séléka Coalition rebels. The
UPDF rescued more than 15,000 people that were abducted since 1986. As of 2022, it was reported that the LRA consisted of splinter groups, totaling 1,000 members altogether and was militarily very weak. It acted more like a criminal gang than an army, smuggling ivory and arms across the DR Congo border. In 2024, LRA officer
Thomas Kwoyelo was tried in Uganda on charges including rape, murder, kidnapping, and enslavement of civilians. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison. ==Causes of the LRA conflict==