Central Africa: Urgent action needed to end LRA abuses

New Document Answers Questions about Rebel Group’s Past and Present

(New York, March 22, 2012) – Officials from the United Nations, the African Union, and governments in central Africa will meet in Kampala, Uganda, on March 22 and 23, 2012, to finalize a comprehensive regional strategy on combating the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a Ugandan rebel group.

“The Kampala meeting needs to generate concrete action to end LRA abuses and not just more talk,” said Anneke Van Woudenberg, senior Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The people living in LRA-affected areas should not be asked to wait any longer for the protection they so desperately need.”

At a meeting in Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, in January, representatives from Congo, Uganda, the Central African Republic (CAR) and South Sudan, together with UN officials, said they would toughen measures against the LRA. Since then, civil society groups and the UN have reported new attacks against civilians by the LRA in northern Congo and the CAR.

Human Rights Watch has long urged a comprehensive strategy with action by international and regional actors to arrest the LRA’s leader, Joseph Kony, and other LRA leaders who are subject to arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court (ICC). Human Rights Watch said that the arrest of Kony and other LRA leaders should be a central element of any strategy to end LRA atrocities, but that enhanced arrest efforts and broader and more effective measures are also needed to protect civilians endangered by the LRA – including those who may be at heightened risk from an arrest operation.

Human Rights Watch has published a question-and-answer document with further details on the actions required by regional and other actors and to respond to the many queries that have arisen since the release of the Kony 2012 video by the organization Invisible Children earlier this month.

Civil society groups in Congo, CAR, and South Sudan have also been pressing their governments for further action. In a letter in November 2011 to their presidents, 20 groups wrote: “Civilians in this remote region have no protection from LRA attacks, and often no means of communicating with others to call for help. We can only truly rejoice when the LRA threat is over and when we hear that Joseph Kony is no longer terrorizing our region.”

For more of Human Rights Watch’s reporting on the LRA, please see:

www.hrw.org/topic/international-justice/joseph-kony-lra
www.hrw.org/drc
www.hrw.org/africa/uganda