African securitySecurity Council condemns LRA’s “war crimes”

The UN Security Council has strongly condemned the war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and its use of children in armed conflict. The council demanded that the group immediately end all hostilities, release all abductees, and disarm and demobilize.

The council urged the UN Office for Central Africa (UNOCA), the UN political and peacekeeping missions in the region, and the UN other agencies, to increase their efforts aiming to implement the UN Regional Strategy and address the threat posed by the activities of the LRA.

AllAfrica reports that the LRA, a brutal militia notorious for carrying out massacres in villages, mutilating its victims, and abducting boys for use as child soldiers and forcing girls into sexual slavery, was formed in the 1980s in Uganda. For more than fifteen years its attacks were directed mainly against Ugandan civilians and security forces. In 2002 the Ugandan military forced the LRA out of Uganda, and the organization began to operate on the territory of Uganda’s neighbors, especially the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Central African Republic (CAR), and South Sudan.

The Security Council expressed its support for the African Union Regional Cooperation Initiative against the LRA, and urged all regional governments to fulfill their commitments under the Initiative and provide basic provisions for their security forces.

The council welcomed the growing cooperation among the African Union and the DRC, South Sudan, Uganda and the CAR, while expressing serious concern that the increased security vacuum in the CAR continued negatively to affect counter-LRA operations.

The Security Council also encouraged the UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUSCO) to reinforce efforts to address the LRA through improved responsiveness to imminent civilian threats, training, and capacity-building of the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC) and implementation of the disarmament, demobilization, repatriation, reintegration, and resettlement program to encourage further LRA defections.