LRAThe Bible as a weapon of war

Published 15 April 2017

Joseph Kony, the genocidal leader of the murderous Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), claimed to have been sent by God to liberate the people of Northern Uganda. From the start of their insurgency in 1987, Kony’s LRA claimed as their major objective the establishment of a government based on the Ten Commandments. How do former Lord’s Resistance Army soldiers – men, women, and children who have used the Bible as a weapon of war – learn to reread the scriptures once they return home? This is the puzzle facing researchers from Uganda and Cambridge.

In 2012, one of the world’s most wanted war criminals, Joseph Kony, became one of the most repeated names on the planet thanks to a YouTube documentary (Kony 2012) and a call to action that sought to expose the terror and slaughter he inflicted on thousands of men, women, and children in Central Africa.

Indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, Kony is now believed to be in hiding with his followers. He remains the genocidal leader of the murderous Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) who claimed to have been sent by God to liberate the people of Northern Uganda from the rival National Resistance Army (NRA). From the start of their insurgency in 1987, Kony’s LRA claimed as their major objective the establishment of a government based on the Ten Commandments.

In the decades since, his army – often made up of thousands of forcibly conscripted child soldiers – have wounded, widowed and orphaned indiscriminately as they prosecuted a campaign of violence with a vigor befitting Kony’s vengeful readings  of the Old Testament.

In the process, the LRA are thought to have displaced as many as two million Ugandans, the vast majority from Uganda’s Acholiland, where Kony originally hails from.

Today, Acholiland is a haunted place; haunted by the ghosts and memories of a recent past that has been written in blood rather than ink during nearly two decades of conflict.

But what happens when former LRA soldiers, those who have used the Bible as a weapon of war, return home from the front lines? How do former soldiers – male and female, adults and children – learn to reread and reinterpret scriptures that once spoke to them of fire and brimstone?

U Cambridge says that this is the puzzle facing Dr. Helen Nambalirwa Nkabala from Makerere University in Uganda. As a CAPREx fellow, she spent time in Cambridge working with Dr. Emma Wild-Wood, from the Faculty of Divinity and the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide.

Nambalirwa Nkabala interviewed returning LRA soldiers in Uganda in order to examine how a positive engagement with biblical texts – especially those that seem to support violence – can help to promote peace instead.

She says: “My project identifies difficult texts in the Old Testament and seeks to identify the means by which they can be used in a constructive and meaningful way – with the central focus being on whether a particular interpretation promotes human dignity or not.