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〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Guatemalan blue helmet deaths stir Congo debate )〕 United States Army |battles= }} The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), also known as the Lord's Resistance Movement, is a rebel group and heterodox Christian cult which operates in northern Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Terrorist Organization Profile: Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) )〕 Originally known as the United Holy Salvation Army and Uganda Christian Army/Movement, its stated goals include establishment of multi-party democracy, ruling Uganda according to the Ten Commandments,〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Profile: The Lord's Resistance Army )〕 and Acholi nationalism, though in practice "the LRA is not motivated by any identifiable political agenda, and its military strategy and tactics reflect this". It appears to largely function as a personality cult of its leader Joseph Kony,〔 a self-declared prophet whose leadership has earned him the nickname "Africa's David Koresh". It is listed as a terrorist group by the United States and has been accused of widespread human rights violations, including murder, abduction, mutilation, child-sex slavery, and forcing children to participate in hostilities.〔International Criminal Court (14 October 2005). ''(Warrant of Arrest unsealed against five LRA Commanders )''. Retrieved 2 June 2009.〕 ==History== (詳細はBantu-speaking agriculturists such as the Baganda people in Uganda's south and east developed different and competing social and economic structures from the Nilotic language speaking Acholi in the north, whose economic system was centred around hunting, farming and livestock herding.〔Rita M. Byrnes, ed. (Uganda: A Country Study ). Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1990. p. 4〕 The ethnic and cultural divisions within Uganda continued to exist during the years of the British Uganda Protectorate, which was created 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 labour, and came to comprise a majority of the military.〔Alfred G. Nhema, "The resolution of African conflicts: the management of conflict resolution & post-conflict reconstruction". p.53. Ohio University Press, 2008〕 The southern region became the centre for commercial trade development.〔Dolan, Chris, "Social Torture: The Case of Northern Uganda, 1986–2006", 2009, New York: Berghahn Books, p.41〕 The livestock-raising Acholi from the north of Uganda were resented for dominating the army and policing. 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. In 1986, the armed rebellion waged by Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army (NRA) won the Ugandan Bush War and achieved 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, UNLA. Many of those groups made peace with Museveni. However, the southern-dominated army 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 Lakwena was formed. Lakwena did not pick up arms against the central government; her members carried sticks and stones. She believed she was inspired by the Holy Spirit of God. Lakwena portrayed herself as a prophet who received messages from the Holy Spirit, and expressed the belief that the Acholi could defeat the Museveni government. She preached that her followers should cover their bodies with shea nut oil as protection from bullets, never take cover or retreat in battle, and never kill snakes or bees.〔Briggs, Jimmie, ''Innocents Lost: When Child Soldiers Go to War'', 2005, p. 113.〕 Joseph Kony would later preach a similar superstition, encouraging soldiers to use oil to draw a cross on their chest as a protection from bullets. During a later interview, however, Alice Lakwena distanced herself from Kony, claiming that the spirit does not want soldiers to kill civilians or prisoners of war. Kony sought to align himself with Lakwena and in turn garner support from her constituents, even going so far as to claim they were cousins.〔Van Acker, Frank, "Uganda and The Lord's Resistance Army: The New Order No One Ordered", 2004, African Affairs 103(412), p.345〕 Meanwhile, Kony 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.〔 A few days later, he met a group of former Uganda National Liberation Front soldiers from the Black Battalion whom he managed to recruit.〔 They then launched a raid on the city of Gulu. By August 1987, Lakwena's Holy Spirit Mobile Force scored several victories on the battlefield and began a march towards the capital Kampala. In 1988, after the Holy Spirit Movement was decisively defeated in the Jinja District and Lakwena fled to Kenya, Kony seized this 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 National Resistance Army (NRA) government forces, in particular former members of the Federal Democratic Movement (FEDEMO),〔 were known for their lack of discipline and brutal actions meant that the civilian population were accused of supporting the rebel LRA, likewise the rebels accused the population of supporting the government army.〔O’Kadameri, Billie. ("LRA / Government negotiations 1993–94" ) in Okello Lucima, ed., (''Accord magazine: Protracted conflict, elusive peace: Initiatives to end the violence in northern Uganda'' ), 2002.〕 In March 1991, the Ugandan government's NRA started Operation North, which combined efforts to destroy the LRA, while cutting away its roots of support among the population through heavy-handed tactics.〔Gersony, Robert. (The Anguish of Northern Uganda: Results of a Field-based Assessment of the Civil Conflicts in Northern Uganda ) (PDF), US Embassy Kampala, March 1997, and Amnesty International, (Human rights violations by the National Resistance Army ), December 1991.〕 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 Bigombe initiated the first face-to-face meeting between representatives of the rebel LRA and NRA government. The rebels asked for a general amnesty for their combatants and to "return home", but the government stance was hampered by disagreement over the credibility of the LRA negotiators and political infighting.〔 At a meeting in January 1994, Kony asked for six months to regroup his troops, but by early February the tone of the negotiations was growing increasingly acrimonious and the LRA broke off negotiations, accusing the government of trying to entrap them.〔 Starting 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. The government created the so-called "protected camps" beginning in 1996. The LRA declared a short-lived ceasefire for the duration of Ugandan presidential election, 1996, possibly in the hope that Yoweri Museveni would be defeated. In March 2002, the NRA, under the new name of the Uganda People's Defence Force (UPDF), launched a massive military offensive code-named Operation Iron Fist against the 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, brutally killing hundreds of civilians.〔 By 2004, according to the UPDF spokesman Shaban Bantariza, mediation efforts by the Carter Center and the Pope John Paul II had been spurned by Kony.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=UGANDA: Nature, structure and ideology of the LRA )〕 In February 2004, the LRA unit led by Okot Odhiambo attacked Barlonyo IDP camp, killing over 300 people and abducting many others.〔〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Killing Every Living Thing: Barlonyo Massacre )〕 In 2006, UNICEF estimated that the LRA had abducted at least 25,000 children since the conflict began.〔 In January 2006, eight Guatemalan Kaibiles commandos and at least 15 rebels were killed in a botched UN special forces raid targeting the LRA deputy leader Vincent Otti in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 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. By 2006, 1.7 million people lived in more than 200 internally displaced person (IDP) camps in northern Uganda.〔(Uganda Complex emergency Situation Report #3 09/13/2006 )〕 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. 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 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. During the Christmas of 2008, the LRA massacred at least 143 people and abducted 180 at a concert celebration sponsored by the Catholic Church in Faradje in the Democratic Republic of Congo,〔Human Rights Watch (17 January 2009). (DR Congo: LRA Slaughters 620 in ‘Christmas Massacres’ ). Retrieved 22 January 2009.〕 and struck several other communities in the near-simultaneous attacks: 75 people were murdered in a church near Dungu, at least 80 were killed in Batande, 48 in Bangadi, and 213 in Gurba.〔BBC News (29 December 2008). (Ugandan LRA 'in church massacre' )〕〔CNN (30 December 2008). "(Congo groups: 400 massacred on Christmas day )". Retrieved on 4 January 2009.〕 By August 2009, the LRA terror in this country resulted in displacing as many as 320,000 Congolese, exposing them to a threat of famine, according to UNICEF director Ann Veneman. That same month, 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 on the international community for help in finding a peaceful solution to the crisis.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Christians are ‘crucified’ in guerrilla raids )〕〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Sudanese bishop urges peace talks with Lord’s Resistance Army )〕 In December 2009, the LRA forces under Dominic Ongwen killed at least 321 civilians and abducted 250 others during a four-day rampage in the village and region of Makombo in the DR Congo. In February 2010, about 100 people were massacred 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, has killed more than 2,300 people, abducted more than 3,000, and displaced over 400,000 across the 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 the DR Congo, 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.〔Conal Urquhart, (Joseph Kony: African Union brigade to hunt down LRA leader ), guardian.co.uk, 24 March 2012〕 In 2012 the LRA was reported to be in Djema, Central African Republic〔Butagiro, Tabu (30 April 2012) (Khartoum aiding Kony rebels again ) Daily Monitor, Retrieved 26 December 2012〕 but forces pursuing the LRA withdrew in April 2013 after the government of the Central African Republic was overthrown by the Séléka Coalition rebels.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=1200 LRA Fighters Set To Defect - UN )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Lord's Resistance Army」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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