{UAH} IDDI AMIN NEVER TARGETED LANGIs/ACHOLIs, THEY TARGETED HIM {---Series One-Hundred and twenty-one}

Friends

In its special report of December 2009, United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, issued a Summary of fact finding missions on alleged human rights violations committed by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in the districts of Haut-Uélé and Bas-Uélé in Orientale province of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Kindly go through it and only consider the numbers of people that got murdered. The numbers are simply staggering.  We are posting from page 14.

Ugandans we need to discuss Acholi violence candidly.

5.1. Violations of the right to life

47. During its many field missions, the UNJHRO received reports that some 1,200 people were killed during repeated attacks by the LRA between September 2008 and June 2009. 48. On 17 September 2008, at least 17 people were killed in Kiliwa (Dungu territory). Three children aged 12 to 15 years, having escaped the attackers, reported to UNJHRO officials that more than 10 adults abducted by LRA members had been killed after their first day of captivity. These children said they heard screams followed by silence and continued their walk for five days without these adults. They also said that their village had been devastated, and that they had seen many bodies in a state of advanced decomposition around the town of Yapako and near Kiliwa. 49. According to other testimonies, at least 14 people were killed on 17 September 2008 at Madoro. Five survivors displaced to Dungu said that on 17 September 2008, they witnessed the killing of two people at Namama. Another survivor said that on 21 September 2008 he witnessed the execution of 15 men at Kpaika and saw several bodies by the side of a path.

50. Several other cases of execution committed during the attacks from September to November 2008 were reported at Napopo, where at least two people were killed on 4 October 2008, and at Babete, where more than 10 men were executed. The information has been corroborated by the testimony of a woman from this village, who told UNJHRO officials about the sequence of LRA attacks, during which her husband and brother-in-law were killed. The brother-in-law's daughter was kidnapped and taken to an unknown destination. She also reported seeing the body of her husband and several other bodies before she fled.

51. Between mid-September and early November 2008, witnesses interviewed stated that LRA members had carried out executions in 11 other localities within a radius of 112 km around Dungu. 52. On 25 December 2008, LRA members started their attack around 10 am, in seven localities within a radius of 2 to 8 km around Faradje. While people were assembled in the market square of the town of Faradje to celebrate Christmas, members of the LRA, estimated at 300 by some, attacked the city, looted and systematically burned the homes from 5pm to 7am. At least 147 people, including 16 children, 7 secondary and primary school teachers, a hospital doctor and a police officer on duty at the police station, were killed. On 2 January 2009, members of the LRA killed 10 people at Naguero (45 km west of Faradje). On the 10 and 11 January 2009, around forty people were killed in three localities (Akwa, Tomate and Sambia) within a radius of 100 to 140 km of Dungu.

53. While members of the LRA attacked Faradje and surrounding communities during the Christmas holidays, other members attacked 13 localities within a radius of 7 and 17 km around Doruma, following the same procedure. In Batande for example, members of the LRA killed 80 people—women, children and men who had been locked in a church. The UNJHRO met witnesses and persons who participated in the funerals of the victims. They described mutilated bodies, bound bodies and rapes that took place in a place described by the witnesses as a "place of slaughter". At least 330 people were killed around Doruma.

54. According to testimonies received, the attacks in December 2008 and human rights violations that followed were obviously well prepared. In more than a score of towns, in places remote from each other by nearly 400 km, two groups of 100 to 150 LRA fighters killed at least 477 civilians within 24 hours. The provisional report, prepared at the end of January 2009 for the localities for which data was collected was as follows: at least 703 civilians were killed, 630 adults and 700 children were abducted or missing, dozens of houses and public administrative buildings, markets, health centres and educational and religious buildings were systematically looted and burned, and more than 100,000 people were displaced. 55. According to information collected by the UNJHRO during its missions to Doruma and Faradje, 292 persons have been identified among the total of 477 people killed in attacks between 24 December 2008 and early January 2009. A list of 189 people killed was also received in relation to the massacres around Doruma in Dungu territory, while another list of 103 people killed in the city of Faradje and its surroundings was obtained by the UNJHRO team.

56. On 15 March 2009, LRA rebels attacked the town of Banda (120 km west of Doruma) in the territory of Ango, in the Bas-Uélé district, killing at least thirty people and looting homes. On 21 March 2009, the town of Boso (60 km south of Banda) was in turn attacked. The death toll rose by at least two deaths.

 

5.2. Rape, sexual slavery and other violations of physical integrity

57. LRA rebels inflicted serious injury on their victims during their attacks. Injured persons were generally those who had been left for dead. LRA rebels sometimes raped their female victims before killing them. They also forced captive girls into sexual slavery.

58. A victim of the attacks at Duru on 17 September 2008, treated at the general referral hospital, informed the UNJHRO that, given the cruelty with which the LRA executed people with knives, she pleaded with LRA members to kill her with a firearm. Wounded, she collapsed and was left for dead.

59. On 31 December 2008, the UNJHRO sought to talk to four victims from Faradje at the general referral hospital at Dungu. The injuries, shock and trauma suffered were so severe that three of the four survivors were unable to speak. They all had large body gashes. The fourth victim was seriously injured in the neck after being hit with axes and machetes. At the general referral hospital at Doruma the UNJHRO encountered several seriously injured people, some as young as 2 to 6 years who received blows to the head. A 6-year-old girl, suffering from upper and lower limb hemiplegia on her right side, could no longer speak. On 17 January 2009, the UNJHRO counted 62 wounded in the initial attacks at Faradje and Doruma on 25 December 2008. 60. During the Batande church massacre (7 km from Doruma), it is probable that LRA members raped a number of women before killing them. The testimonies of those who took part in burials confirm a dozen women had their hands tied, clothes torn and legs apart. Several children who escaped from the LRA camps have confirmed to the UNJHRO the sexual slavery to which the captive girls were subjected. During the mission done to Dungu between 7 and 14 January 2009, among the five children who managed to leave Garamba Park following the bombing, there was a 17-year-old girl of Central African nationality who was 7 months pregnant.

 

5.3. Abductions of civilians

61. According to information collected by the UNJHRO, 1,400 people were kidnapped or missing, between September 2008 and June 2009. 62. During its first mission, the UNJHRO collected several testimonies confirming that during attacks in the district of Dungu, between 17 September and 4 October 2008, LRA members abducted children, including underage girls. Interviews conducted by the UNJHRO with officials of educational institutions, parents, and survivors from the localities which were attacked, as well as victims who managed to escape, clarify that in 6 of the 16 localities LRA rebels abducted and took away with them approximately 177 minors.

63. In Kiliwa, a 15-year-old student testified that he was abducted on 17 September 2008, from the market at around 1pm, with fifty other girls and boys. According to this witness, they were all tied to each other by a rope at their waists and forced to carry looted goods. They walked all day for six days through the forest on the northeast side of Dungu, before arriving in a place that was probably Garamba Park. The witness said that when they arrived there, still tied, they were placed under a large military tent to be subjected to magico-religious rites. The boy is said to have escaped, on 23 September 2008, along with two other girls, after having cut the rope with which he was tied with a razor blade. Not having found his mother in Kiliwa he reached Dungu on 4 October 2008, after seven days of walking along the river Dungu.

64. Two students who were detained in Garamba and who escaped, told the UNJHRO how abductions took place in their school in Duru (90 km north of Dungu), on 17 September 2008. According to their testimonies, a group of LRA members, armed with machetes and axes, came into their classroom. The rebels closed the doors and began to tie up students with string at the hip and took them out in a row. They then followed the Catholic mission's path carrying looted goods before walking for three days to "Camp Swahili", Garamba Park, where they were presented to Joseph Kony who decided to divide them into five groups in different camps. The victims told the UNJHRO that during their captivity, the youths were assigned to pastoral work, while girls were distributed among the rebels. They did their cooking and stayed with them. They said they were sometimes abused. An official of the Institute of Duru confirmed to the UNJHRO that 61 students, including 21 girls, were kidnapped on 17 September 2008.

65. On 17 September 2008, at Nambili at least three children were abducted. Between 21 and 22 September, at least 11 children were abducted in Bayote Tongo Tongo and 50 children at Kpaika. At Kana (95 km northwest of Dungu), five minors were kidnapped on 4 October 2008. 66. According to testimonies collected by the UNJHRO at least 50 people, including 30 children mostly underage girls, were kidnapped after the attack on the city of Dungu by the LRA in early November 2008.

67. During the attacks in late December 2008, the LRA continued its abductions. 225 people, including 106 children, of which 53 were girls, were abducted during the Faradje attack and the attacks on seven surrounding communities on 25 December 2008.

68. LRA rebels carried out the abduction of a large number of people in Bas-Uélé. When they attacked the town of Banda (120 km west of Doruma), on 15 March 2009, the rebels abducted about 200 people, including an unspecified number of children. A mission of the Provincial Assembly of Kisangani that visited Ango and met IDPs from Banda, confirmed to the UNJHRO that abductions had occurred in this locality. On the night of 2 to 3 June 2009, the attack on the city of Dakwa (67 km from Dinguila) led to the removal of nearly one hundred people, whose fate is still unknown.

 

Stay in the forum for Series One hundred and twenty two on the way   ------>

EM

On the 49^th Parallel          

                 Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja and Dr. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda is in anarchy"
                    Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi
"Pamoja na Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja na Dk. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda ni katika machafuko"