The Lord’s Resistance Army, a Ugandan rebel group that is complicating stability in Africa, is sparsely spread over several countries, yet is unquestionably fearsome. They are arguably Africa’s most sophisticated rebel force, able to slaughter tons of civilians at once, and they have eluded collaborative regional efforts to hunt them down.

All of those factors converge to characterize a very real, present danger for the West’s reputation on that continent.

Experts on the situation emphasized the vital importance of this issue in a conference call with anti-genocide activists and reporters on Thursday. The speakers were Paul Ronan, a Senior Policy Analyst at Resolve Uganda, and Joshua Kennedy, Education Associate at Genocide Intervention Network.

A group that originated in northern Uganda in the late 1980s in opposition to the central government, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) underscores the inexorability of African violence. The LRA now carries out mass civilian killings in northeastern Congo, southern Sudan, Uganda, and eastern Central African Republic.

The extension of the group throughout the continent makes combating the LRA a regional problem—one that undermines security and development of not just Uganda but of all central Africa, as Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Ronan stressed in the conference call.

The regional question that surfaces is this: How are African governments, most of whom are still recovering from Western imperialism, supposed to develop if Ugandan rebels keep wreaking havoc?

“The LRA violence can’t be separated from the larger dynamics,” Mr. Ronan said. That direct relationship is why pressure is likely to grow on both the United Nations and the United States to swiftly address the rebel problem.

So far, though, the international response has hardly helped.

“There [are] not nearly enough UN peacekeepers to effectively secure citizens,” Mr. Kennedy said.

Right now, there are roughly 17,000 peacekeepers in the Congo, who are burdened by the activity of other rebel groups in the region.

The U.S.’ reputation in the region is falling just as quickly. It was the U.S. that supported the Ugandan government’s failed offensive against the LRA. Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Ronan said that the U.S. was justified in backing Uganda’s drive but that it failed to ensure civilians would be protected from LRA fighters. 

CHAIN OF TERROR

On Sept. 17, rebels made an incursion into Congolese communities with clear objectives: to scare people away from their homes so that the LRA could assume control of the community, and to gain more youth recruits. This was a signal that the LRA’s mission was intensifying in Congo.

The doomed offensive against rebels on Dec. 17 by Uganda, Congo and Sudan, could prove a disastrous turning point in the course of the LRA’s atrocious actions.

But the U.S.-backed effort came up short: it simply dispersed the rebels, dividing them into smaller yet still brutal bands. LRA rebels were emboldened by the collaborative attempt to undermine them, as they continue to carry out retaliatory attacks against civilians.

“The scale and frequency of these attacks will continue,” Mr. Ronan warned.

The brutality of the LRA attacks brings human rights activists into the fold. Mr. Kennedy said that the rebel force’s human rights violations are blatant: beating people to death with baseball bats and clubs; burning down schools and churches; and raping, then killing, women.

CAN THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION MAKE AN IMPACT?

Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Ronan said it was unclear whether the new president would take a tough stance on the LRA. But there are several steps Team Obama could take to ease this seemingly intractable African conflict.

Perhaps the most direct step would be to appoint an envoy to war-torn central Africa to help resolve the LRA issue, but that would likely happen only after Obama designates an Assistant Secretary of State for Africa, the experts said in the conference call.

This problem “cannot be left to ambassadors in the region,” Mr. Ronan said. The State Department needs to “raise the profile of the issue, and make sure it’s not being swept under the carpet,” he urged.

OUR TAKE…

The Lord’s Resistance Army adds another explosive situation for the Obama administration in Africa. The U.S. must take the lead in ensuring that UN peacekeepers are more capable of carrying out their tasks, particularly that effective coordination with both the Ugandan and Congolese military occurs.