Christianity Today reports from Uganda:
Sixty years after Allied soldiers liberated the Nazi death camps, the world stands silent in the face of another holocaust—one so horrifying that U.N. officials call it “one of the worst human-rights crises of the past century.”
Strong words – but not unjustified:
The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is one of the larger terrorist organizations in the world. It has killed more people than many other violent groups, yet few Westerners have ever heard of it, since nearly all its violence is perpetrated in the border region between Uganda and Sudan in East Africa.
The LRA’s catalogue of rapes, murders, and mutilations – under the direction of leader Joseph Kony, who is now wanted by the ICC – makes for depressing and angering reading. Particularly unpleasant, the group specialises in recruiting children, who are abused and forced to participate in atrocities in order to bind them to the group. CT also describes the religion behind it all:
While the army observes rituals such as praying the rosary and bowing toward Mecca, there is no prescribed theology in the conventional sense. Kony’s beliefs are a haphazard mix from the Bible and the Qur’an, tailored around his wishful thinking, personal desires, and practical needs of the moment. Jesus is the Son of God. But instead of saving the world from sin through his sacrificial love on the Cross, he is a source of power employed for killing those who oppose Kony. The Holy Spirit is not the Divine Comforter, but one who directs Kony’s tactical military decisions.
Despite dabbling in the Bible and the Qur’an, Kony’s real spiritual obsession is witchcraft. He burns toy military vehicles and figurines to predict the course of battles from their burn patterns. He uses reptiles in magic rituals to sicken those who anger him or to detect traitors in his midst. He claims to receive military direction from spirits of dead men from different countries, including Americans. He teaches that an impending apocalypse will usher in “The Silent World,” where only primitive weapons, such as machetes and clubs, will bring victory.
But the group is not without friends:
LRA crimes against humanity are so repulsive that its only former ally, the Islamic government of Sudan, jettisoned its relationship with the LRA to improve Sudan’s international relations. (Credible sources in Uganda insist Sudan still supplies weapons to the LRA, however.)
News about Sudan’s Bashir regime just keeps getting better and better, doesn’t it?
UPDATE: More on the Sudan-Kony link, from Christopher Hitchens.
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