Why do rebels cook people? And what do they do with them after they are done cooking?
Is this a new incident?
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Date: Mon, 28 Oct 2002 15:19:07 EST
War breeds scepticism in Uganda's blighted north By Matthew Green GULU, Uganda, Oct 28 (Reuters) - Hopes for peace were fading in Uganda's northern town of Gulu, where residents say a government offensive to crush Lord's Resistance Army rebels has caused even more suffering. Guerrillas boiled a man in a pot, hacked dozens of villagers to death and abducted an unknown number of children in the past few weeks alone, the army says -- sowing some of their worst havoc in years. In Gulu, which lies at the epicentre of the war, optimism that the army's "Operation Iron Fist" would wipe out a movement feared for cutting off its victim's lips and noses has given way to jaded scepticism. "The war has been going on for so long, if they could stop it they would have done it long ago," said Charles, 31, recovering on the blue plastic sheets of a hospital bed from a gunshot wound in his inner thigh. "So many people are being wounded, so many people are being killed," he said, explaining how he was hit in a gun battle between the army and rebels outside town. The army says the LRA killed 47 people in the past week alone, and has accused the insurgents of burning people alive in grass huts or attempting to force captives to eat body parts from their victims. Thousands have been killed, half a million forced into camps and at least 16,000 children kidnapped for brainwashing as fighters and concubines since the LRA began its uprising 16 years ago. President Yoweri Museveni launched "Iron Fist" in March, hoping to decapitate the movement by destroying its bases in neighbouring Sudan, but the rebels have since returned to Uganda and stepped up their attacks. LRA leader Joseph Kony, who makes abducted children kill one another to enforce discipline, has in the past said he wants to rule Uganda by the Bible's Ten Commandments, but residents say the self-styled mystic has no clear agenda. "People want the rebels to stop the war," said William Ayela, 32, who fled to a squalid refugee camp in Gulu under army orders earlier this month. "People are dying, people are hungry, why don't they stop?," he said, cradling his two-year old son, whose belly has ballooned due to malnutrition. FORGOTTEN WAR The army says the rebel attacks are the last kicks of a dying horse, saying an agreement by Sudan to stop backing the LRA -- slapped on a "terrorist exclusion list" by the United States -- will hasten its demise. Museveni, himself a former guerrilla leader, has pledged to snuff out the rebellion by the end of February. Many in Gulu, a town trapped in a spiral of war-induced decay, say peace talks would work better than bullets and point out the drawbacks of the military option. The army ordered thousands of people into what it describes as protected camps earlier this month, turning villages surrounded by ripening crops into ghost towns. Residents say harvests are rotting in the fields, drawing warnings from aid workers that 500,000 people might be rendered entirely dependent on food aid next year. As armoured cars bristling with machine-guns kick up plumes of dust, the people of Gulu cannot help but feel caught in the middle in a war few say they understand. "The suffering is being caused by both parties," said Macleord Ochola, vice-chairman of the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative, wearing a silver cross over his purple bishop's robe. "When two elephants are fighting, it's the grass that they step on that's being crushed." 10/28/02 04:50 ET
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