They may number as few as 100 men, women and adolescents, but Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) units scattered across the forests of northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo’s Orientale Province have sown sufficient terror to make some 318,000 people take flight.
They abandon their homes and fields, in many cases to the uncertain sanctuary of urban centres.
Their fear is far from misplaced.
Extreme brutality is a tactic in the survival strategy of the rebel group, which has killed almost 2,000 people in Orientale since December 2007, mostly in the districts of Haut- and Bas-Uele.
Lacking supply lines and widely dispersed since a botched air raid in December 2008, the small groups of LRA fighters operate independently of each other and live off the land.
That is to say, off the local population’s produce and livestock.
Since this population has no desire to share what little they have to do with a rebellion in which they have no stake at all, they are made to leave.
– The violence of its attacks and the suffering it causes are intended to frighten villagers into not giving its pursuers the information they need to wage a counter-insurgency campaign and to frighten civilians away so they can move with less chance of being spotted, the International Crisis Group said in a recent report on the LRA.
