Without Sudan, it will be impossible to successfully confront the LRA

Meeting in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, CAR President Francois Bozize and representatives from Uganda, Congo, and South Sudan worked to find a regional solution to the Lord’s Resistance Army. The meeting took place on October 13 and 14 under the auspices of the African Union.

The participants agreed to a series of anti-LRA measures designed to increase military cooperation between the armies of Uganda, South Sudan, Congo, and CAR, according to press release issued by the African Union (Here it is in French). A joint command center aimed at exchanging information, joint border patrols, and a mixed military brigade to go after LRA groups are some examples of the military cooperation agreed to in Bangui. In addition to calling for humanitarian aid to LRA-affected areas, participants proposed nominating an AU special envoy to coordinate efforts against the LRA.

While the initiative from the AU is laudable, it comes fairly late. The LRA issue has been discussed in many AU meetings, including the Special Session on the Consideration and Resolution in Africa held in Tripoli, Libya in August 2009 at the invitation of ‘Brother Leader’ Muammar Gaddafi, and at the Ordinary Session held in Kampala in July 2010. Nothing concrete came out of these meetings, while the LRA has continued to attack civilians in the region.

Despite a few useful recommendations and some optimistic-sounding headlines in the press, the Bangui meeting risks amounting to little if recommendations are not quickly implemented on the ground. Given the state of the regional armies involved in the fight against the LRA, it is hard to imagine that the military options proposed in the AU meeting, involving these same armies, can actually succeed.

There is no reason to believe that a regional agreement was the only thing missing in the effort against the LRA. Uganda has already concluded bilateral and multilateral agreements aimed at dealing with the LRA, but only the Ugandan army is currently engaging LRA fighters. In an agreement signed in Ngurdoto, Tanzania in September 2007, the Ugandan and Congolese presidents agreed to cooperate on the war against the LRA. A year later, Congo, Uganda, and South Sudan made agreements to jointly fight the LRA before the launch of Operation Lightning Thunder in December 2008. On June 2009, in a meeting in the Congolese city of Kisangani, the CAR army agreed to participate in the joint effort against the LRA. (The defense army chiefs at the Kisangani meeting agreed that “the current effort against the LRA had been extremely successful,” a wild overestimation given that LRA groups continued to cause violence in the region since June 2009.)

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