The Sudan Handbook

264 thE sudan handbook

Addis Ababa Agreement ending the first Sudanese civil war was signed in

Addis Ababa in 1972, he recruited many demobilized southern Sudanese

to his army. After Amin was ousted in 1979 they retreated back to Sudan;

Sudan then became an informal rear base for anti-Ugandan government

guerillas.

West Nile province of Uganda, bordering Sudan, became an area of

low-intensity guerilla fighting for the Sudanese-supported West Nile

Bank Liberation Front (WNBLF), a distant and cautious ally of Yoweri

Museveni’s National Resistance Army. In 1986, when the post-Obote

Military Commission disintegrated in Uganda and Museveni’s guerillas

took back Kampala, the survivors of the defeated regime fled to southern

Sudan. In Khartoum, the government of Sadiq al-Mahdi, which made

much of the fact that Museveni had known John Garang as a student at

the University of Dar-es-Salaam, was convinced that Uganda was going

to become a rear base for the SPLA. Khartoum therefore provided aid

and support to ‘the Okellos’ (Tito and Bazilio Okello were the leaders

of the Military Commission), who launched a guerilla war in northern

Uganda. Their attempt failed in part because they were pre-empted

by an unexpected new socio-religious phenomenon, the emergence of

Alice Lakwena’s Holy Spirit Mobile Battalion. Alice Lakwena was an

ajwaka (an Acholi prophetess) who preached the moral regeneration of

Uganda through her millenarian cult. She literally ‘stole’ the troops of

the Okellos, who watched all their men desert to join her movement.

The Sudanese government was bewildered by Alice’s brand of prophetic

politics and declined to support her. But after she was defeated in 1987

and fled to Kenya, her movement was picked up by her nephew Joseph

Kony who turned it into the LRA.

Starting in 1993, Kony received full support from the Sudanese govern-

ment, which used him as a weapon against Museveni and to try to

disorganize the SPLA’s rear echelons in Uganda. By the late 1990s the

intensity of the fighting had resulted in nearly two million internally

displaced persons (IDPs) in northern Uganda and the Ugandan Army

regularly crossing the border in hot pursuit of LRA fighters. Since the

The Sudan Handbook, edited by John Ryle, Justin Willis, Suliman Baldo and Jok Madut Jok. © 2011 Rift Valley Institute and contributors CPA was signed in January 2005 Khartoum has made conciliatory noises

(www.riftvalley.net).