AFRICA/DR CONGO-New LRA attacks in northeastern Congo, the Bishop of Bondo thanked "those who keep talking about this tragedy"

Tuesday, 24 May 2011

Kinshasa (Agenzia Fides) - In the night between 18 and 19 May a group of guerrillas of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) kidnapped 15 to 18 people in a village 7 km from Angola in the north-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This is what the Archbishop Etienne Ung'Eyowun, Bishop of Bondo says in a brief dispatch published on the website of the Episcopal Conference of Congo. "The next day the men of the LRA attacked a village 30 km from the previous one," Mgr.Ung'Eyowun explains to Fides.
The LRA is a guerrilla group born in the mid 80s of last century in northern Uganda, which in recent years has shifted its activities in the north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, south-east of the Central African Republic and in southern Sudan. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, only in the north-eastern DRC, there are about 300,000 internally displaced persons caused by the violence of the LRA.
"The conditions of insecurity stem from the fact that there are few regular army troops, poorly armed and poorly equipped, while there are no UN forces present because they are deployed in other regions of the DRC. The population is therefore alarmed and group together in bigger towns, abandoning their villages which are most exposed to the incursions of the LRA, "explains Mgr .Ung'Eyowun to Fides.
"The internally displaced persons are assisted by the Church and a dozen humanitarian organizations, which are present in Angola and in two other locations, and distribute food to the population," says the Bishop of Bondo.
A year ago, on May 24, 2010, Barak Obama, U.S. President promulgated the LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act, which commits the U.S. to help the people of central Africa affected by the violence of the LRA.
"I thank those who continue to talk about the tragedy caused by the LRA. It is necessary that this statute is fully applied in order to end the suffering of the population, "concluded Mgr.Ung'Eyowun. (L.M.) (Agenzia Fides 05/24/2011)


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