Ugandan Priestess Imprisoned in Kenya : Rebels Keep Faith Minus Their Leader

Rebel Ugandan priestess Alice Lakwena is in a Kenyan prison, but her Holy Spirit Movement marches on, still pitting its faith in magic weapons against well-armed Ugandan soldiers.

At least two separate groups have sprung up to pursue her bizarre crusade against the Kampala government.

Lakwena, 28, led about 7,000 religiously inspired rebels to their deaths in hymn-singing assaults on government forces in 1987. She fled into Kenya in December and is serving a 4-month sentence for entering the country illegally.

In the Gulu region of northern Uganda, birthplace of the movement, a young man called Joseph Kony has taken up Lakwena’s mantle and amassed a force of several thousand.

Lakwena’s father, Severino Lukoya, is also collecting recruits for his branch of the revived Holy Spirit Movement in the neighboring Kitgum District, according officers of the government’s National Resistance Army (NRA) in northern Uganda.

Lakwena’s successors share with the founder a belief that they can fight the well-equipped NRA with witchcraft--ointments to make themselves bulletproof and stones that are supposed to explode like grenades when thrown at their enemies.

A Roman Catholic priest approached by Kony’s forces earlier this year said the men who came to see him boasted of two new weapons in their magical armory.

One was a bullet that makes the sign of the cross shortly after it is fired from a special gun and writes the words “In the name of the Father, the Son and Holy Ghost” when it hits its target, the priest said.

The other was a large white stone that, when Kony holds it above his head, gives small stones the explosive power of artillery shells.

Kony’s forces have been roaming near the northern town of Gulu, 170 miles north of Kampala, and are now reported to be encamped in the Murchison Falls National Park on the River Nile. That is where Lakwena says the Holy Spirit first spoke to her in 1985.

An allied group is under the command of Lukonyomoi p’Otunno, a powerful orator who used to preach unorthodox Christianity in Gulu and who now has a reputation as Kony’s most influential adviser.

Kony is about 21, semi-educated and comes from the village of Odek, about 45 miles east of Gulu, according to local residents who knew him before he went to the bush.

His ragged army killed 50 civilians and government-backed militiamen southwest of Gulu on Feb. 23 in its biggest operation so far. The NRA said it pursued the rebels and killed 25 of them.

The government newspaper New Vision said the separate force led by Lukoya has been attacking Kitgum town on and off since Feb. 19 and has lost 60 of its men.

When the Kony force passed through Bungatira, Lakwena’s birthplace, in February it abducted several local boys at a temporary roadblock.

The Holy Spirit Mobile Force, as the rebel army calls itself, has also been in conflict with the rebel Uganda People’s Democratic Army (UPDA), a secular force made up mostly of former Acholi soldiers in the government army defeated by the NRA in January, 1986.

The UPDA agreed to a cease-fire with the NRA and began negotiations in late March, partly because the Holy Spirit Movement was harassing it and encouraging desertions.

The NRA is seeking ways to contact Kony and avoid the kind of bloodshed that ended Alice’s campaign.

The Catholic Church, the most influential religious group in northern Uganda, is the most likely candidate for the role of mediator.