Albright Takes Aim at Sudan From a Distance as Brutal War Rages On

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright cooed Wednesday as she cradled in her arms a month-old girl who two weeks earlier had been rescued by her 5-year-old brother from a village massacre that left their mother and 13 other women dead.

“You’re going to be all right,” she said in grandmotherly fashion, comforting a baby who had survived an unspeakable horror that is distressingly common in northern Uganda. It is here that a rebel group that calls itself the Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, specializes in murdering adults and kidnapping children for forced labor as soldiers, porters and sex slaves.

But Albright swiftly returned to her role as Washington’s top diplomat, handing the girl to the care of others and emphasizing the theme of her visit to a camp that aids young victims of a shadowy conflict. The secretary of State insisted that the rebels and their supporters in the government of neighboring Sudan are guilty of such brutal crimes against humanity that the world must act to rein them in.

“Those who are responsible for this terrorism, the LRA and their Sudanese backers, destroy villages, and they have done terrible things . . . but they clearly have not destroyed the will of the people,” she said.

On the second day of her weeklong trip to Africa, Albright’s focus was on a nation she will not visit: Sudan, the continent’s largest country in terms of area, where a rigid Islamic government is punctuating a 14-year war against largely non-Muslim rebels with atrocities that target mostly Christians and followers of traditional African religions.

Earlier this year, the Clinton administration imposed a tough trade embargo on Sudan. But Albright made clear that Washington wants to do more to bring down the current Khartoum regime and replace it with a multiethnic and multifaith government.

Before flying to Gulu, about 60 miles south of the Sudanese border, Albright met in Kampala, the Ugandan capital, with leaders of the National Democratic Alliance, an umbrella group of Sudanese opposition organizations.

Although she assured the opposition leaders of Washington’s political support, she warned that the U.S. will not give them arms or other materiel, at least until they show that they can overcome internal differences and effectively challenge the Sudanese government.

A senior administration official noted that the United States plans to funnel a modest amount of foreign aid through nongovernmental groups operating in rebel-held areas in the south and east of Sudan, along the borders with Uganda, Ethiopia and Eritrea. The official said no decision has been made yet on the size of the program. U.S. officials also said Washington has given about $20 million in nonlethal materiel, such as radios and boots, to countries facing Sudan-based terrorist groups. Uganda has received $4 million of such aid so far and is to get $2 million more next year.

The alliance between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Islamic rulers of Sudan is bizarre. The Sudanese government is engaged in a campaign--labeled “genocide” by some Christian groups--to convert everyone in the country to Islam, sometimes telling them to switch to Islam or die. The Ugandan rebels are led by Joseph Kony, a renegade Roman Catholic priest who claims he wants to impose rule based on the Ten Commandments.

Albright focused on the brutal tactics of both the Kony rebel group and the Sudanese government, saying that the atrocities overshadowed their ideologies.

In Gulu, she visited a camp run by the U.S.-based Christian group World Vision, where children who escape from the Ugandan rebels are treated. Since October 1995, more than 3,000 youngsters have passed through the camp. Human rights groups estimate that 8,000 children have been kidnapped by the rebels.

Recently, the center has branched out to include infants. The girl that Albright held in her arms, named Charity after a World Vision official, is one. Others are children of girls, some as young as 15, who were forced to act as sex slaves for Lord’s Resistance Army rebels. Mark Avola, the center director, said unwanted pregnancies among escaped girls are among the camp’s biggest problems.

One teenager told Albright: “Even if you are a very young girl, you would be given to a man who was the age of my father.” She made it clear that she had endured such abuse.

Albright also visited a Gulu hospital where 446 beds are overflowing with victims of the conflict, most of them maimed by land mines. Hospital authorities say that by the end of the month, 14,800 patients will have been admitted this year, more than half of them children younger than 6.

Although several newspapers, including The Times, have reported on the plight of children caught up in the conflict, Albright said her visit was intended to focus world attention on the issue. “It is a terrible story here,” Albright told a group of youngsters. “Not enough people in the world know how much you have suffered. Now everybody in the world will know about the suffering here.”