Rebel Attack Forces Thousands to Flee Refugee Camp in Uganda

Ugandan rebels fired on panic-stricken refugees Monday, forcing 24,000 to flee and killing 14 in a dawn raid on a United Nations camp, a spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said.

Rebels from the Lord’s Resistance Army abducted two Ugandan aid workers during the attack, in which they commandeered an armored vehicle and turned its guns on fleeing refugees from neighboring Sudan before setting the vehicle ablaze, U.N. refugee spokeswoman Bushra Malik said.

The LRA, led by self-styled prophet Joseph Kony, is notorious for cutting off villagers’ lips and hacking off their limbs and has kidnapped thousands of people for use as slaves, wives or fighters during its 15-year insurgency in northern Uganda.

“Initial reports are that eight refugees were killed,” Malik said. “Six Ugandan nationals have been killed as well.”

“All the stocks, food and non-food, have been looted, and they completely burned the staff quarters.”

Malik said the two abducted Ugandans worked for the International Rescue Committee aid agency. Two Sudanese refugees were also abducted, she said.

The IRC’s New York offices later issued a statement saying that 37 of its staff members, all of them Ugandan nationals, were missing.

“This attack on innocent civilians and aid workers is an outrage,” IRC president George Rupp said.

The attack, the second LRA raid on a U.N. refugee camp in Uganda in a month, follows an intensification of LRA activity in response to an army offensive launched in March.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, seeking to ward off criticism that the offensive has done little to neutralize the rebels, traveled to northern Uganda over the weekend to personally direct operations against the rebels.

In July, LRA rebels killed five refugees and a soldier and torched buildings and looted supplies at a U.N. camp in the Adjumani district of northern Uganda.