Background: the Lord's Resistance Army

Katine - LRA rebels
Lord's Resistance Army rebels.

Led by the reclusive Joseph Kony, the Lord's Resistance Army is responsible for Africa's longest running conflict. At its peak, the rebels' brutal insurgency displaced nearly two million people in large areas of northern Uganda. To date, the conflict has seen more than 10,000 people killed in massacres, while twice that number of children have been abducted by the LRA and forced to work as soldiers, porters and sex slaves.

The LRA traces its beginnings to anti-government movements formed in the mid-1980s after Yoweri Museveni overthrew the regime of Tito Okello, an ethnic Acholi from northern Uganda.

Kony, a self-professed spirit medium intent on governing Uganda using biblical commandments and Acholi traditions, launched his insurgency in 1987. Rather than focusing on military targets, the LRA usually targeted the very citizens it claimed to be fighting for, raiding villages for supplies and forcing children to carry the goods into the bush.

In 1991, President Yoweri Museveni's government launched a huge military campaign, known as Operation North, to destroy the LRA. The assault failed, and with the support of the Sudanese government, in Khartoum, the rebels were able to establish safe bases across the border in southern Sudan.

Venturing with ease into northern Uganda, the LRA became increasingly brutal. Civilians suspected of supporting the government or forming self-defence forces had their ears, lips and noses hacked off. During attacks on villages, rebels carried out mass abductions of children who in turn were forced to carry out future attacks - making them both victims of the conflict and perpetrators. In government attacks abducted children would be killed, angering the local population.

To deny the rebels the chance to loot food and abduct civilians, the army emptied the countryside, herding civilians into vast and squalid "protection" camps. And, in 2002, the army again tried gain to wipe the rebels out, launching so-called Operation Iron Fist.

Again, however, the attempted military solution failed. Within months of the operation, the LRA was carrying out attacks with a brutality unseen since the mid-90s. Bands of rebels began overrunning villages such as Katine, in the Soroti district of north-east Uganda, which had previously been untouched by the conflict.

Around Gulu and Kitgum, two of the bigger towns in northern Uganda, the threat of abduction became so great that tens of thousands of children from nearby villages marched into the town centres each night to sleep in schools, hospitals and on pavements – anywhere they could find safety in numbers. The plight of these so-called "night commuters" helped to focus world attention on the crisis.

In 2005, the international criminal court issued arrest warrants for Kony, his deputy Vincent Otti, and three other rebel commanders. Within months the LRA leadership had expressed a desire for peace talks. Negotiations began in Juba, in southern Sudan, last year, and are continuing. Rebel forces, thought to number several thousand, are holed up in southern Sudan and the north-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Kony and Otti have refused to attend the talks personally, fearing arrest, and are trying to negotiate an amnesty.

Hundreds of thousands of people have left the displaced person's camps to return home, but many are waiting for a conclusive peace deal before rebuilding their lives.