Ugandan priest appeals for peace talks to stop the massacre of innocent people

By Linda Bordoni

Forty-two people, most of them students, are confirmed dead in an attack by rebels on a secondary school in western Uganda. 

An unknown number of students have also been abducted and at least eight, seriously injured victims are in hospital, having suffered burns after the rebels set the school on fire.
 

Ugandan police authorities blame the Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) militants, a group based in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, that has pledged allegiance to the Islamic State.

They said the army and police units were in “hot pursuit” of the attackers who fled in the direction of Virunga National Park across the border into the DRC.

Father Sunday Augustine Masereka is in charge of the communications office of Kasese Diocese in western Uganda, very close to where the attack took place. He told Vatican Radio about the attack and explained what is behind it:

Father Augustine said Lhubirira school was attacked at around 11 o’clock at night by rebels that came across the nearby border with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

“The school had around 62 students, both girls and boys, and the rebels killed 41 of them, and now, another has died” raising the toll to 42, he said.

The priest said the rebels’ attack was gruesome and included the detonating of bombs, setting fire to the building and its occupants, assaulting the children and staff with arms and knives.

He confirmed the authorities’ statement that points to ADF militants who are based in Congo. He also confirmed the group is a militant Islamic group as one of the survivors – a pregnant woman – was spared as the rebels told her that Muslims do not kill a person carrying a child.

Fr Masereka explained that the reason for an attack such as this is purely retaliatory.

He explained that the country’s armed forces, the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF) is engaged in neighbouring DRC against the ADF rebels, while the rebels themselves  “are training in Congo to fight Uganda.”

The ADF has perpetrated countless attacks and killings in the past years, both in Uganda and in eastern Congo, and Fr Masereka said the people on both sides of the border are terrified.

“It's not it's not been two weeks,” he added, “ that  they have come to kill the people in Uganda; this time they attacked the boarding school and the students, (…) and there have been even more killings in Congo.”

The Ugandan prelate confirmed that churches and priests have also been targeted and he recalled a deadly attack on a Ugandan seminar back in 1996, shortly after the establishment of the insurgent group.

United Nations peacekeepers in eastern DRC

Asked about what international support there is in the area, Fr Augustine said there are United Nations forces in eastern DRC, but there is a widespread feeling they are largely ineffective.

“According to the Congolese, they are not doing much And people in the Congo are being displaced very, very much,” he said.

It is really terrible, he continued, “and there is a lot of need, but those who are there are not helping much. That's why the people in Congo are not very comfortable with the United Nations.”

Thanks to Pope Francis’ apostolic visit to DRC in February, the spotlight was briefly on the suffering of the people there. His message, Fr Masereka said, of hope and support reached the people who are people of faith and prayer.

Appeal for peace talks

What is needed, the priest said, is a negotiated solution, because people continue to die and the fighting is not solving anything.

“Peace talks calling together the different groups to come, and talk, and share, and agree,” he stressed,  “otherwise people will continue to die.

“If they would come together and agree, and have peace talks, maybe they can yield something,” Fr Masereka said, adding that the Church must also be involved.

Asked who the players in this struggle are, he pointed to “the ADF rebels, the governments of Congo and of Uganda, the United Nations and the Americans.”

A forgotten war

“I would pray that people get involved and the media should spread the news more and more, because at one time, the war in the Congo was called a Forgotten War,” he said.

Fr Augustine concluded with an appeal to raise the issue in the international press because people are continuing to die in Congo, and the only time in which this is reported, is when an attack is carried out.

Meanwhile, “people are dying silently there.”