CONGO (ACN News): “The Lord’s Resistance Army continues to terrorise the population. People are afraid,” Bishop Julien Andavo Mbia of Isiro-Niangara, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, said.
He was describing the dire situation of his countrymen and women in the north-western region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo during a visit of the international Catholic pastoral charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN).
Isiro-Niangara diocese, which borders on Uganda and Southern Sudan, is home to about 1.2 million Catholics, including 89 priests.
Bishop Andavo Mbia said the attacks of the self-proclaimed “Lord’s Resistance Army” had declined in intensity somewhat over the past months; still, many refugees were reluctant to return to their villages for fear of renewed attacks.
“They stay in the settlements protected by soldiers, but there they have neither homes nor enough food to eat,” Bishop Andavo Mbia, who has led the diocese since 2003, said.
He has called on the faithful to show greater solidarity toward one another.
Isiro-Niangara diocese is holding a synod under the motto, “Receive, live and pass on the word of Christ”.
The Lord’s Resistance Army, formed in Uganda at the end of the 1980s, became infamous for the brutality of its attacks and its religiously influenced ideology.
For many years, it fought the government of Ugandan President Museveni, who is still in power today.
Driven out of the country, the group retreated to southern Sudan, where it supported the government in Khartoum in its efforts to suppress the independence movement in the south.
Today, the terrorist organisation regularly attacks villages in north-western Congo, the south of the Central African Republic and parts of southern Sudan.
