It is common knowledge that, despite their denials, the Sudanese government has long provided material support to the world's most stunningly brutal militia, the Lord's Resistance Army ( LRA).
The LRA is Ugandan cult army without any current political agenda. It was founded by Joseph Kony in the 1980s. Since then Kony and his followers have been moving through deepest brush in Uganda, Congo, south Sudan and CAR, emerging only to plunder villages and to murder, rape, abduct and mutilate people. They abduct children to use as sex slaves, porters and to replenish their fighting forces.
Sudanese planes have been spotted delivering arms and supplies to LRA outposts. A witness reported watching a plane full of weapons being unloaded, after which children were brought out of the bush and put on the plane. Presumably the children were flown back to northern Sudan to be sold on the slave market.
After the LRA attacked a Central African village in Obo, they took three hundred children. I spoke to a UN rep who described the silence of the childless village, interrupted by the sound of weeping parents.
In the 1990s and early 2000s the LRA served as a proxy army for the Sudanese government in its war against south Sudan -- just as that same regime would later work in tandem with the marauding Janjaweed militia.
In the past year alone the LRA have killed thousands and sent almost a half a million traumatized people fleeing from their homes. The militia has now moved into south Darfur -- an area controlled by the Sudanese Government.
LRA leader Joseph Kony and Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir have a thing or two in common. Both are wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Ugandan Army has pursued and killed some members of the LRA, but in Sudan they have been offered a safe haven by their patron, Omer al-Bashir.