African rebels step up attacks

There the foreign rebel group has been replenishing its ranks by waging a campaign of abductions, including kidnapping scores of children who have been forced to become child soldiers or sex slaves, the New York-based Human Rights Watch said in its report. Adults, who are used as porters, are also abducted.

During the kidnappings, the rebel group brutally killed those who walked too slowly or who buckled under the heavy loads they were forced to carry, the report said. Many had their skulls crushed with clubs. Children taken into captivity were forced to beat to death other children, including their own siblings.

The large-scale abductions began in southern Central African Republic in July 2009, where more than 300 of the nearly 700 kidnap victims were taken, the report said. The most recent abductions were on June 12 and June 13, when 16 people were seized, including a 2-year-old girl who was later slaughtered.

At the same time, a kidnapping campaign was underway in the remote Bas Uele district of northern Congo, where in March the rebels kidnapped around 80 people from the town of Banda. Two months later, rebels attacked villages near Ango, and those who escaped told the rights group that the rebels had questioned them about the location of schools, indicating they were looking for school-age children, the report said.

The rebel group has a history of swelling its ranks with children as young as 10, who are easier to control.

Of the 45 children interviewed by Human Rights Watch who had escaped from the rebel group, almost all had been forced to kill other children.

The Lord’s Resistance Army began in the 1980s in northern Uganda, where it initially had popular support from northerners who felt marginalized by the central government. It spread to southern Sudan, prompting the Ugandan military to lead a series of military raids to destroy the group’s forest sanctuaries.

By 2007, the force had relocated to Congo and eventually spread to Central African Republic.

For some time there was a lull in the atrocities during peace talks led by Uganda. But the combatants, according to Human Rights Watch, set up substantial farms inside the Congolese national forest and used this period to stockpile food and supplies.

By the end of 2007, the rebel group began replenishing its ranks through abductions. And by 2008 its members turned against Congolese civilians in retaliation for the help they had given to defectors. In the “Christmas Massacre’’ of 2008, at least 865 people were killed in northern Congo, the rights group said.