![]() LAKWENA and Unidentified Men: (Singing in unison) He will come again. She and two of her aides start to shake and sing, summoning the holy spirits for battle. ![]() She says she wants to return to Uganda and unfurls her flowing green dress and stands up. WESTERVELT: But, clearly, Alice Lakwena is no ordinary refugee. And so in that sense, so far as CARE is concerned, she's an ordinary refugee. KENNETH WALKER (CARE Africa Spokesman): She gets no more and no less than any other individual in the camps, not one bit. Kenneth Walker is spokesman for CARE Africa. The relief group CARE which is the lead partner in running the major programs of the camps says she's treated like any other refugee. But why is the spiritual founder of a movement whose leaders have been indicted for war crimes, a voodoo priestess who led hundreds of children to their death, living under the protection of the United Nations, which runs the refugee camps, and the Kenyan government, which oversees them? And why is she given what are apparently special privileges-a waterspout, bodyguards and her own compound? Spokesmen for the UN and the Kenyan government said they're looking into it. Lakwena says she has no contact with Kony and doesn't support the LRA. WESTERVELT: After Lakwena fled to Kenya, her nephew, Joseph Kony, took over the movement, which he renamed the Lord's Resistance Army, or LRA. BENSON ALARKAI (Bodyguard): When the government is fighting a power like this one, they see and they fire but she's bullet-proof. WESTERVELT: And her bodyguard Benson Alarkai(ph) helps explain. Bullets, she claims, have no effect on her or her followers. There's a long tradition of charismatic mystics in sub-Saharan Africa and Alice's theology is a mishmash of traditional beliefs and her own take on fundamentalist Christianity. WESTERVELT: Two guns, three days-it all makes sense to Alice. WESTERVELT: 'Cause sometimes the spirits need guns, too. Just who are these spirits? Alice believes she channels the spirit of an Italian military officer but even a spirit sometimes needs a little fire power. WESTERVELT: In Lakwena's version of holy war, spirits protect you in battle. If I go there fighting, (unintelligible), I promise, holy war I will set. Even me, myself, I can command a war nicely. And people are blocking me here within the camp. ALICE LAKWENA (Founder, Lord's Resistance Army): Me, Alice Lakwena, I can command a holy war. Alice says she's eager to return to what she calls a holy war for liberation in Uganda. Rule 1: Thou shalt not harbor charms or a chewed toothbrush in thy pocket. She sits in her compound decorated with handmade posters of the 20 precautions according to Alice. A large woman, Lakwena wears a flowing green dress and a white head wrap. In her yard, Alice has her own waterspout, a precious hard-fought commodity for all other refugees. Aides and servants serve cold sodas on a tin tray. Alice has her own large complex, complete with a worship hall. In theory, she's just another refugee in this sprawling camp in northeast Kenya, but almost all the refugees live in tiny rundown thatched huts. ![]() Today, Alice Lakwena and her bodyguards and a handful of supporters live in a well-kept gated compound at the Dadaab refugee camp. ![]() Lakwena later fled by bicycle into neighboring Kenya. Her followers were slaughtered by the thousands. Lakwena told her legions of young soldiers, many of them children, that they were bullet-proof, that rocks were hand grenades. In the mid-'80s, Alice Lakwena's cultlike Holy Spirit Movement made a failed bid to overthrow the Ugandan government. NPR's Eric Westervelt caught up with her at a refugee camp in Kenya where she's been living since the late 1980s. Little remembered is the group's spiritual founder, a self-styled voodoo priestess named Alice Lakwena. For two decades, this army has terrorized northern Uganda, killing tens of thousands and taking an estimated 20,000 children as their slaves. But first, the Lord's Resistance Army is a brutal cultlike group in Uganda's north that last month drew the first war crimes indictments from the International Criminal Court. Coming up, infighting among Eskimos over ANWR.
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