So the niggling question is why the Ugandan military has so far failed to snuff the movement out. The LRA has hidden amid alien corn for years now, and because Obo remembers the "tonga-tonga" speech, the rebels can trust no one there. For foreign observers, like the Nato forces trying to wage counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan, the least appetising inference to draw from the LRA's continued survival is that the business of counterinsurgency is even tougher than it looks. Even when the population is on your side, and your enemy reduced to Neolithic weaponry, the fight continues.

•••

I recently convened a meeting of about 20 Central Africans from Ligua, a village a few kilometres outside Obo that has been progressively abandoned since the LRA came to the area. The villagers have retreated to the relative safety of a refugee camp in town. There they live in wooden shanties, using sacks from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees as roofing. The ground

is swept and raked, like a Japanese garden, both to keep things tidy and to leave no refuge for vipers. The displaced villagers met me in their open-air Catholic chapel, which consisted of a few wooden pews shaded by palms and acacias and a bamboo altar topped with a withered pink flower.

The first of them to meet an LRA rebel was a man named Paul who had been fishing for Nile perch on the Mbomu River. First he heard the explosions of a Ugandan military aerial bombardment nearby, on the Congolese side of the river. Then LRA fighters, fleeing from the bombers, crossed the river, found him and forced him to march with them into his village with Kalashnikovs and chain guns pointed at his head. The rebels also carried mortars, which the villagers call "papayas" for their shape, in case they met the Ugandans.

The LRA entered Ligua and immediately shot a 30-year old villager named Paul Ipa'ingba in the leg when he looked out his front door. He fell, and the LRA killed him with a bullet to the neck. Minutes later, the LRA fighters produced an interpreter whom they had kidnapped long ago and taught to speak Acholi, and he informed the villagers that they were now all slaves of the LRA. That night, huddled together and locked into one house, a handful of the villagers were made to shell bushel after bushel of peanuts for their captors. The next morning the rebels took food, kidnapped porters from among the villagers, and left as quickly as they came.

The LRA showed up about half a dozen more times in Ligua. Other villages suffered even more. When people caught on that I was looking for LRA stories, they began hiking up their clothes to show where they had been beaten and shot. Dieudonné Aiba, who was abducted late last year, showed the half-healed wounds to his left thigh - a small dark discolouration at mid-thigh where a bullet entered, and a pale, crusty star of a scar on the other side where it exited. An old woman who spent nearly a week as an LRA hostage in November said she owed her escape to a case of explosive diarrhoea: the LRA's guards let her relieve herself further than usual from the camp, and one day she ran until she found a Ugandan patrol. But they all had tales of murder. The LRA forced them to carry supplies on hiking trips north. One man, Joseph Guinibini, said he saw an unwilling porter complain that he was tired. The LRA caved in his head, telling him, "Now you have your rest."