The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a brutal band of guerrillas that has terrorised Uganda's north for 16 years, continues to bedevil the army.
Dr. Fouad Baban, an Iraqi Kurd who has studied the victims, identified 250 villages and 31 suspected bases of Kurdish guerrillas that Iraq gassed in 1987 and 1988.
"Is it a war against the drug traffic or against the guerrillas that could become worse than Vietnam?" Bishop Emiliani said.
He added, "We are aware of the pain and anguish caused by the conflict, but in the past, the cease-fire has created advantages for the guerrillas that cannot be repeated".
One of the most intractable confrontations was in Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, where a white minority of settlers unilaterally declared independence in 1965 and later fought a bloody war with nationalist guerrillas that ended only with independence in 1980.
Mr. Karma had long been a target of their anger because he founded Salwa Judum, a local militia organized to combat the guerrillas that has been accused of atrocities against the local tribal population.
Those never produced direct peace talks with important sections of the enemy, but they did produce the Geneva Accords and various backchannel deals with guerrillas that eased the Soviet position as they moved back from direct combat.
Links between ivory traffickers and African militias such as the Lord's Resistance Army, a thuggish band of guerrillas that originated in Uganda, have put the issue on the national-security agenda in America and elsewhere.
