Cabbages and Kony

The four-year fiasco that is the futile search for renegade militia leader, Joseph Kony and his army of child soldiers, has once again become the focus in Washington, DC.

Congress discussed Kony recently during a meeting of the House Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations. The hearing was titled, “Ridding Central Africa of Joseph Kony: Continuing US Support.”

While there appears to be continuing support to keep up the hunt for Kony, the reality on the ground in Africa is typically confusing at best.

A recent article in the Washington Post provides a well-crafted update on the search for Kony. It focuses on the apparent dealings the Ugandan army and U.S. special forces advisers have had with Muslim rebel fighters in the region, known as the Seleka.

I have argued in First Kill Your Family that the Ugandans aren't truly committed to finding Kony.

It is absurd for the Ugandans and their American advisers to complain that they can'd find Kony. Many people know where he is. The Post even published the following map:

The only ones who don't seem to know are the soldiers who have been hunting him ever since late 2008 when the Ugandan army botched an air and ground assault on Kony's camp in the Garamba National Park in the north eastern corner of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

In 2011, President Obama ordered 100 U.S. military advisers to help the Ugandans with the hunt for Kony. They've been unsuccessful so far, and Obama will soon have to decide to continue the U.S. support or cut it.

Kony has been killing elephants and rhinos in Garamaba ever since he arrived there in late 2005, having abandoned his marauding of northern Uganda for some "fresh meat." Only recently, however, has this on-going slaughter of wildlife become an issue.

Kony and others, it seems, have been selling the highly valuable tusks to black marketeers who arrive in helicopters, load their cargo, and fly off. If a bunch of men who deal in wildlife parts can find Kony, why can't the Uganda and U.S. Special Forces?

While the Post article looks at a potential controversy should the U.S. advisers be pumping the Seleka for information and cooperation, it's a needless discussion.

The Seleka are apparently among the many who have been dealing with Kony. So if the Ugandans and the Americans are serious about finding Kony and bringing him to just, then WHY NOT talk to them? How can the Kony mission not use any and all means to find Kony?

While the Kony mission stumbles along, the reasons for it lack of success became quite evident as one reads deep into the article. The problems are many.

First, the U.S. has been rotating personnel in and out of the mission, which is based in Entebbe, a town south of the capital of Kampala, and the site of a military airport that also hosts UN planes. This has made it nearly impossible for continuity of the mission.

Second, the U.S. made some noise about adding to the mission three of the highly mobile Osprey aircraft, which can take off and land vertically, along with crew and added personnel. It only lasted three weeks before they were all pulled and reassigned to missions with higher priorities.

This has forced the mission to rely on private contractors to ferry food and supplies around to the various remote base camps. But officials now say that these contractors work at their own pace, meaning that they fit in the work when they can. Hardly a high priority mission.

Third, the U.S. advisers complained about how the Ugandans use, or abuse, U.S. equipment. In one instance, the Ugandans used a U.S. helicopter for a resupply mission, but only put five cabbages on it. Five cabbages? Are you serious?

That's supposedly a resupply mission for soldiers who are supposed to trekking around the jungles looking for Kony?

If anything, it shows that the Ugandans are not serious about finding Kony, as I've long argued, and are more interested in getting and using U.S. arms and equipment for their own purposes.

Kony mutiny not the first

As followers of my writing and this blog know, I advocate serious, coordinated, international action against the renegade militia leader Joseph Kony.

The lack of that kind of action,  however, is the source of endless articles, speculation, and discussion. Good writing about the fiasco to find Kony continues to gurgle up from time to time.

Of late is an article in The New Yorker magazine by a young writer named Ledio Cakaj, He's a blogger for the Enough organization. This is his first piece for the magazine. I recommend it.

The article details interviews with a handful of Kony's former soldiers (there are thousands) about a mutiny and attempted assassination of Kony from within his disaffected ranks. The article suggests that the 2013 attempt on Kony may was the first of its kind against the maniacal leader.

It wasn't.

I spent a significant amount of time in 2005 and 2006 tracking Kony's life and actions, which resulted in the award-winning 2009 book First Kill Your Family: Child Soldiers of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army.

It's the first serious work on Kony to be published in the United States. It remains the gold standard of source material for anyone who wants to know about Kony, what makes him tick, and why he has not been captured.

For nearly 20 years, Kony's number two man was Vincent Otti. He  was a former shopkeeper who bridged the chasm between Kony's self-delusions and the real world. Otti regularly talked live via satellite phone on Ugandan radio shows. He was quite entertaining.

Otti brokered the extended peace talks with Kony that began in June 2006 in the remote jungles of South Sudan. As followers know, the peace talks finally broke down after two years during which Kony skillfully turned the talks into a three-ring circus.

After Kony's team would negotiate terms of an agreement, a large contingent of negotiators would, at great trouble and expense, decamp to a jungle rendezvous for the signing. Declarations that "peace was at hand" echoed across the skies and the worldwide web. Activists swooned.

But Kony didn't show. Three times.

The last of Kony's no-shows was followed by the abortive airstrike and (delayed) ground attack by the Ugandan army on Kony's camp in the the Congo's Garamba National Park. Kony had been living there since late 2005, having fled northern Uganda.

But Kony was gone. He'd been tipped off. The same thing happened in 2013. A privately funded attack on his camp, also by an elite unit of the Ugandan army, found an empty Kony camp in the corner of South Sudan where multiple reports said he was living. (Is there a connection here???)

Kony lived relatively well during the peace talks, thanks the largess of the international community. He was sent convoys of trucks loaded with food and supplies. The thinking was that this would keep Kony at the bargaining table. Not!

From the beginning of Kony's early days in Garamba, once a prime wildlife reserve, he helped himself to the abundant wildlife there, routinely slaughtering elephants and the rare and nearly extinct white rhinos that once lived there.

Cakaj's article discusses a number of Kony's men whom he sent from his enclave in the recesses of northern South Sudan to Garamba to slaughter remaining elephants. The tusks were carried back to be sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars and sustain Kony and his men.

Back to Otti. After spearheading the peace talks, Otti realized Kony was playing the activist community for fools and would never sign an agreement to surrender.

Otti was 61 at the time. He was tired and sick of war. He wanted to go home. At least a third of Kony's men, all of whom were under Otti's command, felt the same way. They were sick of Kony and of living on the run, not to mention his endless slaughter of innocent men, women, children, and wildlife.

They were going to leave, a move that would cripple Kony's army.

Kony got wind of the mutiny. Fearing an assassination attempt, he summoned Otti. On October 2, 2007, Kony's personal guards grabbed Otti, forced him to his knees, and as Otti plead for his life,  executed him. His body was never found.

Otti's death was followed by many desertions. Some of these soldiers gave themselves up to the Ugandan army. They provided details of the Otti's death and the failed mutiny. They said that Kony justified the execution of his trusted long-time commander by saying that Otti had tried to kill him.

Kony has survived attempts on his life and massive desertions from his ranks. He will continue to do so until the international community decides they've had enough of this maniac. Kony will survive until those who can take meaningful action.

What and why we write

The title caught me. It contained the word international, as in International Blog Hop.

It came via writers I know only through Facebook, such as JD Rhoades and Elizabeth Lynn Casey aka Laura Bradford.

Blog about writing and pass the pen. No Bogarting allowed.

I like the international thing. I spent 10 years knocking around largely forgotten, yet unforgettable corners of world, like Albania, Slovenia, Moldova, Armenia, Afghanistan, Uganda, the Congo, South Sudan, and Somalia, with a pit stop in Zanzibar and a trek up Mt. Kilimanjaro.

(My wife Dina finally said I had to unpack that carry-on I kept next to the bed. I didn't grumble much.)

Staring at this blank screen, I thought of the writers and journalists I've worked with in far-flung places. They're fearless scribes who face unimaginable difficulties -- the ever-present threat of being killed for broadcasting or writing the wrong thing (aka the truth) about a maniacal president or warlord.

Here in the U.S. the biggest problems are Internet speed, occasional heartburn, and too many choices.

Yet, these writers had a refined sense of beauty and art, and an appreciation of the time it takes to create it -- notions lost in our headlong rush into the digital age.

So....

1) What am I working on?

Fiction. After six books of narrative nonfiction, I've conceded that Americans don't care much for what happens in the next county, let alone on another continent. It's an unfortunate fact even if we have 100,000 troops in a country for more than a decade to fight a nebulous "war on terror."

Never mind that we don't know who the enemy is, what language they speak, or why they hate us.

For international issues to find a place in the American psyche demands delivery by mythological creatures known as super agents. They're typically misfit ex-CIA-turned-contractors or rogues brought back from obscure locales like Uruguay or Monte Negro for one last chance. (Normal people don't live and work in places like that, do they?)

They often have special knowledge and experience of the countries or regions, even if only bits and pieces of that are revealed. No matter, though. They're really good at knocking off the bad guys, who are always potent and plentiful.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Other than it brings to light global tragedies that compel reconsideration of our role in the world, which no one wants to do?

With my fiction foray, I've deviated from the cop/agent as the central character and substituted a journalist. (Write about something I know, right?) But journalists don't carry guns, even though they're good at digging up dirt and getting into trouble. So, my guy's got a special agent friend with weapons and he knows how to use them.

3) Why do you write what you do?

Nothing is more satisfying than going into a global hot zone, and getting paid to do so, then emerging with the story-behind-the-story. But enough of that. My move toward fiction is explained above.

4) How does my writing process work?

Nonfiction requires organization and preparation: detailed book proposals and sample chapters. Not a lot is left to the imagination, but manuscripts are malleable. Chapters are whacked and others added. Then there's the logistics of finding contacts and meeting sources. I've had the luxury of working in places and at jobs that afforded me time to develop the books on the side. But not always.

For fiction, I like three things: an issue/theme, a beginning, and an end. The rest happens at the keyboard. I start in the morning and don't quit until I have at least 1,000 words. By then I can usually hear a glass of Cabernet calling my name.

We'll see soon enough how the process works, though. My agent specializes in nonfiction. She flinched when I told her I was working on fiction. There's always Amazon.

Abandoning Afghanistan

An article in today's New York Times raises a lot of issues surrounding the so-called "zero option," which would be a total pull-out of Afghanistan by the end of this year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/27/world/asia/afghanistan-exit-is-seen-as-peril-to-drone-mission.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20140127

While the headline suggests that the drone program would be put in jeopardy, a lot more is at stake. Not only would total withdrawal simply turn over large portions of the country to the Taliban and the fundamentalist elements in Pakistan, it would pave the way to a return to civil war. That alone is enough to reject the zero option. 

As the article mentions, a major reason for our presence in Afghanistan is to keep an eye on Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. While it is well known that Pakistan and India have arsenals aimed at each other  -- a sad homage to the paranoia that grips the region -- it's much more serious because Pakistan is apparently developing highly mobile "tactical" nukes. 

Given the inherent instability of Pakistan, its illusory control of the northwest provinces, and its widely accepted ties with and support of the Taliban, possession of tactical nuclear weapons poses a big problem.

It requires no stretch of the imagination to suspect that these exceedingly destructive weapons could fall into the hands of elements of the Taliban and/or the fractured and diverse incarnations of al-Qaeda.

The threat of this to both Afghanistan and Pakistan is obvious. But it doesn't stop there. The region is at stake as well.

Perhaps the best example is al-Qaeda's recent takeover of Fallujah, the bloody and bitterly contested city in Iraq. This is a clear and dangerous consequence of the US total pull-out of Iraq. 

Now Al-Qaeda militias control parts of Syria. They're scattered across northern Africa in countries such as northern Nigeria, Algeria, Libya, and Mali.

This makes a domestic threat to the US all the more real. 

Yes, this theme has been explored extensively already by thriller writers and Hollywood productions. At the risk of sounding like an alarmist, this is a real situation that is evolving slowly but surely.

Because of this, it is all the more important that the US abandon the zero option in Afghanistan. The threat posed by the region, if left to its own devices, is frighteningly real. 

There is historical precedent. The attacks of 9/11 were hatched by bin Laden while he was in Afghanistan. And where did he go to hide for more than a decade? Pakistan.

What is still more disconcerting is that the US policy makers are presenting Afghan President Hamid Karzai as an obstacle because he won't sign the agreement that would give us a long-term presence in Afghanistan.

This is absurd. Karzai is in office and is only alive, in fact, because the US put him there and keeps him there. Not only is the stability of the region dependent on US and NATO presence, so is US long-term security.

All of this is at risk because Karzai is throwing yet another irrational and self-destructive temper tantrum in a fake show that he cares about the Afghan people? No one in Afghanistan takes Karzai seriously, so why should the US?

It is apparent that by giving Karzai the credence that he does not deserve, the Obama administration is giving itself political cover for a possible total withdrawal.  

The US cannot abandon Afghanistan. There is far too much at stake, in the country, in the region, and at home for the US to pull out. It would be a huge mistake. 

An all too familiar story

There's a good story posted yesterday on-line in the New Yorker.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2013/10/how-a-texas-philanthropist-funded-the-hunt-for-joseph-kony.html.

The story is about how Texan philanthropist Shannon Davis and others, have helped fund, train and equip a special unit of the Ugandan army to pursue the notorious warlord, Joseph Kony and his army of child soldiers, now roaming somewhere, people think, in the Central African Republic.

Some thoughts:

Davis and the others rightly suggest that the Ugandans are the ones who must capture or put an end to Kony, not the legions of non-Africans who follow the agonizing and consistent failures of the Ugandan army. 

The result of the Davis funded mission, however, is hauntingly familiar to the first such attack on a Kony camp, funded by the Bush administration in Dec 2008. Despite nearly a year of training and millions in military aid, Kony was long gone when the Ugandans botched what was supposed to be a decisive blow on his base camp in the Garamba National Park in the DR Congo.

In the wake of the attack, it became clear that Kony had been tipped off, mostly likely by the Ugandan army insiders. I would suspect that same thing happened in this latest assault. The Ugandan army is trying to blame US intelligence for not sharing that Kony was already gone. I suspect it is the other way around. The Ugandans knew Kony was gone, but attacked anyway just so the funders would feel that their efforts had not been wasted.

I would suggest that Kony has not really been deprived of a safe haven. He has been roaming the remote reaches of the Central African Republic for more than seven years now, and roamed northern Uganda for 20 before that. Moving and setting up new camps is routine.

I would also suggest that Sudan's president al-Bashir willingly supports Kony, the first person indicted by the International Criminal Court, since now he too is on the court's most wanted list. Helping Kony is finger in the eye of the court.

It's been the same story with Kony told over and over, only with different players. As I argue in First Kill Your Family: Child Soldiers of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army, Uganda does not want to capture or kill Kony. He is much more valuable alive than dead or on trial before the International Criminal Court. That well-funded and well-intention people like Davis and Buffett, not to mention US Special Forces, are willing to train, equip and fund the Ugandans year-after-year illustrates how Kony is a cash cow for the Ugandans.

This has been obvious since the onset when Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni padded his military payroll and the pockets of his generals with thousands of non-existent "ghost soldiers" who were supposedly fighting Kony when he was in northern Uganda prior to vacating the country in 2006. The Ugandan army's refrain is sadly familiar when the generals are asked what they need to capture Kony: money, equipment and training. 

The US continues to advise and assist the Ugandans in their "pursuit" of Kony because the Ugandans are the bulk of the African Union's mission in Somalia. 

As a terrorist haven for the al-Qaeda-like Al Shabab, which conducted that horrific attack on the mall in Nairobi, Kenya, and previously bombed locations in Kampala, keeping a Ugandan force in Somalia is strategically much more important to US interests than Kony will ever be. 

A few helicopters and contingent of special forces to chase Kony is little more than a bone tossed to the Ugandans.

--Peter Eichstaedt

Kony's plunder of wildlife

A report issued by the Enough Project and titled, Kony's Ivory, documents yet another in an endless string atrocities by Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army.

The report, http://www.enoughproject.org/files/KonysIvory.pdf,  reveals how Kony and his cutthroats have contributed the destruction of elephant population in Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

According to the report, the elephant population has dwindled from about 20,000 (other reports set the figure at only 7,000) to just 1,500 in the past decade due to poaching, much of it by the LRA.

As anyone who has been following this issue knows, Kony and company set up camp in the Garamba park in late 2005 and early 2006, using it as a base while peace talks were conducted in Juba, South Sudan, with the Ugandan government.

Even then, reports were rife that Kony's men were killing the Garamba wildlife, mostly for the meat.
I visited the periphery of the park twice, both times in connection with research for First Kill Your Family: Child Soldiers of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army.

The first time was in 2006 on the northern edge of the park where it borders South Sudan.

The second was on the western edge of the park in 2008 in the town of Dungu, which had been attacked and raided by the LRA, despite the presence of United Nations forces.

In Dungu, I met with wildlife officers who talked about the dangers faced by the park rangers, who had basically withdrawn from much of the park because of the LRA, but also told me of extensive poaching.

It is good that Enough has documented this on-going tragedy, but it may be too little, too late.

The report provides no details on who is buying the ivory, how and why, or where it goes once it leaves the park. The only details we get are from one former LRA captive who says that people arrived in helicopters to buy it. Really? From where?

If the buyers used helicopters, it means some fairly well-heeled smugglers are involved, most likely based in Nairobi, Kenya, or Khartoum, Sudan. Or, more likely, that corrupt military commanders from either country (imagine that!) are in the middle of the illegal trade.

Just last month the Reuters wrote a story about the wider problem of elephant poaching across central Africa, based on a United Nations report, singling out the LRA as an example of the problem: http://news.yahoo.com/libya-war-weapons-may-killing-central-africa-elephants-062616139.html?.tsrc=lgwnaww.

As early as 2004, a year before the LRA entered Garamba Park, the slaughter of white rhinos was being reported as a major concern for wildlife biologists, as noted in the British newspaper, the Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/democraticrepublicofcongo/1462372/Poachers-killing-last-of-the-rare-white-rhinos.html.

Closer to home, the National Geographic Society was also involved, reporting in 2004 about the problem on it's website: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/05/0507_040507_whiterhino.html

Solutions anyone?

The common thread here is that various armed groups across Africa kill the elephants and rhinos for their tusks and horns, since they can get several thousand dollars per pound for ivory. The sale of the ivory buys weapons and supplies for armed groups.

One report mentioned that the rhino horns went to Yemen where they were carved into handles for highly prized daggers for wealthy sheiks. Likewise, the rhino horns are valued for their supposed medicinal qualities and the ivory for its rarity by Asians.

Despite the on-going human tragedy and the destruction of the last wild herds of elephants and rhinos in Africa -- a problem that has been highly publicized for more than a decade -- nothing is being done to stop it.

This is all too reminiscent of what is being done, or more precisely NOT being done, about Kony and the LRA. The Ugandan army, which had been chasing Kony in the Central African Republic for the past five or so years, gave up the hunt by using the recent military coup in the CAR as an excuse to quit.

The U.S. Special Forces mission, sent by President Obama in 2011 to help in the search for Kony, also decided to stand down.

As wildlife activists have been saying for years, the slaughter of African wildlife must be attacked on many fronts.

First, enforcement. The poachers certainly must be stopped. This will require a trained and pervasive force which will require commitment and funding.

Second, the traders must be found, stopped, prosecuted and jailed.

Thirdly, the demand must be curtailed. This will require working with the Chinese and Southeast Asian nations to gain their support and cooperation.

While the Enough Project report may help rekindle interest in the poaching problem, it does little more than note a problem that people have known about for decades.

If there is to be any hope of actually solving the problem, Enough and the other groups involved in the report need to much more than plow what is already heavily plowed ground. 

Sudan harbouring Kony: report

It should come as no surprise that reports this past week from Resolve Uganda claim that Sudan has been harboring international fugitive from justice, Joseph Kony, and his Lord's Resistance Army.

 

Sudan, of course, denies the charge.  

Titled, "Hidden in Plain Sight," the Resolve report  (http://www.resolveuganda.org/) includes satellite images that it claims is a recently-abandoned camp, where Kony apparently was seen in late 2012. The region is called Kafia Kingi, and is in the far northwestern corner of South Sudan, where the borders of Sudan and the Central African Republic meet.  

 

Despite the fact that the territory is clearly in the newly independent South Sudan, Kafia Kingi is "disputed" land nominally controlled by Sudan.

"Eyewitnesses testify that elements from Sudan's military actively provided Kony and other LRA leaders with periodic safe haven in Sudanese-controlled territory from 2009 until at least February 2013," according to the Resolve report.

 

While the report raises the necessary red flags about Kony's whereabouts and lines of support, it reflects a host of past behavior patterns on the part of ALL parties concerned.

 

For much of the 20 years that Kony fought his bloody war in northern Uganda, he and his army of child soldiers found refuge in South Sudan during Uganda's dry season, where Kony was able to establish semi-permanent camps and grow food.

 

In First Kill Your Family, I write about my interviews with Kony's former top commanders who described being hosted by the Sudanese, who controlled South Sudan then, including one LRA commander who was flown to a hospital in Khartoum where he was treated for a severe wound that resulted in a leg amputation.

 

Sudan's support for Kony was due to Kony's guerilla war against Uganda, following the principle that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni was an ardent supporter of the late John Garang, who led South Sudan in its war for independence from Sudan. 

 

The situation is no different today than it was back then. While Kony has directed his attacks in the past couple of years against the innocent people of eastern Central African Republic, the fact that he remains camped out in South Sudan is a warning.

Then as now, Kony has the strong potential of being a thorn in the side of South Sudan, wreaking havoc on the South Sudanese, who even now are struggling to solidify their independence and their claims to the oil-rich Abyei region that is challenged by Sudan.

 

Another repeated pattern that the Resolve report reveals is of Uganda's wholly inept efforts to capture Kony. Uganda's army, which has been chasing Kony since 2008 when peace talks finally collapsed, is considered one of the best in east Africa.

 

The fact that Uganda's army can't find Kony is not an accident. Kony is much more valuable to Uganda alive and on the loose than he is captured and on trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, where he was indicted for war crimes in 2005. 

 

Kony has been and continues to be an endless excuse for Uganda to received millions of dollars of U.S. and international civilian and military aid. 

 

After all, U.S. Special Forces were assigned in 2011 to help Uganda's efforts to find Kony in the Central African Republic -- just the latest tranche in two decades worth of money and equipment that has been handed over to the Ugandans.

 

What has Uganda been doing with all that support and advice? Not much, it appears, since the search for Kony for the past two years has been based in Obo, a remote town in the far eastern tip of the Central African Republic.

 

Obo is nowhere close to where Resolve says Kony has been operating since 2009. Look for yourself on www.googlemaps.com. Kony's apparent location is about 400 north of where the Ugandans and the Americans have been looking.

 

If a handful of humanitarian activists can track down Kony, what have the Ugandan and their American advisers been doing? Not much, because Uganda does not want Kony captured or killed, but is happy to accept American aid.

 

If the Resolve report is even remotely true, this is a huge embarrassment to the State Department and the U.S. military advisers.

 

According to new reports, this is the U.S. response: "The United States is aware and continues to evaluate reports that the LRA has operated in the disputed Kafia Kingi area claimed by both Sudan and South Sudan," said Patrick Ventrell, deputy State Department spokesman.

"The US and the international community as a whole would take very seriously any credible evidence of support or safe haven being provided to the LRA," he said, adding Washington has encouraged Sudan to cooperate with regional efforts to counter the LRA.

Meanwhile, the US has thrown more money on the table, a reward of $5 million for the capture of Kony, who Secretary of State John Kerry said would "not be easy to find."

 

Given the fact that Uganda once arrested, jailed, then deported a group of mercenaries who were organizing to capture Kony, this reward will undoubtedly result in the same lack of success as all previous efforts.

Russell's out-of-body experience?

USA Today, the nation's colorful, vapid newspaper, got a jump on the coming Oprah Winfrey interview of Jason Russell, founder of Invisible Children and maker of the now infamous Kony 2012 viral video.

In the advanced excerpt, undoubtedly leaked to boost viewers for Oprah's  less-then-successful network, Russell claims he had an out-of-body experience this past March.

If you saw the video, it was hard to forget, of course.

It showed a butt-naked Russell on a busy street corner in San Diego ranting and raving at traffic, snapping his fingers, shouting incoherently, and slapping his hands on the pavement.

(The article wrongly states that Russell was pounding his fists on the pavement, which makes me wonder if the reporter bothered to see it before writing about it.)

Russell clearly flipped out. The true reasons are probably known only to Russell and his psychiatrist, but the man clearly has some deeply rooted issues he needs to confront. I doubt that his meltdown was because of the fact that the video was viewed by 100 million people.

He's trying to make a comeback, and why not? His Invisible Children organization raises millions of dollars each year from gullible college students for his anti-Joseph Kony crusade. Without Invisible Children, Russell and the others at the organization stand to lose their fame, fortune and So-Cal life style.

My criticism of the Kony 2012, which some have said was too harsh, still stands. Russell used his child to generate a superficial emotional response on the part of millions of naive viewers to a very serious and complex problem.

He not only used his child, but he drew on historical film footage to create a host of misleading impressions, the worst of which is that Kony is still terrorizing children in northern Uganda. He then concluded the video by asking for money.

Only in passing does Kony 2012 mention that Kony left northern Uganda in 2006, and has been roaming a remote region of central Africa ever since.

What bothers me the most is that Russell has the personnel and the resources to do much, much more, and to have a serious impact on the on-going push by the African Union soldiers to find and capture Kony and ultimately put him on trial.

Here's the article from USA Today:

Oprah Winfrey has scored another first.
She's talking to Kony 2012 campaign creator Jason Russell, who had a very public meltdown soon after the phenomenal success of the video that brought worldwide attention to Uganda rebel leader Joseph Kony. It all happened in March. And while many remember the initial Kony video, another video â?? of Russell â?? emerged, showing him on the streets of San Diego naked, yelling, disrupting traffic and pounding his fists on the pavement.
Russell was hospitalized with what his wife said at the time was "reactive psychosis."
He and his wife, Danica, will discuss with Winfrey on Sunday's Oprah's Next Chapter (9 p.m., OWN) what happened on that day and the impact the events have had on his career, his marriage and his continued fight against Kony.
Here's an excerpt:
OPRAH: "What do you remember, Jason?"
JASON: "I remember me flipping off cars."
OPRAH: "Flipping off cars? Like with your..."
JASON: "With both hands. I remember that just like 'doot,' just like a little memory. I remember running around our lemon tree. I remember ..."
OPRAH: "There were reports that you were breaking into cars?"
JASON: "There are reports. I mean I think I was stopping cars in the street. People said I was laying in the street â?? it's a busy street â?? I was laying in the street."
OPRAH: "How did you get your robe off? How do you go from running out with your robe on to your robe off?"
JASON: "Again, it's really hard to explain if people who have never had an out-of-body experience, but it really wasn't me. That wasn't me, that person on the street corner ranting and raving and naked is not me, that's not who I am."
Russell goes on to acknowledge that he was "walking around snapping my fingers up and down" and "slapping my hands on the ground as hard as I can. Just slapping them on the ground. Talking to myself. Ranting. Raving. Talking about good versus evil, God and the devil. I mean it was just very out of control." He shows that he dented his wedding ring because he was pounding the pavement, literally, so hard.

M23 atrocities in eastern Congo predicted

Human Rights Watch has released a scathing report on abuses being committed by the Rwandan-backed, ethnic Tutsi group M23, now wreaking havoc in eastern Congo.

HRW does the best work of any humanitarian/rights group in the region and their research is impeccable.

That M23, the successor group to the notorious ethnic Tutsi CNDP, is committing atrocities was predictable and I wrote as much in Consuming the Congo: War and Conflict Minerals in the World's Deadliest Place, back in 2010.

At the time, the CNDP (a French acronym for the National Congress for the Defense of the People), had been incorporated into the hapless Congolese army. It was a foolish gesture by the Congolese to appease the various ethnic militias fighting over the region's minerals.

As I wrote in Consuming the Congo, it was bad idea and doomed to failure. The CNDP would only play along as long as they and their leader, the notorious Bosco Ntaganda, wanted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, could continue to plunder the region's resources.

Even then, people in the region knew that the CNDP had stockpiled weapons for the day when the arrangement would collapse. It didn't take long.

The trigger came when the Congolese authorities made it known that Ntaganda was about to be arrested and taken to The Hague to face trial. Ntaganda would have none of that, of course, since he and his Rwandan backers were making too much money.

Ntaganda, it must be noted, was deeply involved in the $10 million gold scandal in 2010 that was thwarted by Congolese authorities who refused to let Ntaganda get away with that sale without getting a piece of the action. After the gold was siezed, its whereabout remain unknown.

So now the old CNDP, which has morphed in to M23, is back to killing, plundering and raping. Ntaganda remains free. Rwanda refuses to acknowledge any connection to the group, as always. Instead, Rwanda and President Paul Kagame collected praise and admiration from people such as former U.S. President Bill Clinton.

Clinton should know better and should not be dirtying his hands, since the truth of the situation in eastern Congo is in the HRW report, according to Reuters:

"The M23 rebels are committing a horrific trail of new atrocities in eastern Congo," Anneke van Woudenberg, HRW's senior Africa researcher, said.

One victim said that M23 fighters had burst into her home, beaten her son to death and repeatedly raped her before dousing her legs in petrol and setting her ablaze, the rights group said.

HRW also said that at least 600 men and boys have been forcibly or unlawfully recruited in neighboring Rwanda, with recruitment continuing after allegations of Rwandan complicity were published in an interim UN report in June.

"The United Nations Security Council should sanction M23 leaders, as well as Rwandan officials who are helping them, for serious rights abuses," van Woudenberg said.

A Hijacking, new film on Somali pirates

I, for one, am looking forward to seeing this film. The president of the shipping company, the ship's captain, and the primary negotiator for the pirates are all in my book, Pirate State: Inside Somalia's Terrorism at Sea.
--Peter

Toronto Film Fest: Somali Pirates

 

Everyone is talking about a Danish film called “A Hijacking,” whose screening on Sunday afternoon was completely full.
A taut psychological thriller written and directed by Tobias Lindholm, tells the high pressure story of a Danish freighter captured and held for ransom by Somali pirates. The drama follows the pressure cooker of weeks of high-stakes negotiations that recalls Paul Greengrass’s “United 93” or even the classic “Das Boot.”


 

Bring in the drones

This past week, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was photographed holding a small drone that looked more like the handiwork of a model airplane hobbyist than a weapon in the American military arsenal.

The photo came while Clinton posed at the U.S. special forces base at Entebbe, the Ugandan airport on the shores of Lake Victoria, where she announced that these small drones would be used to help track down the elusive rebel militia leader Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army.

Kony is in his fourth year of wreaking havoc and eluding what has proven to be an inept and unmotivated force of Ugandan soldiers hunting Kony from their base in the eastern Central African Republic town of Obo.

The Ugandans have never had any success stopping Kony and his army of child soldiers.  The recent infusion of aid and military advice from a hundred U.S. special forces soldiers sent to Uganda about a year ago by President Barack Obama has had little effect.

Obama sent the soldiers there at the end of 2011, much to the consternation of people such as the right wing radio ranter Rush Limbaugh, after signing a bill with the long-winded title: The Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda  Recovery Act of 2009.

Yet, after nearly a year of American military advice, equipment, and infusion of millions of dollars, Kony and his army roam free.

While this is immensely frustrating to the people who continue to follow this issue, such as myself who has tracked Kony on the ground and written extensively on the LRA, it should come as no surprise.

Kony and the LRA have been wandering one of the most remote regions on earth, a place where the Central African Republic, South Sudan, and Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) meet.

He has been there since early 2006 when he and his army abandoned northern Uganda and their so-called war against the Ugandan government.

After two years of farcical peace talks, the final round of which ended in November 2008 after Kony refused sign a negotiated settlement for the third time, the international community tried to strike back.

In December 2008, the Ugandan army botched a secret raid on Kony's sprawling camp in northern DRC. Kony escaped and went on a rampage, killing about 1,000 civilians in the region who had nothing to do with Kony or his fight with Uganda.

Long before that December 2008 attack, organized and supported by the U.S. military to the tune of $1 million, I had argued that Uganda has never wanted Kony and the LRA captured, despite the rhetoric to the contrary.

Kony continues to be a valuable asset to Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who has ruled Uganda with an iron fist for 26 years.

Museveni's army is one of the best trained and motivated in Africa, yet strangely has been unable to kill and/or capture Kony since 1986. Why?

Between 1986 and 2006, Kony waged a war that was conducted largely against his own people, the Acholi tribe of northern Uganda. To most people, this does not make sense.

But the fact is that while the Acholi people detest Museveni, they also rejected Kony and refused to support his lame war against the government. Because the Acholi rejected Kony as their "savior," he turned on them in vicious and horrifying attacks, kidnapping their children to fill his ranks.

This played directly into Museveni's hands. Because Kony turned on his own tribe, who were also Museveni's enemy, he did little to stop Kony in the north.

Instead Museveni turned to more lucrative pursuits and sent his army across the border to plunder the mineral-rich mountains of eastern DRC from 1996 until about 2003. (Details of this are in my book, Consuming the Congo.)

All the while, Museveni has continued to collect vast sums of money from the international community, telling them that he needs more and more money to keep fighting Kony.

Museveni continues to use this ploy with great success.

Not long after the spate of articles in April 2012 that detailed how U.S. special forces were helping the Ugandans on the ground in Central African Republic, a different story soon emerged.

The Ugandans complained about how frustratingly difficult and dangerous the hunt for Kony was. They complained of the heat, the flies, and the fact that two of their comrades had been attacked by crocodiles, killing one of them.

They complained that when they reached the latest village that had been attacked by Kony's men, the LRA fighters were long gone. It was a useless wild goose chase.

Then came the stories that the Ugandans were running out of money and supplies ... again!

These complaints are more than a little ironic.

The U.S. has committed to spending $35 million in 2012 just to find and fight Kony, according to news agency reports. Since 2008, the State Department has spent $50 million to support Uganda's non-lethal efforts to capture Kony, such as securing helicopters to transport troops and supplies.

Since 2008, the U.S. has spent and additional $500 million to help rebuild northern Uganda.

Where has the money gone?

Uganda has very little interest in capturing Kony. He is considered a source of revenue by the Ugandan leadership and is not viewed as the scourge against humanity that Kony is presented by such groups as Invisible Children and the Enough organization.

To many Ugandans, Kony is not considered their problem any more. Kony is Ugandan but has not been in their country since early 2006.

Ugandans rightly question why they need to carry the burden when Kony is in the Central African Republic now, which for all practical purposes is a failed and lawless state, much like its neighbors, Sudan, South Sudan, and the DR Congo.

Although Kony is Uganda's responsibility, there is little hope that Kony will ever be captured by the Ugandan or any of the other countries in the region, even with an air armada of drones.

That can and only will be done by an international cooperative military mission -- a mission that few, if any, countries outside of the region are willing to undertake.

Viral Kony 2012 raises ethical issues

The debate over the Kony 2012 video and the Invisible Children organization raises a host of ethical questions.

The video, the filmmaker Jason Russell, and the Invisible Children organization present themselves as committed humanitarians striving to help the people of northern Uganda free themselves of the terrible rebel militia leader Joseph Kony.

Yet Kony and his army have not been in northern Uganda for six years. The war is over, Kony is on the run in central Africa, and northern Uganda is rebuilding.

Information posted on the group's website shows that only about a third of its $13 million annual budget, which comes largely from small donations from college students across the country, goes to projects in northern Uganda.

That most of the group's money goes to the group's salaries and overhead, its travel and fundraising budget, and its filmmaking efforts, is now being dismissed by Invisible Children and its devotees as not important.

The devotees now say that the group is not really a humanitarian organization, but a "messaging" outfit. Their purpose is to simply tell the world about Joseph Kony, which it has done with enormous success.

Does that mean that the group is actually a news media outlet? If it is an "advocacy" group, the definition of which is vague, does that mean the message does not need to be accurate? Or, if the group is advocating the kill and/or capture of Kony, does that make it a vigilante group?

If Invisible Children is presenting itself as a legitimate information dispersion organization, it needs to assume the mantle of responsible delivery of information. But it is pretty clear that the Kony 2012 video uses historical images to create false impressions about the realities of northern Uganda, Kony, and the Lord's Resistance Army.

Yet, this is being dismissed as less important than the "message." Does the end justify the means?

The filmmaker also uses his wife and son as vehicles to infuse the film with exaggerated emotions. Is this any different that any other stage mom or dad in America? He then uses baby talk -- "there a bad man who makes children to bad things" -- to explain an historical conflict of a terrible, but localized consequences.

The key Ugandan character in the Kony 2012 is a former "night commuter," one of the many thousands of children who at the time were fleeing the LRA. These children no longer exist in northern Uganda because Kony is long gone. These children, along with the tens of thousands of former child soldiers who escaped Kony's army, are now grown and getting on with their lives.

Whether Russell and Invisible Children are videographers, "messagers," advocates, or vigilantes, it is puzzling as to why the filmmakers never talked to any of the former child soldiers who populated northern Uganda then by the thousands and who remain there. Isn't that a much more real and compelling story?

The video asserts that by giving money to the group, the situation can change in northern Uganda, that "you can make a difference."

But giving money to Invisible Children, as the group now admits, does little to help northern Uganda, nor does it help to get Kony captured. That dirty business has to be done by Ugandan soldiers who have shown little will in the past 25 years to get the job done.

There are U.S. Special Forces advisers in Uganda now helping with this, just as they did before in 2008 when the Uganda's army failed to carry out a "surprise" attack on Kony's camp in northern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Kony was warned and fled.

Now that Invisible Children has raised millions of dollars, everything is going to be different? How? Why?

Uganda has financial and military aid reasons to keep Kony alive, just as it has done for 25 years, despite its appeal for help in 2003 to the International Criminal Court to bring Kony to justice.

All of the emotional videos, all of the money, all of the marches, and all of the notoriety generated by Invisible Children does not solve the singular problem that remains: capturing Kony.

Nor does it help the people of northern Uganda.

The truth is that Invisible Children makes people feel good. They tell people they can do something about an obscure problem in a distant land, with no pain or effort. It is nice to think so, but is not true.

This says more about the emptiness of lives in America and the need to be relevant, than it does about solving Africa's problems.

It also reeks of neo-colonialism, which is what angers my African friends, such as Rosebell Kagumire, whose video is also posted on YouTube and typifies the African response.

Ironically, this conversation over the Kony 2012 video is taking place while 50 to 100 people per day are being killed in Syria, right before the world's eyes. Syria is a problem in front of us NOW that can be stopped, but world sits and watches. Where is the viral outrage?

And just across the border there in southern California where Invisible Children is based, there is a drug war raging in Mexico that has claimed some 40,000 lives. Where are the cries of anguish?

This viral video in question is not about any of these more pressing and immediate horrors, but is about a man, Joseph Kony, who is on the run in the remote forests of central Africa, and has been for six years.

Is Kony a perhaps more safe and lucrative thing for the group to focus on?

Viral Kony 2012 versus reality

More than 50 million people viewed the 30-minute video, KONY 2012, during the three days after it was posted on youtube.com.

The video rightly focuses global attention on Joseph Kony, one of Africa's most prolific killers, a maniacal, self-styled prophet, and his Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) of child soldiers.

I lived and work in Uganda in 2005 and 2006 for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, and like the filmmakers at the Invisible Children organization, was horrified at the LRA’s 20-year war northern Uganda. It had caused the death of an estimated 100,000 men, women and children, resulted in the abduction of well more than
50,000 children and adults, and disfigured many dozens.

Kony’s war was faltering at the time because his victims were not the government soldiers he claimed to be fighting, but his own Acholi ethnic group, who feared, but refused to follow him as their military leader and spiritual guide.

By early 2006, Kony and his fighters decamped northern Uganda and based themselves in the Garamba National Park, a former wild game shooting gallery for Belgian aristocrats in the northern forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Back in Uganda, Kony's former child soldiers streamed into rehabilitation centers where they were fed, clothed and counseled. They included young boys and girls, many of whom had given birth to children by Kony's soldiers.

Kony was far from finished.

In June of 2008, I traveled to Dungu, an overgrown town at the western edge of the Garamba park where Kony's men had been slaughtering the endangered wildlife and raiding villages in the
area.

At the time, as Kony was negotiating a peace deal with the Ugandan government that he later refused to sign, his army swept through northern DRC and corners of South Sudan and Central African Republic (CAR). Scores were killed, villages plundered, and hundreds abducted to carry the stolen food and supplies.

One of the kidnapped, a young third-grade teacher named Raymond Rpiolebeyo, had escaped and returned to his village of Doruma. I found a bush pilot who would take me there.

We flew over meandering, muddy rivers and an unbroken canopy of jungle as far as the eye could see before descending onto a narrow, red dirt landing strip. We were welcomed by a committee of villagers and their leaders.

Rpiolebeyo’s story typified 99 percent of those abducted by the LRA. He had escaped after just a week, fleeing in the middle of the night and running through the forests for the next day. We then rode small motor bikes to the surrounding villages where clinics had been burned and medicines stolen by Kony's soldiers.

In late 2008, Ugandan forces conducted a surprise attack on Kony's camp at Garamba. But Kony and his men were gone, having gotten wind of the assault, which had been arranged and funded by U.S. military advisers secretly in Uganda under orders of former President George W. Bush.

The attack failed miserably, but enraged Kony, who divided his army and sent his soldiers on rampages that killed nearly 1,000 people in the region’s three northern DRC, CAR, and South Sudan.

None of this critical background or details of Kony’s current status and location surface in the Kony 2012 video.

The video relies on a images from 2003 that are inserted into a home movie about filmmaker Jason Russell’s son -- his birth, his preschool dancing, and how he makes sand angels on a sunny SoCal beach.

The historical footage in the video is accurate for northern Uganda eight years ago, but unfortunately bears no relation to the situation there today.

Having been chased across three countries for the past several years by Ugandan soldiers, Kony’s forces are scattered and desperate. Lacking food and military supplies, they continue to prey on defenseless villagers.

Kony intentionally positioned himself in the region so as not to bother anyone of significance to the world at large. He also knows that the DRC, the CAR, and South Sudan are effectively failed states that have neither the will nor a way to capture him.

When and if Kony is captured or killed, the thousands of child soldiers depicted in the video will not be suddenly freed since they are not with him. Kony’s army is comprised of his most hardcore fighters who have known nothing but a life of killing, rape and plunder, and have little hope of being reintegrated into society.

Kony rightfully should be taken to the International Criminal Court, which indicted him back in 2005, at the request of the Ugandan government. Unfortunately Russell’s video fails to mention that the United States refuses to join the court.

The Kony 2012 video states that Invisible Children now targets celebrities and policy makers who can make a difference. It may come as a surprise, but the U.S. Congress does not control what happens in sovereign African states and neither does Hollywood.

Yet, 100 U.S. Special Forces advisers have returned to Uganda so that country’s army can again go after Kony with renewed vigor, a move for which Invisible Children can take credit after lobbying a bill through Congress that authorized assistance in Africa to neutralize Kony.

One knotty problem is that the Ugandan government has a vested interest in keeping Kony alive. For the past 26 years, Uganda has used the Kony problem to collect millions of dollars in foreign military aid, with little result. The presence of U.S. military advisers in Uganda shows this practice continues.

Raising awareness is a good thing, but doing so based on neo-colonial notions that privileged white people must solve African problems, and using misleading and incomplete information that evokes overly wrought emotions, is a major disappointment.

- Peter Eichstaedt, author of First Kill Your Family: Child Soldiers of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army

Why Kony will never be captured

When I was reporter covering government, I learned that to understand what was behind any particular bill being debated in Congress, one should find out whose cow was being gored.

It was a gruesome, but clear depiction of what propels most government action.

In the case of Uganda's fugitive militia leader Joseph Kony, no one's cow is being gored by his continued existence. On the contrary, Kony's continued existence has been beneficial for Uganda and President Yoweri Museveni.

For the duration of the war in northern Uganda from 1986 to 2006, Museveni used Kony and the LRA to keep the north in a virtual state of war. As I explain in my book, First Kill Your Family: Child Soldiers of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army, Museveni applied a limited number of soldiers to fight the LRA.

Museveni was distracted by a much more lucrative proposition: toppling the Mobutu regime in neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo. Beginning in 1996, Uganda took control much of northeastern DRC and plundered gold, diamonds and timber until 2003, when Uganda was forced to withdraw from eastern DRC due to international pressure.

This has been well documented by Human Rights Watch, the United Nations and forced a judgement against Uganda by the International Court of Justice.

As Museveni applied just enough pressure to control the LRA, he rounded up all of the Acholi people in northern Uganda, his traditional opposition, and put them in refugee camps.

As long as the LRA was alive and well, Museveni controlled and isolated the north, leaving him to plunder the eastern DRC.

Additionally, the LRA irrationally attacked, killed, and mutilated the Acholi people, the same ones who Kony said he was fighting for, claiming that the Acholi were being punished for not joining the LRA's rebellion.

As long as the LRA was alive and fighting, Museveni and Uganda received millions of dollars in foreign aid, with much of the money going to his generals, not soldiers or equipment.

Meanwhile, hundreds of private aid groups from the US, EU, and UN dumped time and money into caring for the people in the camps. This relieved Uganda of its responsibility to care for these Ugandans, who had been put in the camps under the guise of solving the situation in the north.

The LRA has been a cash cow for Museveni and Uganda.

When Kony left northern Uganda, and Uganda failed to kill or capture Kony in the DRC in December 2008, Museveni and Uganda repeated past behavior.

Their failures allowed Museveni to ask for yet more money to fight the LRA, which the US and EU countries continue to give happily.

While humanitarian aid continues to flow into northern Uganda, the latest incarnation of financial support, to the tune of $10 million a year, is in a bill that recently passed the U.S. Senate titled, "The Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009."

Many of the bill's supporters think it means an end to Kony and the LRA, despite the fact that bill only calls for the developing of a multi-lateral "strategy" to bring Kony to an end.

The reality is that as long as Kony remains in remote and inaccessibly places, he will never be killed or captured.

The LRA's brutality affects people who neither control valuable resources nor are connected to events or issues of concern on the world stage. This is not heartless. It is a fact. No one's cow is being gored by Kony.

The only reason anyone knows about Kony is because of the outrages he continues to commit, which continue to shock the world. But to a limited extent.

While the International Criminal Court has indicted Kony and LRA commanders, nothing concrete has been done in five years to bring an end to the LRA. This is the fault of Uganda, not the international community, and certainly not the U.S.

Yet, the international community perpetuates the situation by giving Uganda money and relieving Uganda of doing what it should be doing to capture Kony and help rebuilt the north.

The international community should force Museveni and Uganda to capture Kony and put an end to the LRA using the millions of dollars that Uganda has already received, most of which have disappeared due to corruption.

But, we all know this will never happen.

The international community will not act against Uganda because Uganda is very useful in other ways.

Uganda provides the bulk of the troops for the African Union force in Mogadishu, Somalia, that protects the weak transitional federal government there, and the only line of defense against the rising tide of militant Islam there, embodied in the al-Shabab militia.

For the US and the EU, Somalia is much more critical to regional security than Kony will ever be. Since Uganda is willing to fight in Somalia, the international community is willing to forgive and forget about Kony and the LRA.

The ring of truth

The widely publicized report from Enough that a unit of the Lord's Resistance Army had found safe haven in south Darfur as guests of the Sudan government, may be in doubt.

A story last Friday by Nairobi-based reporter, Alisha Ryu of the Voice of America radio, titled, "Reports That LRA's Kony is Hiding in Darfur Alarm South Sudan," quotes an Enough researcher as saying no one really knows where LRA leader Joseph Kony is.

As I and others have warned for several years now, officials in South Sudan are worried that Kony is being equipped and preparing for attacks in advance of the south's elections next month and next year.

Additionally, as reported in this blog last week, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said that his military intelligence officials suspected that Kony, who had fled the Central African Republic, had joined LRA units in south Darfur.

However, when Ryu contacted Ledio Cakaj, the Kampala-based researcher for Enough, Cakaj said Kony's whereabouts is unknown.

"Kony could be anywhere," Cakaj told Ryu. "Having spoken to the Ugandan military intelligence services, I have found out that the military intelligence is not sure what happened to Kony," said Cakaj.

"There was a belief that he tried to go into south Darfur," the researcher added. "But it is very likely that he turned south. And we have heard - I would say fairly credible reports - he might have even crossed into Congo last week, close to Bas-Uele in Province Orientale," Cakaj added.

If Kony had crossed into the Congo when Cakaj suggests, it was within days of when Enough announced that it had confirmed the LRA's presence in Darfur.

As I showed last week, the Enough announcement was very old news. But more worrisome is that the announcement raises questions about both Kony's and the LRA's locations.

However, comments made by Enough's Cakaj have the clear ring of truth.

Assuming that Cakaj's comments are correct, it means trouble is on the move. If Kony has already "moved south," and could be in northeastern Congo, he and his army mostly likely have been resupplied.

If that is true, it would make sense for Kony to return to the Congo and regroup his scattered forces there for strikes into South Sudan. These strikes could come as early as the next couple of weeks and certainly by next month's general elections.

This eventuality is sadly the worst, but most likely of all.

Joseph, where are you?

Joseph Kony and his LRA have not been seen or heard in the past month?

In a story by Uganda's government-owned New Vision daily newspaper, written by Raymond Baguma, the statement was made that Kony was thought to be in an area that includes portions of Central African Republic, south Darfur (Sudan) and the western Bahr-el-Ghazal province of South Sudan.

“It is almost a month with no reported LRA activities in the Central African Republic and Southern Sudan,” according to Chief of Defense Forces, Gen. Aronda Nyakairima.

Is Kony dead?

Probably just laying low.

Some have speculated that Kony and his LRA are being re-armed for a possible assault on South Sudan ahead of this year's regional and national elections. That remains a distinct possibility.

But nothing in a month? No attacks? No looting? No abductions?

While these facts stir thoughts that Kony may be approaching the end, I recall my many interviews with northern Ugandans victimized by Kony's atrocities.

They said be careful when it's quiet. Kony is preparing to strike.

We wait.

These nuggets of information came at the end of the New Vision story about the Ugandan soldiers FINALLY getting paid for the dangerous and thankless work they are doing in Somalia.

Uganda provides the bulk of forces battling fanatical Islamic militants in Somalia, and these soldiers are the thin line of defence against the total takeover by militants in Somalia.

Despite the blatant and obvious threat that militant Islam presents to the African continent, the increasingly useless African Union agreed to pay the massive outstanding balances owed the Ugandan troops who now are the bulk of the "peacekeeper" in Somalia.

The troops have not been paid since May 2009. That's nearly a year.

Ugandan defence minister Crispus Kiyonga attempted to clarify the situation when he told the press: “More than six months ago, the African Union secretariat got problems and payments could not continue. But about a month ago, the flow of payments began. The arrears are being paid and all the soldiers will be cleared.”

The AU "got" problems?

In reality, what this means is that the money went missing, or most likely, did not exist because it had not been paid.

Enter the international community, specifically the U.S.

According to the article, each "peacekeeper" gets $750 a month, which is a good wage in Uganda. In the event of death, the soldier’s family receives $50,000, which is huge!

Burundi is the other country contributing troops.

A total of 37 Ugandan peacekeepers have been killed since 2007.

There are six battalions of totaling about 5,200 Ugandans and Burundians, which is far below the agreed upon 8,000 peacekeepers.

“We (are) waiting for friends of Somalia to come,” Nyakairima said, adding that Uganda was considering deploying more forces to the war-torn country.

Let's hope they're not holding their breath.

The good, the bad, the ugly

This past week, Norah Anek, the 86-year-old mother of Joseph Kony, the leader of the militia-cult Lord's Resistance Army, passed away. She was buried not far from where she gave birth to Kony in the town of Adek, about an hour's drive southeast of Gulu in northern Uganda.

According to the nurse who was present at her death, "Moments before dying she said, 'Tell Joseph Kony to make peace.'"

She earlier had said that Kony's problem, the thing that drives him, was that he is possesed by evil spirits.

One can only hope that she was able to find some peace, having been saddled with the unenviable fame of having given birth to perhaps one the world's most notorious and deadly cult leaders.

Norah Anek's explanation for her son's behavior, possession by spirits, contains a nugget of wisdom that apparently cannot be grasped by those who continue to think and advocate appeasement as a way to deal with Kony and his vicious militia.

The latest of these statements surfaced on November 6, titled, "Elements of a New Strategy to Disarm the LRA," written by François Grignon, Africa Program Director of the International Crisis Group.

While I agree with much of what Grignon proposes, it reflects an approach to solving the Kony problem based on weakness rather than strength. It fundamentally seeks to appease and reward evil, rather than eliminate it.

Rather than support the Ugandan special forces in their on-going search and destroy mission, Grignon suggests that, "The US should instead lead a coalition of the willing to provide... (regional governments with) ...the means and ability to restore state authority along their common borders, corner the LRA in progressively circumscribed areas of operation, and help Special Envoys of the UN and the region negotiate the disarmament of its commanders and combatants...."

(Why is it always the U.S. who is supposed to do the work? Why is it that the French are so quick to criticize the American "hyper-power" unless there is some fighting to be done? Why don't the Belgians and the French, who created the mess in Central Africa, clean it up rather than only helping themselves to the region's mineral wealth? What about the British, who controlled and occupied Sudan and South Sudan for a century or so? Where are they?)

As part of his solution, Grignon suggests that the Catholic aid group, Caritas, once again be enlisted to provide food and aid to those who are willing to abandon the LRA with their arms and abductees.

The concept is to entice the LRA, which has broken into five or six elements, into surrendering piecemeal, until Kony has no other choice but to sign a peace deal.
Grignon justifies this by saying, "Only two things have succeeded to contain Kony’s murderous campaigns in the past: food and talks."

This has already been tried and didn't work.

As I wrote in First Kill Your Family: Child Soldiers of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army, I was in Nabanga, South Sudan, in July 2006 when the first convoy of supplies was delivered to Kony and his LRA.

The gesture had doubtful merit even back then. Feed Kony as long as he stayed at the peace talks? It worked for a while, but it wasn't long before Kony and the LRA were back to killing, looting and abducting, even as food supplies were being delivered.

This aiding and abetting of an indicted war criminal, which was illegal, reached a depressing height in the spring of 2008 when Kony rounded up some 500 abductees from the Central African Republic, the DR Congo, and South Sudan. Yet, it continued.

It was done while Kony's opportunistic cheerleader, David Matsanga, proclaimed that Kony was going to sign the negotiated peace deal, which he did not, in April or May, and then again at the end of November.

The UN, meanwhile, was actively attempting to keep it all quiet because they were afraid that Kony would abandon the peace talks because of the logical outrage that would be generated. This was immoral.

The December 14 attack on Kony's camps in Garamba National Park failed, we all know.

It is clear that the LRA's capacity to intercept information about the pending attck, flee from it, and then go on an extended killing rampage had been enabled by the international community's "feed the lion" approach.

We should do something like that again?

When are we going to suck up our sagging guts, and do the right thing? No more appeasment. No more talk. Capture Kony and put him on trial at the International Criminal Court.

At least Uganda is trying and U.S. supports that actively. What is anyone else doing?

Kony, afterall, is an Africa problem, not one that needs to be dealt with by either the US or any European countries. Where are the leaders of the DR Congo and South Sudan? Why should the US have to call them up and hand them a pot of money so they will do their jobs?

Where are the African leaders who are so quick to condemn western nations who dole out aid with strings attached, such as insuring that aid money is spend for the purpose it was intended? Why do they shrink into the shadows when there is work to be done?

The citizens of the DRC and South Sudan are dying at the hands of the LRA. Why does the US or EU need to bribe these leaders into action?

Sudan, meanwhile, should further be held up to intense international ridicule if, as most suspect, it is once again aiding Kony, or elements of his army.

Certainly, the current process of Uganda chasing the LRA around the region is frustratingly slow and tedious. If any of the leaders of the affected nations had an ounce of integrity, they would already be in the chase. The sad reality is otherwise.

Forget more peace talks. Kony has more than humiliated the international community already with his lies, with his looting and killing.

Kony's mother had it right when she said her son was possessed. She knew, unlike some people, that we're not dealing with a rational person. Kony needs to be treated like the psychopathic killer that he is.

Maybe just once, finally, countries in the region (with EU and US support) can do the right thing: find and capture Kony, send him to The Hague, and end the madness.

See Grigin's posting at: http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=6381&l=1

A new chapter?

After predicting more than a year ago that the now rebels-for-hire of the Lord's Resistance Army, led by their maniacal leader, Joseph Kony, eventually could be used against Darfur rebels, it appears to be coming a reality.

In a story published this Saturday in The Independent, and featuring the above photo by Reuters, Africa Correspondent Daniel Howden quotes a South Sudan military man as saying that LRA has entered South Darfur.

"We have confirmed that the LRA are there and they have clashed with the local population," said Major-General Kuol Deim Kuol.

South Sudanese officials are prone to saying such things based on extremely flimsy evidence. They eagerly make statements that call attention to the nefarious and always duplicitous dealings of the Sudan government in Khartoum.

That said, South Sudan knows what it's talking about since the south battled Sudan for more than 20 years. They know well that Sudan loves to use proxy militias, such as the janjaweed, to fight its bloody battles against defenseless civilian populations.

The LRA fits the Sudan ideal since it specializes in attacking, mutilating, raping and destroying the softest of civilian targets, just as it has done for 20 years in northern Uganda and for the past three years in northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, two of which were during the farcical peace talks in with Uganda, held in Juba, South Sudan.

While I remain skeptical that the LRA will be actively involved in what remains of the war in Darfur, I think the LRA is being positioned for that possibility by the Sudan government, which may again be arming and supplying the LRA.

The region south and west of Nyala, south Darfur's largest town, and extending into southeastern Chad, has been the province of Darfur rebel groups such as the Justice and Equality Movement. The JEM remains a strong threat to the Sudan government, having conducted the wild raid on Omdurman in February 2008, an attack that shocked Khartoum and revealed its glaring vulnerabilities.

With Kony's militia-for-hire in the area, Sudan has a perfect foil to conduct attacks on civilian targets in south Darfur and southeastern Chad, which is where Darfur rebels have found refuge for regrouping and resupply.

This will allow Sudan to tell the world that the war in Darfur is over, when in truth it is not.

My stronger sense is that Kony's move into the Darfur region is more for him to obtain the weaponry and supplies he will need for Sudan's likely efforts to disrupt the coming elections in South Sudan in 2010.

This will be a prelude to what could be an all-out civil war with horrendous civilian casualties as South Sudan moves to its independence vote in 2011, as called for in Sudan's 2005 peace agreement.

Sudan has used the LRA like this before, having given the LRA aid and comfort in South Sudan during the long 20-year war with Uganda. Sudan used the LRA also to fight south Sudan's army, which to the delight of Khartoum, made the region a veritable hell-on-earth where four armies fought: the LRA, the Ugandan army, the Sudan army and the South Sudan army.

Likewise, a consensus is growing that the recent fighting in the eastern South Sudan province of Jonglei is much more than bloody ethnic clashes over cows that it is portrayed to be. Rather, it is part of a calculated effort by the Sudan government to destabilize the region and prevent the development of the region's oil, which South Sudan needs desperately.

While this is speculative, it is based on well-established patterns by Sudan and the horrific history of the LRA. One can only hope that people like the U.S.'s envoy to Sudan, Scott Gration, is cognizant of all of this as he flies around the world trying to negotiate a "deal" with Sudan.

The sad reality is that while the world knows all too well the death and destruction that follows that LRA wherever it goes, nothing is being done about the LRA other than a lot of deep sighing and muttering.

As the numbers of dead and mutilated and raped continue to grow and as the LRA continues to grow increasingly malignant, those among the international community, such as the Dutch, the Danes, Scandinavians, and others who supplied the LRA from 2006 to 2008, saying that it was necessary for peace, should think again about the blood of innocent people that now covers their hands.

Boots on the ground

I apologize for my long absence from this blog site, but I just recently returned from six weeks of research and travel in East Africa, collecting material for two new books.

The first concerns Somalia and its pirates and the second concerns the seemingly endless fighting in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

You can expect to hear a lot more about these two topics in future postings.

Before we get there, however, there's an interesting article in The East African, written by Keven Kelley, about the joint military exercise in northern Uganda involving about 450 U.S. troops.

According to Kelley's article, total troops will be about 1,000, with Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi each sending 150 soldiers to join 450 US military personnel in Kitgum for the October 16-25 event.

Labeled as operation Natural Fire 10, it is reportedly the U.S.'s largest African exercise this year. While this is clearly an exercise loaded with significance, it is the not the first such military exercise. Such joint maneuvers began across Africa in 1998, hence the name Natural Fire 10 -- this being the tenth.

The US Army describes it as “a regularly scheduled training exercise, which offers an opportunity for East African partner nations and the US military to work together to increase regional capabilities to respond to complex humanitarian emergencies.”

What is most interesting is the location: northern Uganda. It is a message not only to Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army, but also Sudan.

That message being, of course, that a multi-national force of 1,000 -- an effective number for a fighting force anywhere in the world -- can be assembled in this strategic location with relative ease.

Such a force would be a huge problem for someone like Kony, should he think about a return to northern Uganda. It shows that Uganda has allies who are willing not only to donate moral support and money in the fight against Kony and his maniacal militia, but are willing to put boots on the ground.

This is an acknowledgement that Kony is much more than Uganda's problem, and has become a regional nightmare. Though Kony's precise whereabouts are not known, the latest information is that he has been operating in the remote eastern regions of the Central African Republic. Uganda's army has permission from the CAR to chase Kony and has been doing so with their typically limited results.

The biggest regional concern, however, is not the CAR, but widely-rumored support that Kony once again is getting from Sudan as we slowly but surely approach the coming election cycle in Sudan and South Sudan.

Since Sudan has effectively backed off its offensive in Darfur, this has freed up personnel and resources for coming confrontations in South Sudan, which is fully expected to vote for independence in 2011 -- an eventuality that Sudan does not want.

Preparing for an expected battle, South Sudan has been arming itself as we know from the famous shipment of weapons that was temporarily delayed off the coast of Somalia by Somali pirates last year. Feisty publications such as Jane's have been following the progress of the weaponry to Juba, South Sudan.

However, should Kony be added to the mix in any pending chaos in South Sudan, the Sudan People's Liberation Army will need some help. What better than an integrated, multi-national force from regional powers, aided and equipped by the U.S.?

There are strategic advantages for the U.S., of course, which has rarely had a good relationship with Sudan, ever since the militant and fundamentalist Islamic takeover of the government a couple decades ago.

We hardly need to mention Sudan's hosting of Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s or the U.S.'s condemnation of Sudan's so-called war in Darfur which the U.S. has labeled a genocide.

The U.S. quietly has been supporting South Sudan's drive for independence, knowing that a staunch ally in Sudan's back yard will give the U.S. a firm foothold in the region and first-hand chance to keep an eye on Sudan.

Among other things, the U.S. very much wants to see the expected revenues from South Sudan's vast and untapped oil reserves to fill the pockets of an ally, rather than antagonistic Sudan.

When push comes to shove in the next year or two, the current joint military exercise taking place just 30 miles from the South Sudan border shows how that support could take a very dramatic step.