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

Congolese: Uganda not serious about Kony

A blog posted this week by writers of the Economist, one of the world's leading news magazines, quoted a Congolese army commander as accusing the Ugandan army of being "not serious" about the capture of Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army.

The blog is titled Baobob, which is a majestic and extremely long living tree in Africa, and focuses on the plight of an unnamed army lieutenant who has the unenviable mission of leading his men against the LRA as it roams the remote northern jungles of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The officer bemoans the fact that his men have not been paid or resupplied for months, yet they continue to slog after the battle-hardened child soldiers of Kony's LRA.

What makes the army unit's situation all the more depressing is that the Ugandan units that are in the region are well-supplied and well-equipped, but aren't doing anything.

"It's a crooked war the Ugandan are fighting with the LRA," the officer tells the Economist blogger. "They have all the weapons in the world, but they're not serious."

This commander's frustrations parallel my own when it comes to Uganda's abortive efforts to track, capture and/or kill Kony and the minions of his murderous cult. As I have argued in my book, First Kill Your Family: Child Soldiers of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and his army have a vested interest in keeping Kony alive.

As I discuss in my latest book, Consuming the Congo: War and Conflict Minerals in the World's Deadliest Place, Museveni focused his army in the DRC starting in early 1996 when he teamed up with Rwandan President Paul Kagame to topple the regime of Mobutu Sese Seko. Mobutu was replaced with their hand-picked commander, the late Laurent Kabila, whose son Joseph will most likely be re-elected president of the DRC next month.

After Laurent Kabila tried to kick the Ugandans and Rwandans out of his country in 1998, they launched a second war in the DRC that stalled. But Uganda and Rwanda stayed in eastern Congo until 2003, allowing them to plunder the gold, diamonds, timber, as well as untold tons of what has become known as "conflict minerals": tin, tungsten and tantalum.

Meanwhile, back in northern Uganda, Kony continued to fight, wreaking havoc against his own tribe, the Acholi who dominated all of northern Uganda. Museveni let his generals inflate the number of soldiers actually fighting in the north, which became know as the "ghost soldiers." The generals were eventually relieved of their rank, but not until after they'd been able to pocket millions of foreign aid dollars meant to put an end to Kony and the LRA.

Although Kony decamped northern Uganda in 2006 for the remote jungles of northern DRC, he continued as he had done for the prior 20 years, killing, looting and kidnapping, no longer able to justify his criminal behavior by claiming to fight the Museveni government.

In 2008, former President Bush sent US military advisers to Uganda, and with the Ugandans, they devised an attack on Kony's camp, which failed miserably when Kony was apparently tipped off and fled with army. He then went on a murderous rampage, killing nearly 1,000 innocent people in the region.

Because of these past failures by the Bush administration, and armed with a congressional mandate, President Barack Obama has sent yet another bevy of US military adviser to Uganda to see if they can convince Museveni and the Ugandan army to get the job done once and for all.

While some influential commentators, such as the perennially bizarre and woefully confused Rush Limbaugh, have said that Obama is trying to wipe out Christians in Africa, other more knowledgeable ones have said that these advisers will actually be armed and accompany Ugandans into the jungle.

With US forces on the ground, this gives hope that finally something might be done about Kony, but wait! Last Sunday, shortly after Obama made the announcement, Uganda's Museveni says that no, US advisers will NOT be on the ground, and according to reports, "will not participate in actual fighting."

Museveni's comments only reinforce my long-standing belief, which is now shared by that poor Congolese lieutenant, that Uganda does not want Kony captured. Rather, what we can see is more foreign money and arms lavished on Uganda, but to no other purpose but to enrich and empower the Ugandan elite.

Advisers to Uganda is nothing new

President Obama's decision to send 100 military advisers to Uganda to help kill or capture renegade militia leader Joseph Kony is nothing new.

The same thing was done in 2008 by then President George Bush, just three years ago, and with disastrous results.

As those who track events in east Africa know, a bevy of military advisers was sent to Uganda in early 2008 with loads of advice and bundles of cash.

The idea was to kill and or capture Kony and his band of hardened child soldiers who comprise the Lord's Resistance Army, in their long-time camp in the Garamba National Park in the northern jungles of the DR Congo.

The U.S. advisers came up with a surprise attack plan that involved an air strike at dawn on December 14, 2008, followed by a devastating ground attack. The U.S. even handed over $1 million to pay for the logistics.

The attack was completely botched. It was an embarrassment all the way around and exposed the corruption and incompetence of the Ugandan army. And sadly, it raises serious questions whether Obama is simply throwing good money after bad.

First of all, Kony and his men were apparently tipped off that the surprise attack was coming and by the time the bombs were dropped, only kidnapped women and children were left in the camp.

The air attack was grossly delayed, according to the Ugandan army, because Kony's camp was shrouded in fog. This seems hardly likely, since the area is too warm for significant fog to develop, although drifting mist is more than possible.

This four or five-hour delay, it was speculated, allowed the Kony and his soldiers to monitor the radio traffic of the Ugandan army, and allowed them to escape.

Meanwhile, the Ugandan ground forces were still two days away from Kony's camp, and by the time they arrived, they found only a few abandoned laptops, radios and a handfull of mobile telephones.

Enraged by this abortive attack, the psychotic Kony divided his force into three groups, and each when on a rampage of revenge, brutally killing an estimated 800 to 1,000 innocent villagers in the region, some in the Central African Republic and others in South Sudan.

While Uganda has continued to track the Lord's Resistance Army, they have done little but keep Kony and his cutthroats on the move. Uganda's enthusiasm for the killing or capture of Kony has waned as he continues to roam one of the most remote regions in the world, killing and kidnapping with abandon just as he's done for decades.

The U.S. has tolerated Uganda's failure to find Kony, who is undoubtedly Africa's most wanted man, having been indicted by the International Criminal Court nearly eight years ago, because of other regional issues.

Uganda has the bulk of the African Union forces currently occupying Mogadishu, Somalia, and are the only thing that protects the U.S.-backed regime in Somalia, providing a thin barrier between Somalia and total chaos.

The question now is whether this second round of advisers will be able to generate a result that is any different from the disastrous attack on Kony's camp three years ago.

Chances are that it won't. Unlike the previous attack, Kony's forces remain largely scattered and mobile. Tracking and finding Kony and his various units of the LRA will be more difficult than ever and will require the cooperation of three countries.

While that cooperation can be bought with wads of U.S. dollars, coming up with a successful result is quite another matter.

Al-Shabaab's deadly strike

It was only a matter of time.

Some 74 innocent people are now dead in the Ugandan capital of Kampala in the wake of two vicious suicide bombing attacks by the al-Shabaab militia, which controls almost all of southern Somalia.

This is the kind of deadly disaster that I feared would happen in my forthcoming book, Pirate State: Inside Somalia's Terrorism at Sea. Sadly, it won't be the last.

Although Pirate State is ostensibly about Somalia's pirate horde, the pirates and the al-Shabaab militia have emerged from the smoldering chaos that has gripped Somalia for the past two decades.

Remember Black Hawk Down? Al-Shabaab does. But they're not waiting for another invasion of U.S. marines. They've exported their war. Expect it to get worse.

That al-Shabaab attacked two locations in Kampala, Uganda, is no surprise. Uganda provides the bulk of the African Union's 4,000 or so troops now hunkered down in the Somali capital of Mogadishu.

These Ugandan soldiers, accompanied by a much smaller contingent of soldiers from Burundi, are all that prevents a complete take-over of southern Somalia by the fundamentalist al-Shabaab militia.

The Ugandan soldiers are kept alive by a life-line of military and logistical support from the U.S. and protect the fragile and pro-western Transitional Federal Government that is holed up in corner of Mogadishu.

This is not the first time that Uganda has been hit by al-Shabaab. On September 17, 2009, al-Shabaab militants, some of whom were reportedly American converts, drove a couple of stolen UN vehicles into the Ugandan's compound and detonated themselves, killing more than 20 people.

Because of the notorious Black Hawk Down debacle, the U.S. has been more than happy to let the Ugandans hold out as the final bulwark of defence for the teetering transitional government.

But clearly there is a price to pay, while Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni relishes his role as the pro-western posterboy for the few African governments that still claim to be "democratic."

After altering the constitution to allow himself unlimited terms, Museveni faces yet another re-election bid in early 2012. Uganda's presence in Somalia has already been challenged, and this bloody tragedy will certainly rouse Museveni's opposition.

The suicide bombing at the private club in Kampala where hundreds had gathered to watch the World Cup final only underscores al-Shabaab's fundamentalist doctrine, which has forbidden such entertainment as anti-Islam.

The attack on an Ethiopian restaurant was also a reprisal, since Ethiopian forces, with U.S. help, defeated the Islamic Courts Union and occupied much of southern Somalia for a couple of years after.

Al-Shabaab, which means "the youth," grew out of the former Islamic Courts Union, which controlled southern Somalia for most of 2006 and at the time was the only law and order the country had known in 15 years.

Al-Shabaab was the ICU's militia. When the ICU was defeated in the opening weeks of 2007, the al-Shabaab scattered, licked its wounds, and regrouped.

Despite the defeat, the militia had established strong ties with the militant and deeply fundamentalist Islamic network that grips the region, including Yemen, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Using suspected links with the Somali pirate clans that control the coasts, al-Shabaab has been supplied and staffed by a cadre of seasoned militants who serve as instructors and mentors for the al-Shabaab recruits.

These recruits have included disenchanted American converts, some from the Minneapolis area, but also many from Nairobi, Kenya's sprawling Somali neighborhoods.

I spoke at length with a former al-Shabaab soldier in September of last year. The man had volunteered, been trained by al-Qaeda- and Taliban-linked commanders, then fought for more than a year against the Ugandans in Mogadishu and other towns in Somalia.

Seeing the futility of the killing, he had left, and was on the run in Kenya, convinced that al-Shabaab agents, bent on revenge, would soon kill him.

He told me that al-Shabaab militants permeated Kenyan society and it was only a matter of time before the would begin to strike.

At the time, it was widely rumored that Kenyan authorities has barely been able to foil an al-Shabaab plot to strike hotels in downtown Nairobi during Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit in August 2009.

The attack on Uganda shows that al-Shabaab has a long reach that extends through Kenya, Uganda's strongest ally and neighbor. Is Burundi next? Or is Kenya?

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.