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Politics

Don’t Elevate Joseph Kony – By Alex de Waal

By African Arguments
March 11, 2012
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Joseph Kony - leader of the Lord's Resistance Army.

Put yourself in Joseph Kony’s shoes: imagine you are a fugitive leader of a rebel band in the forests of central Africa, travelling on foot and avoiding encounter with any organized military force. You have spurned peace talks and bribes because the only existence you know is surviving off the land and its fearful people. Every high profile offensive by the armies of three neighbouring countries, or international Special Forces, that fails to capture or kill you, adds to your mystique. Your army is run as a cult, using charisma and fear. For a quarter century your reputation has grown, even while your political agenda has dwindled. In fact, since the killing of Osama bin Laden, you are arguably the most wanted man on the planet.

Today, eight years after abandoning northern Uganda, the LRA’s depleted band of a couple of hundred barefoot fighters is somewhere in the borderlands between the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and Central African Republic. According to the “˜LRA Crisis Tracker’ they have killed 98 civilians in the last 12 months and abducted 477. That’s an impressively high infamy-to-atrocity ratio, testament to the effectiveness of terrorist advertising. In earlier days, the LRA achieved spread terror throughout northern Uganda by its gruesome mutilations. Severed lips and noses spread the message better than a radio station.

Today, Kony’s supernatural powers are newly validated by his newest enemy, the earthly superpower, which is staking its power and prestige on catching or killing him. The LRA’s new echo chamber is an advocacy group, Invisible Children.

The armies of Uganda, South Sudan and Congo, backed by American advisers, may yet succeed in putting handcuffs on Kony and delivering him to The Hague. But there are plenty of dismal precedents for failure. In 2002, following the U.S. declaration that the LRA was a terrorist organization, the Ugandan People’s Defence Force (UPDF) won the reluctant cooperation of Sudan and launched Operation Iron Fist on both sides of the Uganda-Sudan border. It didn’t succeed. In 2008, after the LRA had relocated to north-eastern Congo and the adjoining areas of southern Sudan, a joint offensive by the armies of Uganda, Congo and South Sudan also failed. Another episode was a 2006 operation by Special Forces attached to the UN mission in Congo. Experts in jungle warfare, Guatemalan commandos, were dispatched to the Garamba national park with the objective of executing the recently-unveiled ICC arrest warrant against Joseph Kony and senior commanders. The operation ended in disaster with the UN soldiers fatally shooting each other.

The problem hasn’t been that Kony isn’t well-known. Compared to the host of other rebel groups and militia that have inflicted comparable or greater destruction on the region over the last quarter century, he enjoys by far the highest profile. The problem is that he is hard to catch, and that his adversaries have too often colluded in keeping the war going.

The Ugandan army had an incentive for keeping the LRA alive and kicking – it justified a high defence budget and gave the generals plenty of opportunities for getting rich. Principle and profit have also driven Ugandan military adventurism across its borders. Invisible Children’s solution to the LRA is for the Ugandan army to pursue them through the jungles of Congo. It doesn’t mention that fifteen years ago, Uganda and Rwanda invaded Congo (then called Zaire) to pursue Rwandese genocidaires and Ugandan rebels through those same forests. The world hadn’t cared enough to stop the Rwandese killers regrouping and rearming in Zairean refugee camps, so the leaders of the Uganda and Rwanda, with a nod from Washington DC, took unilateral action themselves. It didn’t work out so well for the Congolese people.  Let’s hope that this time Ugandan soldiers and their proxies kill fewer than 98 Congolese civilians.

Since peace and stability began returning to northern Uganda six years ago, the agenda has been reconstruction and reconciliation. There are programs of social healing to address the roots of the LRA rebellion, which lie in a complicated history of marginalization and the traumas of the war and massacres of the 1980s. Demystifying Kony – reducing him to a common criminal and a failed provincial politician – should be part of this effort to normalize life.

During these years, the LRA has survived in the frontierlands of central Africa because the reach of government doesn’t extend there, and because the inhabitants of these places have as much reason to distrust the depredations of officialdom as they have to fear the cruelties of the LRA. If Kony dies or is captured, the few hundred LRA fighters may disband, but the lawlessness that made possible his reign of fear, will not be so easily resolved.

In elevating Kony to a global celebrity, the embodiment of evil, and advocating a military solution, the campaign isn’t just simplifying, it is irresponsibly naive. “˜Big man’ style rulers – of which President Yoweri Museveni is one – prefer to dismiss their opponents as disturbed individuals, and like to short-cut civil politics by military action. The “let’s get the bad guy” script is a problem, not a solution.

Millions of young Americans are being told about a bizarre and murderous African cult. They are also being told that for 25 years Africa has been waiting for America to solve this problem, which can be done by capturing Africa’s crazed evildoer and handing him over to international justice. And they are led to believe that what has stopped this from happening is that American leaders don’t care enough. The apologists for Invisible Children call this “raising awareness.” I call it peddling dangerous and patronizing falsehoods.

Alex de Waal is Director of the World Peace Foundation.

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8 comments

  1. | theBlackout 11 March, 2012 at 23:11

    […] at nothing, even if Ugandans have told you to stop.” People from Tumblr’s own Amber Ha to the director of the World Peace Foundation to Anonymous have criticized Invisible Children, often citing it’s propaganda-like qualities and […]

  2. thabo 12 March, 2012 at 02:20

    Is the LRA currently killing any Congolese?

  3. Weekend Reading: #KONY2012 Edition « Backslash Scott Thoughts 12 March, 2012 at 20:08

    […] article in the CS Monitor touches on the need to reach out to African groups. Alex de Waal argues that elevating Kony to “make him famous” isn’t the right way forwards. There is also an article on […]

  4. Kony Hater 14 March, 2012 at 11:42

    A college student has taken it upon himself to go farther than the average person and has contacted major corporations like walmart, walgreens, and best buy, to help donate to the kony cause. The agreement they made was that for every lead he generated, they would donate a small amount of money to the kony cause. I found his blog on wordpress while searching for kony related topics. His blog doesn’t have much information and is very simple. Not much information is provided. However I would like to give this kid the benefit of the doubt. He doesn’t ask anyone for any money, he doesn’t even have a donate button on his blog. All he asks is that people take 2 minutes out of their day to fill out a simple form. Out of sheer optimism I am pulling for this kid. He states on his post “If people actually spent as much time as they did on facebook and twitter reading about kony, and actually took action to help support the cause, we may have already caught kony.” Think about that for a minute. If everyone who read about kony and had discussions about kony, made productivity of their time, kony would probably be dead by now! Here is his blog. Lets try and get this kid famous. After all, the good lord knows that walmart and all these other major corporations as the resources to take down probably 100 joseph kony’s. Lets exploit the corporate world and help support the kony cause! http://supportkony2012.wordpress.com/

  5. Kony 2012: Biased, Simplistic, But Effective (Part Two) « Zeitfeature « ZeitLife 14 March, 2012 at 12:19

    […] will not help if removing Kony is not the solution. Alex de Waal of the World Peace Foundation hopes that Kony’s downfall will lead to the disbanding of the LRA, but predicts that “the lawlessness that made possible his reign of fear will not be so easily […]

  6. KONY 2012: Something to do - Converge 14 March, 2012 at 18:23

    […] […]

  7. Brock Delorme 14 March, 2012 at 20:56

    Make Him Do Time For the grime that idiet is stupid!

  8. What will it take to end the conflict with the LRA?, Kennedy Tumutegyereize | Fast Fails | The Best Fail Channels 16 March, 2012 at 22:03

    […] [15] https://africanarguments.org/2012/03/11/don%E2%80%99t-elevate-joseph-kony-by-alex-de-waal/ […]

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