Mick Hartley

Grim news from Uganda, where Lord's Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony is reportedly preparing a new offensive after the collapse of peace negotiations in Southern Sudan:

Diplomats say his Lord's Resistance Army is forcibly recruiting fresh fighters and acquiring new arms in neighbouring countries.

His fighters are reported to have attacked South Sudanese forces, killing 13 troops and seven civilians.

Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni and the region's armies have this week all suggested taking military action.

The LRA is believed to be digging up arms caches and resuming their usual practice of abducting civilians, who are then press-ganged into acting as fighters, porters or concubines.

This is said to be taking place in a large area encompassing parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic and Sudan.

Around 1,000 new recruits have been added to around 600 existing combatants.

There are also reports that Chadian rebels have been seen offering them fresh supplies of weaponry.

It's likely that Kony sees no alternative: he's already under indictment from the International Criminal Court for war crimes. There's no possibility that he can in any sense win, or see many of his demands met beyond ensuring his personal safety. It was never all that clear exactly what his demands were anyway, beyond a vague appeal to the Ten Commandments, and the exploitation of a (justified) sense of grievance by the Acholi people of Northern Uganda against President Museveni. The best he can hope for is to raise the cost of refusing to compromise on his status as a war criminal. But really, by now, he's got nothing to lose.

I recently read The Wizard of the Nile, by Matthew Green, which as far as I know is the first full length book treatment of Kony and the LRA. It's useful for providing some background, but somehow gets bogged down in the author's own quest to fulfil his goal of meeting Kony, and never quite delivers what it promises. The main point seems to be that Kony's really just a victim of circumstances, rather than the devil he's usually portrayed as. Certainly the Ugandan government must bear some responsibilty, for its heavy-handed response to the LRA campaign, but there has to be a limit to "tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner", especially when it comes to the abduction, rape, and mutilation of children.

The Wikipedia article on the LRA is fairly exhaustive, though it fails to include Green's book in its references.