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Joseph Kony
The international arrest warrant for Kony was issued by the ICC in 2005. A 30-minute Youtube video called “Kony 2012” was accessed by Friday 58 million times. The video was promoted by some major celebrities, and is deemed as a way of inspiring young people to criticism, but is also being criticized for the over-simplifying of the entire human rights crisis that sparked in Uganda as the Lord’s Resistance Army forced children to fight its wars.
The producer of the video said that the simplification of the issue was made on purpose, so that the film go viral on the internet and raise the awareness to the matter. Reactions to the movie were mixed in Uganda, where there were voices to say that the campaign is too late, and that it focuses on Kony alone, while the government in Uganda was doing the same thing to children.
There are Ugandans who believe that the problem should be solved in their country, not by a viral campaign, because people do not know the facts and the realities in the field. The producers of the video, which started it with the slogan “Nothing Is More Powerful Than An Idea,” were counting on a 50,000-view target. Now, they have said that they would carry on some fundraising campaigns to help it. On April 20, people are demanded to “blanket every street, every city.”
The Lord’s Resistance Army was founded in 1987 by the Acholi people of northern Uganda as a means to put pressure on the central authorities of Uganda. The organization represents the Acholi ethnic group, and operates in Uganda, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.
The army is led by Joseph Kony, who fancies himself as a spokesman for God Himself, and a spirit medium for the Holy Spirit. The group is ideologically a mixture of mysticism, Acholi nationalism and Christian ideas.
Kony claims to establish an Acholi theocratic state, based on the Ten Commandments, and the Acholi tradition. A Holy Spirit Movement was founded in Uganda by Alice Lakwena in 1988, which said that the Acholi could defeat the central government by purging their lands of all sort of dark mysticism, and witchcraft. Therefore, the movement of Joseph Kony was sometimes called Lakwena Part Two.
Lakwena distanced herself from Kony in 1988, as she said that the Holy Spirit could not demand somebody to kill prisoners of war and civilians. She launched an assault on Kampala. She was defeated in Jinjam and fled to Kenya, leaving Kony the only leader of the movement, which by now was called “Holy Spirit Mobile Force II.”
Kony’s movement used the rivalry between the Ugandan central government and Sudan, which gave him support in retaliation for the support offered by Uganda to the South Sudanese rebels. Sudan refused to continue to support the organization in 2005, when Kony was indicted by the ICC.
In May 2002, 450 were killed in what is now known as South Sudan, during an attack on East Equatoria, in South Sudan. In November 2002, LRA is said to have forced some sixty people who were mourning a deceased person to boil the corpse and eat it. After the corpse was boiled and eaten, the eaters were all shot dead.
On Christmas Day of 2008, LRA killed 189 people and abducted 120 children who were attending a concert sponsored by the Catholic Church in the Democratic Republic of Congo, over the next days, they attacked other villages in the DPC and killed some 130 people.
On December 28, 2008, the Ugandan army offered details about the massacre in Doruma village, saying that some 48 people were killed in a church there. In 2008, Sudan, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo launched attacks on the territories occupied by the LRA, but the actions were unsuccessful.
In 2009, the Ugandan army, supported by the U.S. army, launched a huge attack on LRA, but the success was not total, as the LRA retaliated, and 1,000 people were killed in Congo and Sudan.
In August, the LRA massacred the people in the Our Lady Queen of Peace church during the Feast of Assumption. They desecrated the Eucharist, and then the altar, then they abducted some people and killed them.
In December 2009, the LRA massacred 321 people in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and in February 2010 100 people were killed in Uganda.
The central government in Uganda says that the Lord’s Resistance Army has 500 to 1,000 people, but other sources say that there are 3,000, half of which are women and children. It is considered that most of them are children.
International organizations say that since the LRA started its wars in 1987, some 10,000 boys and girls were forced to fight by the troops, often by killing their parents, relatives or neighbors in the process.
On July 8, 2005, an international warrant was issued in Kony’s name, and in September one was issued for his deputy, Vincent Otti and other highly-ranking commanders.
On November 2005, LRA announced through BBC channel their intention to renew their dialogue with the central Ugandan government. In 2006, the vice president of South Sudan was said to have refused to serve the arrest warrant and supported the organization with guns and cash.
In 2009, a black op to capture Kony failed in the forests of Uganda; in May 2010, Barack Obama signed into law Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act, by which the American authorities were searching a way to end the influence of the LRA in Uganda.
In 2011, Obama dispatched 100 U.S. military advisors to help capture Kony and end the presence of the LRA.
Speaking of Kony’s so called “Christian fundamentalism,” Wikipedia says that it is emerging from American and British Protestantism of the late 19th century and early 20th century Evangelism.
Kony is held responsible for the abduction of about 66,000 children that were turned into sex slaves or soldiers. It is considered that since 1987 two million people have been displaced one way or another.
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