Kony, the tip of the iceberg
The image of Joseph Kony, leader of Uganda’s Lord Resistance Army (LRA) militant group, has spiked much attention and controversy in the beginning of March. By March 11, this video made by the NGO Invisible Children’s (IC) for its Kony 2012 campaign already had 72 million views on Youtube. The campaign also called for students and youths to cover local towns with Kony posters and stickers on April 20 for its “Cover the Night” project.
The video asked that American advisers be allowed to continue assisting the Ugandan army to capture Kony. Kony, however, is only the tip of the iceberg.
The co-founder of Invisible Children, Jason Russell, admitted that his viral video was oversimplified the issue, but quickly added that IC’s goal was to stop Kony. But according to Adam Branch, a senior research fellow at the Makere Institute of Social Research, students ought first to learn about the conflict before acting. Behind Kony’s image lays complicated regional dynamics: heavy militarization, failed states and tropical underdevelopment.
If the international community is willing to successfully target Kony, it should respond to the insecurity factors in the region, and adopt a “population-centric” approach.
Regional insecurity
According to New York Times blogger Lisa Shannon, “We owe them [the victims of the LRA] concrete steps toward capturing Kony.” This can be applied to all the victims found in the middle of mineral and ethnic conflict and state oppression from Congo to Sudan. Civilian populations are trapped in a structure of systemic violence between mushrooming militias and state-sponsored coercion.
When Museveni rose to power in 1966, his South Uganda-based National Resistance Movement (NRA) cracked down on North Uganda, mainly the Acholi region. The LRA was one of many militias to emerge in that area in response. The NRA became Uganda’s official army and was renamed the Uganda Peoples Defense Forces (UPDF).
The LRA has fueled an autonomous and resilient terror, lasting now 25 years in central Africa, abducting young children as soldiers and sex slaves in the tens of thousands, and causing immense suffering across an expansive territory. In 2006, the LRA fled Uganda and entered peace negotiations, but resumed massacres in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in late 2008. The Ugandan army was permitted to enter DRC soil a few months after.
The LRA was also supported by Omar al-Bashir’s brutal regime in Khartoum as a proxy to fuel social turmoil in South Sudan against the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/ Army (SPLA/M). The LRA entered the Southern Sudanese Western Equatoria district in mid-2009.
However, according to the government of Uganda, the LRA is a now a “weakened group with numbers not exceeding 300.” It is divided into small groups of 10, all hiding in “grey zones,” highly inaccessible and inhospitable areas that reach to the Central African Republic.
Uganda’s large neighbor, the DRC, has been hit hard by several waves of insecurity since 1994, most notably the spillover effects of massive refugee flows following the Rwandan genocide, and two invasions by the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF). All of these events involved neighboring states, the plundering of natural resources and the importation of ready-to-use weaponry.
In 2001, Joesph Kabila succeeded his father Laurent-Désiré Kabila as DRC’s president. Both have used their army to systematically undermine democracy and sustain an elite few. Since the late 1990s, smaller militias have mushroomed in many parts of the country in order to take control of mineral resources, a phenomenon social science theorists call the “honey pot effect.” In the fog of war, different groups have transited minerals via Rwanda. The market of some minerals, like coltan, has diversified, and are now used in personal computers and cellular phones.
The DRC army and UNAMIR, the United Nations peacekeeping forces, have been mostly ineffective in protecting civilian populations against the LRA and other militia groups. The UN has a weak mandate. DRC’s army (FARDC), much like Ugandan’s, is undisciplined and attracts mostly unqualified and poor labor who see the military career is as a way to collect bounties. The institution has been itself is a governmental tool to limit civil society. In Sudan, the elites of the “liberator” SPLA have used their oil revenues to buy houses in Kenya, instead of distributing it, subsequently fueling conflict with other ethnic minorities.
American involvement
The United States are supporting Museveni, Kagame’s RPF and are now training the SPLA, in a comprehensive strategy that serve their interests in the region.
Washington has put forward strategic alliances throughout the African continent with the institution of the AFRICOM central command, signed in 2008 by Obama. The main goals are fighting al-Qaeda linked cells in the Sahel and Somalia, AQMI and al-Shabaab, but critics have noted a second interest in securing viable flows of energy resources in the region. Uganda has served both interests well in the past decade.
First, the United States refuses to send troops in Somalia since the 1992 fiasco of Operation Restoring Freedom. It has thus mainly conducted its combat operations, AMISOM, through drone attacks, the UPDF and the Kenya Defense Forces (KDF). Al-Shabaab has responded by attacking directly Kampala, Uganda’s capital, and the UPDF has lost several hundred soldiers in the war.
Second, as an effort to fight the LRA, the UPDF has forced internal displacement in the northern Acholi region, pushing its citizens into refugee camps and grabbing their lands. Milton Allimadi, the news editor at Ugandan American Black Star, calls this the “Second Acholi Genocide”. In the Albertine region, west of Lake Alberta, oil was discovered in 2006. Corruption issues have shaken the political landscape, directing criticism towards the London-based Tullow Oil Company.
Moreover, the United States has been containing Sudan, whose president Omar al-Bashir has also an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC), since the country took a radical Islamist stance and harbored Osama Bin Laden in the 1990s. Sudan has also been at the forefront of China’s oil strategy in Africa. China provides massive aid to Sudan in exchange of petroleum.
Finally, the U.S. intervened in the region in 2008-09 in Operation Lightning Thunder, which consisted of coordinating efforts to chase the LRA in the Garamba National Park in North DRC. It failed, partly due to communication problems with Uganda’s national army and the difficulties penetrating grey zones. These events were mostly overlooked by Western media.
Uganda is in a strategic location between East and Central Africa, and the international community needs to incorporate all the regional dynamics to avoid dramatic spillover effects. Moreover, the high-tech industry’s demand for minerals, direct involvement of multinationals in the region, and the support of murderous regimes like Kagame’s Rwanda and Museveni’s Uganda all make Western nations guilty of fueling the conflict.
Recommendations
Pushing for further American intervention is a problem because it revolves in supporting American interests in the region. Uganda is one of the most corrupt nations in the world, and strengthening the military institutions will reduce any prospects of democratization. This happened in Rwanda. Sending massive aid to Uganda will only serve to satisfy Western humanitarian guilt and may lead to a Haiti-like scenario of dependence.
Capturing Kony and defeating the last remnants of Kony’s army before it regains strength is important. However, his army still comprises of many children. Community-based self-defense forces and initiatives appear to be the most effective forms of organization in the region. They need to be assisted when they can with, for example, greater access to radios, telephones, and health and education facilities.
The African Union has declared that it will send 5,000 combat troops on March 24, to capture Kony. Yet, the international community needs to denounce once and for all the arms trade and mineral industry. Supporting autocratic governments to attack militias is not an option, because the price to pay is too big for the citizens, which have suffered enough. This process is much slower than the immediate action that IC advocates, but it is more conscious of the context of its operations.
Finally, governments in the region need to stand accountable for their own human rights abuses. More transparency is also needed for “first-world” citizens to understand how their own leaders and multinationals have benefited from the fog of war.
These dynamics play out from Sudan to Congo, Rwanda, Uganda and the horn of Africa, involving dozens of armed groups and Western countries. It is complex, hence less “empowering” than the Kony 2012 video. The Kony 2012 campaign has opened a window of opportunity to understand an issue, but if the international community wants to help the Central and East Africa civilian populations, at minimum it needs to understand these dynamics.
Branch’s three questions remain relevant:
What are “we,” American citizens, “already doing to cause those conflicts in the first place?”
“How are we, as consumers, contributing to land grabbing and to the wars ravaging the region?”
“Finally, how are we allowing our government to militarize Africa in the name of the ‘War on Terror’ and its efforts to secure oil resources?”
