International Crisis Group

All Africa | Central Africa: Muted Applause for Ugandan Rebel’s Arrest

By Simon Jennings

As the Ugandan military seeks to flush out Joseph Kony, leader of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army, LRA, analysts are downplaying the significance of last weekend’s capture of a senior commander from the group.

According to the Ugandan army, LRA officer Caesar Acellam was captured in a pre-planned ambush as he crossed the Mbomu river between the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC, and the Central African Republic, CAR.

Felix Kulayigye, spokesman for the Ugandan People’s Defence Force, UPDF, described Acellam as a “big fish”, and predicted that his detention would accelerate the arrest of other LRA members, including Kony himself.

The International Criminal Court, ICC, in The Hague has charged Kony and two of his commanders, Okot Odhiambo and Dominic Ongwen, with atrocities committed during the 20-year insurgency which ravaged northern Uganda until 2006. Two others whom the ICC charged in 2005 have since died.

Analysts say it is not clear what Acellam’s arrest means for the pursuit of the three ICC indictees, since the precise circumstances have not been made public.

“The key question again is whether this was a result of a negotiation and he had a path smoothed for him; whether he simply walked out of the bush or whether he was tracked down and captured,” Ben Shepherd of Chatham House’s Africa programme said. “Until we know more details on that, it is very hard to know what the implications are.”

FULL ARTICLE (All Africa)

NPR | Young People Turn From Kony To Spooning Record 

The chapter of Invisible Children on Messner’s campus broke its ties with the group, changing its name and deciding to donate funds directly to children’s programs in Uganda.

But not everyone has given up on the cause. Around the country, thousands of young people will still turn out on Friday to placard Kony’s image and stencil his name in chalk.

“At least on our campus, interest appears to be relatively strong,” says Christopher LoCascio, editor-in-chief ofHighlander, the student newspaper at the University of California, Riverside.

Even at the height of the video’s popularity, there were questions about whether teenagers tweeting it would turn awareness into action. Still, the amount of attention it received arguably worked as intended, making Kony and the LRA something policymakers had to address in places like Washington and Brussels.

Last year, President Obama dispatched 100 troops to Uganda to help with the hunt.

“Certainly, the video raised the issue of the problem with the LRA to a much higher level than it had been for quite some time in Washington, D.C.,” says E.J. Hogendoorn, Horn of Africa project director for International Crisis Group.

Its message may have been “simplistic,” he says. But, he adds, “The fact that this has increased the U.S. administration’s focus on this issue probably has some lasting value.”

FULL ARTICLE (NPR) 

Alan Greenblatt

Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army have been terrorizing civilians in central Africa for more than 25 years. But their crimes have suddenly received prominence due to one of the most successful social media campaigns in history.

On Monday, a nonprofit group called Invisible Children uploaded a video onto the Internet that has already been viewed nearly 40 million times on YouTube. Many viewers are young people, and the topic is dominating discussion on social media sites such as Twitter and Reddit.

There’s no question the video has directed wider attention to a far-away matter like Kony and the LRA than any congressional debate or set of policy papers.

“It’s had a dramatic effect,” says Richard Downie, deputy director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. “We’ve been talking about him for a long time, without anything like this response.”

But Invisible Children has been criticized for oversimplifying the issues involved. Capturing Kony – which has been the goal of multiple governments for years – is going to take a lot more than sharing a video online or putting up posters and purchasing bracelets from the group, as the video suggests.

“Activism always involves sparking attention –- getting people to take up and notice this problem, as opposed to the six million other problems they could be mad about,” says Jeremi Suri, author ofLiberty’s Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building From the Founders to Obama.

But awareness and activism aren’t always enough to achieve the outcomes desired in a complex, real-world situation.

“This video is making a moral plea, but it doesn’t leave much space for the unintended consequences that might result from intervening,” Suri says.

‘Evil In This World’

The LRA was one of the armed rebel groups that emerged in northern Uganda following the rise to power in 1986 of Yoweri Museveni, who remains the country’s president.

The LRA has committed countless atrocities, hacking off limbs, noses, ears and lips from its victims in order to instill fear. More than 400,000 people were displaced or living as refugees last year as a result of the LRA’s activities, according to groups that have tracked the organization.Over the years, the LRA has metastasized from a group resisting the government to a force that seems to have little purpose outside its own survival. As the video points out, the group has killed and disfigured thousands of people and abducted thousands of children.

“If you ever had any question if there’s evil in this world, it’s resident in the person of Joseph Kony,” Gen. Carter F. Ham, head of U.S. Africa Command, said last year.

Getting Kony Was Already A Policy

The capture or killing of Kony is already official U.S. policy. Prodded by Invisible Children and other human rights groups, Congress in 2010 passed a law requiring the president to devise a strategy to eliminate the LRA.

Last October, President Obama detailed the administration’s plans for doing so, including the announcement that 100 U.S. troops would be deployed to Uganda to provide intelligence and logistical support.

There are still snags. The LRA now roams through densely-forested land along the borders of South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republican of the Congo.

The U.S. is trying to work with all those armies, but they have failed to come together in an organized or effective way, says Mark Schneider, a former Peace Corps director who is now with the International Crisis Group, which supports conflict-prevention efforts.

FULL ARTICLE (National Public Radio)

With the attention Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 campaign has been getting on Tumblr and elsewhere, here’s our own take on stopping the LRA, from a report published November 2011.

The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) remains a deadly threat to civilians in three Central African states. After a ceasefire and negotiations for peaceful settlement of the generation-long insurgency broke down in 2008, Uganda’s army botched an initial assault. In three years since, half-hearted operations have failed to stop the small, brutally effective band from killing more than 2,400 civilians, abducting more than 3,400 and causing 440,000 to flee. In 2010 President Museveni withdrew about half the troops to pursue more politically rewarding goals. Congolese mistrust hampers current operations, and an African Union (AU) initiative has been slow to start. While there is at last a chance to defeat the LRA, both robust military action and vigorous diplomacy is required. Uganda needs to take advantage of new, perhaps brief, U.S. engagement by reinvigorating the military offensive; Washington needs to press regional leaders for cooperation; above all, the AU must act promptly to live up to its responsibilities as guarantor of continental security. When it does, Uganda and the U.S. should fold their efforts into the AU initiative.

FULL REPORT (The Lord’s Resistance Army: End Game?)

Photo: Flickr/chris shultz