JOSEPH KONY SAYS HIS DEATH WILL BE A MYSTERY

Publish Date: Mar 14, 2012
By Joseph Kizza
New Vision
Kampala

Kony with some of the children he kidnapped in northern Uganda.(File photos)
By Joseph Kizza and Carol Kasujja

Joseph Kony’s atrocious acts in northern Uganda for over two decades will remain delicately but painfully emblazoned within the historical archives of a country looking at marking 50 years of independence on October 9.

Kony prides in his position as the pulse and leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a militant group formed in 1987 in Uganda and is still active, but weakening according to reports, in central Africa.

The rebel group has also been up and about in neighbouring South Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), especially after having been driven out of Uganda by the Uganda People’s Defense Forces (UPDF) following years of clashes and killings.

Forcing Kony out of Uganda in the UPDF’s several attempts to snuff him out during the insurgency inspired a sense of relief among Ugandans. The source of relief was against the background of the actions of Kony’s group in the north—cases of murder, abduction, mutilation, child abuse, a clear violation of human rights.

As many Ugandans and other audiences across the globe continue to wonder how Kony will end, the ever stern-looking Acholi fighter revealed once how, after his death, no one will know how he died.

Ugandans were awakened again to the bitter memories of one of the most hated men in the country’s history—Joseph Kony—when a viral campaign dubbed “Stop Kony” to bring him to justice caught the world’s attention through an online video.



Slowly, some people had started to forget about Kony and his LRA group, considering they were fought out of the country by the UPDF.

But remembering the despicable acts towards hundreds of innocent people in the north only needed a Youtube video like “Stop Kony”.

After the video took rounds across all kinds of (social) media with over 70 million views, and the number should be growing, the Kony-talk has picked up momentum around town.

Down to DRC

In 2010, award-winning French-British writer of The Kindly Ones 2006, Jonathan Littell, trekked down to DR Congo on a mission to investigate the LRA. While there, Littell was opened up to several accounts of death, torture and other harrowing experiences at the hands of the LRA group.

Littell narrates his hair-raising story in an article; “The Invisible Enemy. The LRA in Congo: The Forgotten War”, published in the French newspaper, Le Monde.

Somewhere in the article, Littell writes: “No one knows how the LRA will end. Perhaps the most likely thing, for Kony himself, is the fate he spelled out to Betty Bigombe, on the telephone, during their last conversation: “Someday, the world will wake up and learn that I’m dead. It will be the way it was for Hitler. You won’t know the circumstances. No one will know what day I died. No one will know where I am buried.”

At the Combonian mission of Dungui in the North eastern Province of Haut-Uele Province, Littell met Father Sergio who has lived in Congo for almost 40 years, who told him of a series of killings Kony and his men had left in their wake.

“The LRA are very disciplined. If you kill them, they will kill you. They go where no one else goes. They have become animals. It’s an insane and desperate group. They have no objectives,” Sergio explained.

The LRA kidnapped many young children during their numerous raids in villages, who later, became child-soldiers and expanded the rebel group. Many, however, managed to escape and ended up in a rehabilitation programme by an Italian NGO, COOPI. About 1,129 children who had fled from their rebel captives went through the programme.

Clemence, like all children captured by the LRA, was marked with crosses drawn on her forehead, chest, back, hands and feet with shea oil, which the Acholis call moo-ya and regard as a sacred plant.

The children offer two explanations for this ceremony: For some, it was done to give them strength so they could bear the long marches carrying loads through the jungle; but for most, it was a spell, which was supposed to allow the LRA to find them easily in case they ran away, or even kill them.

Young mother

Clemence was 15 when she was captured in the CAR, in March 2008, from her hut. “When I woke up, I realised that I was tied up. They drugged me out by a rope and loaded me with sacks to carry,” she recalled. She spent two years in captivity.

She mothered one of the Acholi fighters’ child one year after she was abducted.

Just like Clemence, most of the girls kidnapped by the rebel group were offered to the top fighters as “wives”.

“They captured many children, adults too. The ones that cried were beaten or whipped,” the young girl spoke of the cruel treatment by the LRA of their captives.

For the slightest fault — a stumble, a bag dropped, a word spoken in the boy’s native language — the LRA hit.

Though they have hurt many innocent people, LRA have no more future in Congo. Most of them have no permanent bases and they are under pressure because they have no weapons and support.

Low on technology, Kony cannot communicate with his commanders regularly. He has to send someone to deliver his messages which take weeks and months. They lack medical assistance, yet UPDF is hunting them day and night.

“The LRA moves or it dies.” confirms a kidnapped child. If Kony does not come back to Uganda, he will have no soldiers.

Most LRA rebels have died and since their leader is in hiding, he has no access to Uganda to kidnap more recruits to boost his army. “I go from place to place chasing the LRA. The other day, I killed six of them,” says Lt Col Augustin Anywar, the leader of the tactical mobile group.

Kony has already spelled out his fate. Speaking to Betty Bigombe, who was at the time leading the peace talks, he said: “Someday, the world will wake up and learn that I’m dead. It will be the way it was for Hitler. You won’t know the circumstances. No one will know what day I died. No one will know where I will be buried”.

Challenges UPDF faces in hunting Kony

Through the help of Americans, Ugandans have been supported with electronic intelligence. However, due to lack of synchronisation, UPDF has failed to trace all the LRA camps in Congo. They do not have enough aircrafts to spy on the rebels.

“Ugandan troops got close to Kony, very close, but he always managed to slip away, and the UPDF, loaded down with weapons and equipment, never managed to catch up with him,” says Gen Charles Otema, who commands the anti-LRA regional operation in South Sudan.

JOSEPH KONY AND THE OTHER AFRICA

By Paul Stoller
Professor of Anthropology,
West Chester University;

The continent of Africa is once again in the news. This time the buzz is about a viral video, "Kony 2012," which is about the unspeakable atrocities committed by one Joseph Kony, leader of the Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army, which has consisted of a ragtag group of dazed and confused children who have been kidnapped. The girls become sex slaves and the boys are transformed into the child soldiers who mutilate their victims and sometimes are forced to kill their parents. In a matter of days, the video scored 50 million hits on the Internet. Although this is good news for Invisible Children, the organization that sponsored and showcased the video, it is more of the same when it comes to our narratives about the societies and cultures of Africa.

There can be no denial of the horrors of the Lord's Resistance Army or of Joseph Kony's horrendous crimes against humanity. By the same token this film about the unimaginable violence that underscores social life in some parts of Uganda extends the notion that Africa, seen by most Americans and Europeans as one homogenous country, is irreconcilably backward, brutish, and uncivilized. In this narrative, the country, "Africa" is a place of failed government, incessant civil war, widespread famine and boundless filth. It is a place where "Africans," irrational creatures, all have no history, no culture and no religion -- only the "law of the jungle." These Africans, who are destitute and barely human, need our help -- to stop Joseph Kony or some other ruthless commander of an army of kidnapped children. While such activism may well result in the apprehension of a rebel leader, it also reinforces our stereotypical image of "Africa" and "Africans."

One of my obligations as an anthropologist who has spent more than 30 years learning from people who live in various parts of the African continent is to attempt to undermine destructive stereotypes. I never tire of informing people that Africa is not a country. Indeed, there are 54 sovereign nations in Africa. What's more, "Africans" don't speak "African." Indeed, people in Africa speak more than an estimated 2000 languages -- not dialects -- that are grammatically distinct. As such the continent of Africa is marked not by its homogeneity but by an almost mind-boggling diversity.

Such diversity is evident when you travel on the road that connects Niamey, Niger and Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso in West Africa. When you begin your journey, you are in Islamic Niger and the road cuts through an arid step dotted with acacia trees. Each town features a prominent mosque. This region is populated with Fulani and Songhai people, who tend to be tall and slender. After the border crossing you descend an escarpment and, after 10 kilometers, everything changes. There are vast plains of tall grasses and clusters of cottonwoods. The people who live on the plain, the Gourmantché, tend to be short and more round-bodied. In their towns, the most prominent structure is a church. Fulani, Songhai and Gourmantché, of course, are mutually unintelligible languages. Accordingly, social and cultural life among these geographic neighbors is quite distinct. What's more this diversity exists in a rather circumscribed geographic area.

So Africa is not a country and Africans don't speak "African."

What about the most pernicious stereotype -- that in the face of ongoing civil war and unending famine, "Africans" are powerless and need our help? The peoples of Africa are no strangers to drought and famine. Long before Europeans first traveled there, societies devised all sorts of ingenious social measures to deal with food shortages due to drought and/or famine. Clearly, funds to feed homeless and stateless families are much appreciated. But if you have lived among African peoples and speak one of more than 2000 African languages, what truly impresses -- at least for me -- is a capacity for social resilience -- to confront adversity and adjust to it with verve and creativity.

This narrative is almost never recounted in the media or on the Internet. It is certainly not part of the "Kony 2012" narrative. How much does Kony 2012 filmmaker, Jason Russell, know about social life in Uganda? Does he speak Baganda or one of the other languages spoken in that East Africa country? Has he lived there or is his knowledge of the social life of Ugandan peoples simply a result of his visits and some background reading?

When you immerse yourself in the social life of another society and learn its language, you eventually learn how to ask central, rather than peripheral questions. You are sensitized to what is important. You avoid falling into the trap of exoticism. Consider the following passage from Michael D. Jackson's compelling book, In Sierra Leone, a moving account that focuses on the impact of civil war on the social lives of people in that war-ravaged country. Like Uganda, Sierra Leone experienced the social and moral devastation of an army of kidnapped child soldiers who mutilated their victims. Sometimes these victims were forced to witness the brutal killing of their loved ones. Toward the end of the book, Jackson, an anthropologist who has spent more than 30 years thinking about Sierra Leonean social life, visits the Cline Town displaced persons camp, in which the orphans of war were trying to get beyond the horrors of their recent past. Conditions there were grim. And yet, despite their suffering, the young people there resiliently looked forward to new lives.

What overwhelmed me was not the demands, nor the sense of impotence I felt, but the realization that the these people needed so little to resume their lives, and that, rather than dwell on what had happened in the past, they desired only to move on, to start over...
Like the Sierra Leoneans that Jackson describes, the people I have known in Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso and Senegal -- not to forget those who live in the African Diaspora -- have impressed me deeply with their social and personal resilience. This resilience should be a much more important part of our narrative about the African continent.

The Sierra Leonean orphans of war -- not Joseph Kony -- merit 50 million hits on the Internet. Their stories mark a path toward a better life in the future.

Follow Paul Stoller on Twitter: www.twitter.com/stol1

RWANDA ASSASSINATION PLOT SUSPECT OFFERED S A POLICE $ 1M BRIBE

S. Africa cop: Rwanda assassination plot suspect offered police $1m bribe after airport arrest
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By Associated Press,
Published: March 19
JOHANNESBURG

A South African police detective said Monday a Rwandan businessman offered police a $1 million bribe to free him after his arrest on suspicion of bankrolling an assassination attempt against an exiled dissident Rwandan general.

The trial of those accused of trying to kill Rwandan Lt. Gen. Faustin Kayumba Nyamwasa in a June 2010 attempted shooting has exposed a growing web of financial and political intrigue involving Rwanda and South Africa.

Leonard Kanye of the Johannesburg Organized Crimes unit testified in court on Monday that he arrested Rwandan suspect Pascal Kanyandekwe at the Johannesburg airport soon after the shooting attempt.

He said the Rwandan offered the money while handcuffed in the back of a police car. His seized baggage contained two passports and photographs of two of five other suspects on trial for the attempted killing.

All six men have pleaded innocent.

The trial resumed Monday for two weeks of testimony after a lengthy series of hearings.

Kanye said Kanyandekwe arrived at the Johannesburg airport on July 2, 2010 from Rwanda. A police officer sent to the airport to find him called his mobile number and claimed to be a driver sent to pick him up.

In the unmarked police car, he was formally arrested and read his rights. Kanyandekwe became edgy and “said we mustn’t arrest him. He would give us $1 million” if he was taken instead to the Johannesburg district of Kyalami, said Kanye, a 17-year veteran of the police service.

Prosecutor Shaun Abrahams said the contents of the Rwandan’s luggage included a key “almost identical” to one recovered from another arrested Rwandan suspect, Amani Uriwani, an out-of-work truck driver allegedly recruited for his contacts with other Rwandans and African immigrants in South Africa.

Kayandekwe, 30, says he was setting up businesses in South Africa.

But Kanye said his two passports, one identifying him as a national of Belgium, Rwanda’s former colonial ruler, and the other as a Rwandan, showed he came to South Africa for the first time just before the attempted shooting. He entered South Africa twice after the shooting and again flew from Rwanda to Johannesburg on the day of his arrest.

Photographs of his alleged accomplices in his luggage showed they were printed by a digital photo store in Burundi’s capital of Bujumbura.

The Rwandan government has denied involvement in the assassination attempt outside the Johannesburg home of Nyamwasa, a former Rwandan military chief who has become a sharp critic of Rwandan President Paul Kagame since coming to South Africa in 2010.

But Rwandans in exile have accused Kagame of using his agents to hunt down his external foes.

Nyamwasa and dissident leaders accuse Kagame of crushing opponents and trampling on democracy after helping to end the genocide that left 500,000 people dead in 1994. Kagame was re-elected in 2010, months after Nyamwasa was shot.

Last year, Nyamwasa was among four former Kagame aides in exile in South Africa and the United States who were convicted in their absence by a Rwandan military court for disturbing public order, sectarianism, criminal conspiracy and threatening state security.

South African prosecutors have said key witnesses in the politically and diplomatically sensitive trial have sought police protection in South Africa because they fear Rwanda’s government.

Testimony in the South African trial has hinted that shadowy figures were determined to kill Nyamwasa, trying more than once and offering large amounts of cash to draw in conspirators.

After Nyamwasa survived the shooting, prosecutors said the people pursuing him plotted to kill him in his South African hospital bed. But that case was dropped on lack of evidence.

Police in Britain last year warned some Rwandans living there that their lives were in danger after they criticized the government of the east African nation.

In Sweden, fears were also raised for the safety of a small community of Rwandans, some of whom run blogs and online newspapers that are critical of Kagame.

Kayandekwe, who has appeared in the Johannesburg court dressed in impeccable business suits, has hired top South African attorneys but has twice been refused bail.

His co-accused, two Rwandans and three Tanzanians, have appeared in T-shirts and cotton smocks and have not applied to be freed on bail since their arrests.