Uganda Picks

U.S Special Forces efforts to get Joseph Kony,appreciated

Over 30 U.S  Special Forces plotting to get one of the world’s most elusive and sadistic rebels Joseph Kony arrived in Africa.

The U.S. troops arrived two months ago and by most accounts have yet to undertake any military actions. But their mere presence has transformed this tattered out-of-the-way enclave of Congolese refugees, Ugandan soldiers and traumatized local residents into an upbeat cluster of newfound hope.

At night, energized locals bang homemade 8-foot-long xylophones and straddle voluminous bass drums, crooning new tunes to celebrate their good luck.

“The Americans are here/our saviors are here/Let’s dance” goes one such song.”Americans are favored by God wherever they are in the world,” said Bassiri Moke, a local chief. “We asked God to save us and the Americans came. We hope we won’t have to die like before.”

The American deployment here forms the core of a new plan constructed in Washington to end the violent cross-border marauding of Ugandan rebel Joseph Kony and his band of 200 hundred or so fighters known as the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Masters of survival, they slink through thick equatorial forests and brush-littered plains in Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and the Central African Republic, preying on the civilian population for food and new conscripts, killing and abducting as they go. Thousands have died in their wake.

That the U.S. has joined the hunt for a group that horrifies millions of Americans but poses no direct threat to the United States is testament to the influence of human rights campaigners, who, together with evangelical Christians, lobbied Congress to pass a law requiring renewed U.S. efforts against the LRA. The Obama administration responded by dispatching 100 special operations troops to help find Kony.

Most of the U.S. troops are based near the Ugandan capital, Kampala. But this outpost in Obo a town of 15,000 in the far-eastern obscurity of the Central African Republic, an impoverished former French colony of 4 million people is the true heart of the effort.

Kony and his core followers are believed to be living off the surrounding forests, always on the run.Officials in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, say that this country was the weakest link in the Uganda-led regional effort to finish off the guerrilla group.

Kony and his men have not set foot in Uganda for years. Most of the attacks take place in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and South Sudan is also seriously affected, but each of those countries have United Nations peacekeeping operations and somewhat functional, if ill-disciplined, national armies.

The Central African Republic, however, has a weak army with a spare presence here. When small groups of Central African Republic troops started arriving in some of the more rural areas in 2008, some teenagers had never seen a soldier before.

There are differing opinions among officials about whether killing or capturing Kony would be enough to end his movement, which originated in the marginalized Acholi tribe of northern Uganda and offers an ideology that is a cult-like mish-mash of Christianity and traditional mysticism, held together by the force of Kony’s charismatic and cruel leadership.

Kony and two of his top lieutenants have been charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court and would theoretically face trial if captured alive.

The U.S. says it is here to provide logistical support, bolster intelligence sharing and improve the coordination among the four nations’ armies now fighting the LRA.
Adapted from Kansascity.com