Joseph Kony is one of the most notorious and vilified rebel leaders on the planet. He stands accused of kidnapping countless children in northern Uganda and neighboring countries, turning the girls into sex slaves and the boys into killers.
His so-called Christian movement, the Lord’s Resistance Army, has terrorized villagers in at least four countries in central Africa for nearly 20 years, killing tens of thousands of people, burning down huts and hacking off lips. Mr. Kony has been wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court since 2005. The fact that Mr. Kony, whose followers believe he is a prophet, rarely appears in public has only added to his brutal mystique.
Exiled to a fiefdom on the border of southern Sudan and Congo, Mr. Kony in 2007 emerged from the wilderness indicating a willingness to sign a historic peace deal with the Ugandan government that would disband his army. But in April 2008, he backed out, saying he needed more time to consult Ugandan elders.
There have been efforts by the United States to combat Mr. Kony and his army over the years. The Bush administration authorized the Pentagon to send a team of counterterrorism advisers and provided millions of dollars worth of aid, including fuel trucks, satellite phones and night vision goggles, to the Ugandan army. Those efforts scattered segments of the Lord’s Resistance Army, but it regrouped in the countries that border Uganda, especially the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In October 2011, President Obama ordered the deployment of 100 armed military advisers to central Africa to help regional forces combat Mr. Kony’s group.
The Americans have emphasized that they have no interest in participating in actual combat. Their deployment is emblematic of the Pentagon’s new military strategy for Africa, unfurled early in 2012, in which Pentagon officials said they plan to develop “innovative, low-cost, and small-footprint approaches to achieve our security objectives on the African continent.”
Mr. Kony has been hiding out in the jungle for years with a band of child soldiers and a harem of dozens of child brides.
No one knows exactly where he is, but at a remote forward operating post in the Central African Republic, Green Berets pore over maps and interview villagers, hopeful for a clue.
Their biggest challenge, they say, is Mr. Kony’s turf, a vast expanse the size of California in the middle of Africa that is so rugged it renders much of the American gadgetry they carry useless. Imagine towering trees that blot out the sun, endless miles of elephant grass, and swirling brown rivers that coil like intestines and are infested with crocodiles; one of them recently ate a Ugandan member of the force.
American officials believe Mr. Kony is hiding in an especially remote corner of the Central African Republic, though some Ugandan officials said he had moved into Sudan, with the blessing of the Sudanese government.
The Central African Republic would be an excellent place to disappear. Its national army is one of the region’s smallest and weakest. Its terrain is primordially thick. And its infrastructure is shambolic.
On March 23, 2012, the African Union said it would send 5,000 soldiers to join the hunt for Mr. Kony. The mission would be launched from South Sudan, United Nations and African Union officials said.
he's already dead
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