Note the bit of honor for the president as well...
Africa?s Most WantedBy Matthew Green
Published: February 8 2008 21:59 | Last updated: February 8 2008 21:59
FTMatthew Green?s book, The Wizard of the Nile: The Hunt for Africa?s Most Wanted, recounts the author?s quest to meet Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord?s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels.
For 20 years, Kony?s followers have waged a campaign of terror by abducting thousands of children in his native northern Uganda. But beyond Kony?s pledges to rule according to the Ten Commandments, nobody seems to know why he is fighting.
Tracking Kony through the badlands of Uganda and Sudan, Green uncovers a hidden history of oppression and betrayal stretching back from the earliest Victorian explorers to the modern-day ?war on terror?. By the time Kony emerges from his jungle hideout, it is clear there is far more to the war than one man?s madness.
Kony?s appearance 18 months ago marked the start of talks that have led to one of Uganda?s most prolonged periods of peace in living memory. Hundreds of thousands of people have returned home after surviving for years in squalid ?protected camps?. But confirmation in January that the LRA had executed Kony?s deputy, Vincent Otti, has renewed concerns over dangerous divisions in the rebel ranks. Until Kony himself gives up, few in northern Uganda will believe their ordeal is over.
First came the bodyguards, teenage boys rustling through the long grass in oversized wellingtons. Some wore dreadlocks, others rosaries. All carried guns.
We watched as they formed a circle round the clearing, staring at us with eyes both sullen and alert. Their leader had to be close now, perhaps just around the bend in the trail.
Then we saw him. Gaunt, somehow managing to look immaculate in sharply creased short-sleeved shirt and trousers, the leader of the LRA strode out of the forest wearing a look of utter bewilderment.
One of the rebels produced a plastic chair. Lowering himself into his makeshift throne, he dabbed sweat from his brow with a flannel. His nerves could be forgiven. After two decades of fighting, he was about to hold his first news conference.
?I am a man,? he began, voice quavering. ?I am a human being. I am Joseph Kony.?
Until he emerged from his hideout in the north-eastern Democratic Republic of Congo in mid-2006, Joseph Kony was the most mysterious rebel leader in Africa, perhaps the world. For almost 20 years, his LRA rebels had terrorised his native northern Uganda, abducting thousands of children for use as soldiers, porters and wives. His fighters were renowned for chopping off people?s noses, padlocking their lips, or hacking them to death with machetes. Chief among their victims were Kony?s own Acholi community. At its peak, in 2002 and 2003, the war forced two million people from their homes, creating one of the worst humanitarian crises on the planet. For all the mayhem, Kony was an enigma. ?Ugandan newspapers described him as a self-styled prophet who wanted to rule according to the Ten Commandments. Possessing few pictures, they instead recycled a snap of him as a much younger man, wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ?Born to be Wild?. Nobody seemed to know why he was fighting.
Six months before Kony appeared in the clearing, I had set out to find him. I had been working as a reporter for the Reuters news agency in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, covering east Africa. I had filed endless reports about Kony?s atrocities, but had no real idea what the war was about. My question was simple: how could one man, kidnapping thousands of children, hold half a country hostage for 20 years?
My timing could have been better. The International Criminal Court in The Hague had just issued its first arrest warrants to try suspected war criminals. It named Kony and four of his top commanders. Facing 33 counts, Kony was now officially Africa?s most wanted man. Scared of being arrested, he seemed even less likely to be willing to receive visitors.
I took a bus north from Uganda?s capital Kampala, hurtling through schools and plantations until the land cracked in half. White water surged over rocks, soldiers guarded a bridge. This was the Karuma Falls on the river Nile, the dividing line between the peaceful south of Uganda, and the land of the LRA in the north. A sign by the road said ?Safe journey?.
I headed for Kony?s home village, Odek. As the bus drove past abandoned fields and the remains of farmsteads, I began to wonder where all the people had gone.
Then we passed the first ?protected camp? ? huts crammed together into a giant slum. Men, women and children wandered the lanes, too scared of the rebels or the soldiers sent to guard them to go out and farm. The government created the camps in 1996 to separate Kony from his Acholi people. A decade later, they had become huge prisons.
Kony?s village looked much the same as the other camps. The men gave sheepish grins when I asked about Kony, as if I had mentioned a relative nobody liked to talk about. Finally, they directed me to a hut belonging to a maths teacher named Lakoch p?Oyoo.
Mr p?Oyoo smiled as he reminisced about the childhood he had shared with Kony, describing a mild-mannered boy who hated violence. Older kids would insult his mother, but Kony ignored them. ?People said he was a coward,? p?Oyoo told me. ?He just said ?I can?t see the use of fighting.? ?
He smiled again. ?Kony was really a jolly man,? he said. ?What he liked best was conversation and laughing.? Then he frowned. ?He told me he never wanted to be a witch doctor, but he was forced to by the spirits,? p?Oyoo said. ?He could even have died if he had refused, so he accepted that he had to become a witch doctor and healed so many people.?
Among the Acholi ? where disease was often blamed on spirits called jogi ? becoming a healer was not such an unusual career. Kony might still be treating the sick, had his people not suffered a calamity that would, at first, turn him into a hero.
In January 1986, a dashing young guerrilla leader named Yoweri Museveni seized Kampala and toppled a ruling junta of Acholi generals. Five years of civil war that had raged in the south were over. Crowds thronged the capital to celebrate as Museveni was sworn in as president.
But for the Acholi, Museveni?s victory was a disaster. The Acholi people had formed the core of Uganda?s army ever since Britain began recruiting them into the King?s African Rifles before independence in 1962. They had been at the centre of Uganda?s power struggles ever since ? massacred by the dictator Idi Amin in the 1970s, then fighting Museveni on behalf of former president Milton Obote in the early 1980s.
Acholi officers feared Museveni wanted to take revenge for massacres their soldiers had committed. When his followers marched north, burning granaries and executing civilians, many Acholi believed he planned to wipe them out. Acholi rebel movements emerged, with Kony just one of several mystics who joined the fray.
Rival groups were soon defeated. But within a few years Kony had become more powerful than anyone could have believed.
In Gulu, the main town in the north of Uganda, I met Moses, a young man who knew the secrets of Kony?s success. Rarely seen without a file of notes from his peace studies course under his arm, Moses was fond of salmon-pink shirts and a matching tie. It was hard to imagine him as one of Kony?s most trusted commanders.
His rebel career had begun 10 years earlier, when Kony?s men stormed his dormitory at Sir Samuel Baker School (named after the Victorian explorer who crossed northern Uganda in search of the source of the White Nile). Kony?s men roped 39 boys together and marched them towards his camps in southern Sudan.
The Sudanese government in Khartoum had adopted Kony in the mid-1990s, using his fighters as a proxy to attack their own southern rebels. Lavished with guns, Kony sent his followers back into Uganda to abduct enough ?recruits? to swell his ranks into the thousands.
Moses, then 16, was dragged into an upside-down-version of the life he left behind. Kony became the teacher, his sermons the lessons. Years later, Moses still remembered his speeches: ?Kony is a messenger from God! We follow the commands of the Holy Spirit!?, Moses said, bulging his eyes like his old master. ?Our people are suffering while Museveni?s tribe is enjoying life. But by next year, Kony is going to overthrow the government. Kony is going to be president!?
Isolated in Sudan, Kony felt betrayed by the Acholi when they failed to rise up and support his rebellion. Twisting the logic of the Old Testament, he ordered punishments for people suspected of helping the army. Moses resumed his impression: ?If someone has done something bad to you, you have to kill them!? he said. ?Go and read in Matthew, chapter what and what, it is stated that if your right hand causes trouble, cut if off! It is there in the Bible!?
I met one of the victims of this policy in Gulu, a teenager called Geoffrey. The rebels had sliced off his lips, ears, fingers and thumbs. Then they had stuffed a letter in his pocket warning that anyone who tried to join the army would suffer a similar fate. He clasped my hand between his fingerless palms, managing to say he had forgiven the people who had done this ? hate would not bring back his hands.
Kony?s men were also famous for snatching young girls, who they called ting ting. Strict rules governed the women; rebels could be shot for touching a girl before she was handed out as a wife to a commander. Kony himself accumulated a harem of more than 80 wives. He began to father a master race of ?New Acholi?.
After suffering many wounds in countless battles with the army, Moses decided he might as well die trying to escape. He slipped away and handed in his gun after eight years in the rebel ranks. And yet, rather than laying all the blame on Kony for his suffering, he reserved most of his contempt for Museveni, the president. ?The government says these rebels are only terrorists, that we are thieves,? he said. ?But Kony has objectives: he wants to overthrow the government; he wants to restore Acholi culture.? Moses shook his head. ?We northerners, we are not given any respect, we are just like slaves.?
Leaving northern Uganda, I travelled to Juba, the capital of southern Sudan, hoping to find out more about where Kony might be hiding. I arrived just in time to learn that he had been captured ? on tape.
Leaders from south Sudan?s government had met Kony in the bush, persuading him to open talks with Museveni. They shot a video of him saying: ?I am not a terrorist, I want peace.? Riek Machar, south Sudan?s vice-president, handed him $20,000 in a brown envelope to buy food for his followers. Kony flashed the faintest of smiles.
In fact, he was boxed into a corner. Kony?s old backers in Khartoum had reduced their support after the US added Kony to a ?terrorist exclusion list? shortly after 9/11. Sudan?s government, listed by Washington as a ?state sponsor of terror?, was anxious to show it was on America?s side.
Kony?s options narrowed further in 2005 when Khartoum signed a peace deal with the southern rebels to end their long civil war. Both sides agreed foreign forces ? inc?luding the LRA ? must leave. Kony fled across the border into Congo?s Garamba National Park. Rebels began dining on elephant.
Riek then made one of the most dramatic gestures in the history of African peace-making. He flew or trucked more than 200 people ? Ugandan elders, rebels? relatives, even three of Kony?s wives ? hundreds of miles to the clearing on Sudan?s border with Congo to try to persuade the commanders to come home. I hitched a ride.
?I love him so,? one of Kony?s wives told me. ?He taught us how to pray.?
The convoy also brought three of Kony?s children, including a toddler he had named George Bush. Riek guessed the LRA leader could not fail to be moved.Days passed until, finally, Kony stepped into the clearing. At first he strode past the small group of reporters, ducking into a tent to meet the elders. When the time for the press conference came, a Sudanese journalist asked about abducted children.
Kony said simply: ?I did not abduct ?anybody which was in the bush.? The presence of his young bodyguards suggested otherwise.
Another Sudanese journalist asked why the war had lasted so long.
?I don?t know,? Kony snapped.
A young British woman asked Kony if he would face the International Criminal Court.
?Me?? he asked.
A Ugandan reporter repeated the ?question, and Kony seemed to come to his senses.
?No, no, no, no,? he said.
?Why not?? I asked.
?Because I did not do anything.?
He stood up to leave. The session had lasted five minutes and 32 seconds.
I had set out to find a monster, but Kony turned out to be a rather pathetic, frightened man. It wouldn?t have mattered much, if it weren?t for the fact that Kony?s satanic image had obscured the fear of annihilation among his Acholi people that both gave rise to the war, and helped to sustain it. Seduced by the legend of a jungle-dwelling demi-god, journalists, aid workers and diplomats had all been blind to the deeper reasons why the conflict persisted. As long as the war was understood as the result of one man?s lunatic quest to impose biblical laws, there was little hope of a solution.
Peace talks that began in Juba in July 2006 have yet to deliver a final settlement, though they have led to a sustained period of peace in the north. Much now depends on whether Kony, still fearing arrest, will leave his hideout.
I would have liked to talk to him about his plans. But when I looked up Kony had vanished, back into the bush.
Matthew Green reports for the FT from west Africa. His book, ?The Wizard of the Nile: The Hunt for Africa?s Most Wanted?, is published by Portobello (?12.99). It is available from the FT bookshop for ?10.39 plus p&p
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
