Joseph Kony: Rebel boss on world’s most wanted list

KAMPALA – Commanding an army of child soldiers and taking orders from the Holy Spirit, brutal and elusive Ugandan rebel boss Joseph Kony has been elevated from local cult leader to one of the world’s most wanted men.

In its first arrest warrants, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has targeted five leaders of Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a UN official confirmed on Thursday. No names were given but Kony – pronounced “cone” – is sure to be among them.His 19-year-old war has kept much of north Uganda trapped in a nightmare of violence, hunger and fear of a night-time visit by his soldiers.Notorious for abducting children for use as soldiers, sex slaves and porters, the LRA’s rebellion has been one of Africa’s most brutal and the world’s most neglected conflicts.An LRA hallmark is slicing off lips and ears of “collaborators” to punish and mark them out.But for all the violence, many Ugandans have little idea what the self-proclaimed mystic is actually fighting for.Kony, who served as an altar boy in his village, claims to talk to angels and has said he wanted to rule Uganda by the biblical Ten Commandments.When the 44-year-old launched his war against the government of President Yoweri Museveni he said he wanted to fight for the rights of the Acholi, a marginalised northern tribe.When his own people failed to back his campaign Kony fled to south Sudan with a plan to obliterate the “treacherous” Acholi.The rebel chief, who wears his hair in dreadlocks or braids and sometimes wears women’s clothes, according to former fighters, is a powerful speaker who instils fear through often bizarre commands.In a rare interview with a bodyguard published by a Sudanese magazine last year, he described himself as a lord and a liberator – a heady claim for a man who came from a typically impoverished rural family in Odek in Uganda’s north.”Dreams of the spirit came to me one night and asked me to launch a Lord’s resistance movement,” he said.”I spent 60 days praying and appealing to God to strengthen my faith so I could liberate the people of Uganda from corruption, sins and immoral thinking.”Many of Kony’s thousands of abductees are forced to kill children who tried to escape, or murder their own relatives, fostering a sense of complicity that guarantees subservience.Under Kony’s instruction, these child soldiers and their commanders – many barely in their teens – have carried out the most violent attacks on unarmed villagers.More than 300 civilians were shot, hacked and burned to death in February 2004 in just one LRA raid on a camp for some of more than 1,6 million people uprooted by the war.Despite Kony’s fondness for mysticism and prophecy, the movement had its origins in deep-rooted political grievances.Ugandan commentators say the LRA was born partly out of British colonial policies that enriched southern Uganda, where the capital Kampala is located, at the expense of the north.Uganda won independence in 1962.Following the bloody dictatorships of northerners Idi Amin and Milton Obote, Museveni, a guerrilla leader from western Uganda, seized power in 1986.Almost immediately he faced an Acholi revolt led by Kony’s aunt Alice Lakwena, a popular mystic.When her Holy Spirit Movement rebels were defeated, Kony started the LRA.Preaching a mix of Christian beliefs and traditional African religion, he initially attracted a wide following.But he failed to win lasting support, and under pressure from the Ugandan army and local resistance he retreated to southern Sudan and focused his increasingly brutal attacks on the Acholi ethnic group he felt had betrayed him.- Nampa-ReutersNo names were given but Kony – pronounced “cone” – is sure to be among them.His 19-year-old war has kept much of north Uganda trapped in a nightmare of violence, hunger and fear of a night-time visit by his soldiers.Notorious for abducting children for use as soldiers, sex slaves and porters, the LRA’s rebellion has been one of Africa’s most brutal and the world’s most neglected conflicts.An LRA hallmark is slicing off lips and ears of “collaborators” to punish and mark them out.But for all the violence, many Ugandans have little idea what the self-proclaimed mystic is actually fighting for.Kony, who served as an altar boy in his village, claims to talk to angels and has said he wanted to rule Uganda by the biblical Ten Commandments.When the 44-year-old launched his war against the government of President Yoweri Museveni he said he wanted to fight for the rights of the Acholi, a marginalised northern tribe.When his own people failed to back his campaign Kony fled to south Sudan with a plan to obliterate the “treacherous” Acholi.The rebel chief, who wears his hair in dreadlocks or braids and sometimes wears women’s clothes, according to former fighters, is a powerful speaker who instils fear through often bizarre commands.In a rare interview with a bodyguard published by a Sudanese magazine last year, he described himself as a lord and a liberator – a heady claim for a man who came from a typically impoverished rural family in Odek in Uganda’s north.”Dreams of the spirit came to me one night and asked me to launch a Lord’s resistance movement,” he said.”I spent 60 days praying and appealing to God to strengthen my faith so I could liberate the people of Uganda from corruption, sins and immoral thinking.”Many of Kony’s thousands of abductees are forced to kill children who tried to escape, or murder their own relatives, fostering a sense of complicity that guarantees subservience.Under Kony’s instruction, these child soldiers and their commanders – many barely in their teens – have carried out the most violent attacks on unarmed villagers.More than 300 civilians were shot, hacked and burned to death in February 2004 in just one LRA raid on a camp for some of more than 1,6 million people uprooted by the war.Despite Kony’s fondness for mysticism and prophecy, the movement had its origins in deep-rooted political grievances.Ugandan commentators say the LRA was born partly out of British colonial policies that enriched southern Uganda, where the capital Kampala is located, at the expense of the north.Uganda won independence in 1962.Following the bloody dictatorships of northerners Idi Amin and Milton Obote, Museveni, a guerrilla leader from western Uganda, seized power in 1986.Almost immediately he faced an Acholi revolt led by Kony’s aunt Alice Lakwena, a popular mystic.When her Holy Spirit Movement rebels were defeated, Kony started the LRA.Preaching a mix of Christian beliefs and traditional African religion, he initially attracted a wide following.But he failed to win lasting support, and under pressure from the Ugandan army and local resistance he retreated to southern Sudan and focused his increasingly brutal attacks on the Acholi ethnic group he felt had betrayed him.- Nampa-Reuters