For 24 years one of the most horrific killing machines known to humanity has been rolling round central Africa. The Lord’s Resistance Army, led by the spirit medium Joseph Kony, has been plundering defenceless villages, killing, looting and committing acts of unspeakable barbarity. The LRA has fuelled its continued existence by kidnapping children, brutalising them, and turning them into killers.
Time after time the Ugandan government has proclaimed crackdowns to eliminate the LRA, and each time Joseph Kony and his men have escaped – presumably with “inside knowledge” – and gone on to take revenge on more unarmed civilians. Now the governments of four African nations – the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and Uganda – have pledged to mount a crackdown.
The involvement of Sudan is disingenuous because Kony has for years been used by the Sudanese government as a tool to terrorise the non-Muslim peoples of southern Sudan. Kony’s high-powered weaponry has been supplied by Sudan, and the reason why the LRA seems to be on the rise once again, after more than 240 attacks and 344 killings this year, is that Sudan needs his help again in terrorising the south in the lead-up to next year’s independence vote.