More than a year has now passed since the United States passed the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act. Joseph Kony, the leader of the LRA, has been the subject of an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court since 2005, and has been on the US Treasury Department’s list of “Specially Designated Global Terrorists” since 2008, but he has managed to elude all attempts to catch him for more than 20 years.
Kony’s forces left Northern Uganda a few years ago, and since then Northern Uganda has been recovering from the devastation wrought by many years of insecurity, murder, terrorism, rape and child abductions. Since then Kony has been carrying on his barbarous trade in neighbouring countries, predominantly in remote parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the inhabitants are defenceless and it is hard for armies to find and track him.
Some are now complaining that the US government has done little more than talk about stopping and capturing Joseph Kony. According to reports, Kony’s gang has engaged in more than 100 attacks this year, killed dozens of people and abducted almost 200. These are small numbers compared with LRA activity in previous years, but they represent devastation for large numbers of victims. It took ten years to track down Osama bin Laden; how long will it take to catch Kony?