How long joseph kony

I try running in the dream, but they are holding me. What I have gone through I can never get out of my mind. The LRA's reign of terror led hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes as bullets and mortar fire rained down on what little they possessed.

Body parts and facial features were hacked off, and bones were left to pile up and rot under the scorching sun. These brainwashed child soldiers were fearless and had nothing to lose. The Obama administration said in January that it has taken into custody a man claiming to be Dominic Ongwen, a top member of Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army who is wanted by the International Criminal Court, after the man surrendered to U.

The militia thrived under the veil of protection at bases inside Sudan, where they received support from dictator Omar al-Bashir as the Ugandan forces launched cross-border attacks in their quest to defeat the guerrilla group. In , Kony was indicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague on 21 charges of war crimes and a further 12 for crimes against humanity.

The case against him is open, as is the Interpol red notice, which was launched the following year. Kony, as underscored by several sources, is now purported to be running his militia, which official estimates say is comprised of few more than a hundred fighters, from Sudan-controlled territory in Kafia Kingi. According to one Western intelligence source that covers the region, Kony is believed to have been struck down with severe health concerns around a year ago — likely suffering from sexually transmitted infections.

He allegedly sought treatment in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. That said, it's now not as powerful as some other groups. A representative for Invisible Children, the nonprofit behind the short film, emphasized that although Kony no longer hits the headlines, the LRA poses a daily threat to locals, and funding to help victims has largely dried up. Kenyan officials display some of more than 1, pieces of illegal ivory found hidden inside bags of sesame seeds in freight traveling from Uganda, in Kenya's major port city of Mombasa, Kenya, on Oct.

Warlord Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army rebel group is increasingly trafficking in ivory and minerals to obtain weapons and other supplies to be used in the jungles of central Africa, watchdog groups said in a report released in In early , a four-seater aircraft landed on a red dirt runway in Obo, a town in the Central African Republic near the Sudanese and Congolese borders.

Obo didn't see many planes at the time - it is one of the world's most disconnected places, no less than a week's travel from the nearest city of any size - so when the plane buzzed the runway and landed, townspeople ran to meet it. Two passengers emerged: Obo's traders recognised the first as a low-level functionary from the Sudanese border outpost at Tumbura, a day's drive away; the other was a much larger figure in full military dress with three stars on his shoulder, his shoes alone worth more than most people in Obo would make in two months.

The officer cleared his throat and addressed the group in English, while the Sudanese man translated into Zande. He said that in the coming months, Obo would be visited by a terrible scourge that his people - the Ugandans - had been fighting for years, a group that called itself tonga-tonga, "the people who cut off lips and ears".

The tonga-tonga hailed from northern Uganda, where the military had defeated them after nearly two decades of fighting. Now they were on the move, and their path had led them here.

They survived by abducting children, the Ugandan said, and the children of Obo would be next. The officer was bending the truth a little - the group calls itself the Lord's Resistance Army, or LRA, not tonga-tonga - but if anything he understated the brutality of the LRA. Formed in , the group is motivated by a complex mix of fundamentalist Christianity and allegiance to the traditions of the Acholi people of northern Uganda. Its leader, General Joseph Kony, aims to dislodge the Ugandan government headed by Yoweri Museveni and replace it with one led by northerners, who enjoyed privileged status during the first 20 years of Uganda's independence.

But when Museveni's military drove the LRA out of the nation in , the group initiated a period of brutal wandering. Uganda's northern and western neighbours, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, have each taken turns as bases for the rebels, who move in small, ultraviolent gangs that abduct villagers, drug them and force them to work and fight for the insurgency.

They learn that powerful magic protects Kony from the Ugandan military, and that he can appear and disappear at will.

An American diplomat in Bangui compared the group to the Manson family, but given that the LRA has killed 12, people, the comparison is self-evidently unfair to Manson. Since the LRA moved into the Central African Republic, the Ugandan military's hunt has entered what one might expect to be a decisive phase. The Ugandans are, after all, schooled in LRA tactics, and they enjoy one of the most decisive technological advantages in the annals of contemporary warfare.

When I visited the Ugandan base near Obo, a young officer briefed me on the assets the Ugandans have at their disposal in pursuing the rebels: modern telecommunications, armoured vehicles, JetRanger helicopters and, at times, even the assistance of US intelligence and satellite imagery.

The LRA, by contrast, no longer has large, permanent bases. Its fighters' weapon of choice is frequently a log of wood - about cm long and 10cm in diameter - applied with force to the back of the head. I shuddered when Daba Emmanuel, 32, an ex-fighter, told me he had killed many people with a plank.

I asked if the killing was tough work. He said that it wasn't: "In five minutes, they're gone. As the LRA cuts its swath, it moves farther from its home. One of the fundamental strengths of a successful insurgent is usually his ability to move undetected through a population of people whom he resembles, whose language he speaks and who feel an ethnic kinship with him. Most have fled the countryside to shelter near the Ugandan military encampment, and they fear for their lives whenever they stray more than three miles in any direction from the town centre.

The LRA owns the forest and frequently makes hostages of those who wander beyond the villagers' shanty towns. At the Obo market - where women sell individually wrapped Maggi soup cubes and little heaps of shrivelled okra - cassava, the white tuber that is the staple of the Central African diet, has doubled in price over the last year, because everyone is afraid to go out to the fields and collect it. So the niggling question is why the Ugandan military has so far failed to snuff the movement out.

The LRA has hidden amid alien corn for years now, and because Obo remembers the "tonga-tonga" speech, the rebels can trust no one there. For foreign observers, like the Nato forces trying to wage counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan, the least appetising inference to draw from the LRA's continued survival is that the business of counterinsurgency is even tougher than it looks.

Even when the population is on your side, and your enemy reduced to Neolithic weaponry, the fight continues. I recently convened a meeting of about 20 Central Africans from Ligua, a village a few kilometres outside Obo that has been progressively abandoned since the LRA came to the area.

The villagers have retreated to the relative safety of a refugee camp in town. There they live in wooden shanties, using sacks from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees as roofing. The ground. The displaced villagers met me in their open-air Catholic chapel, which consisted of a few wooden pews shaded by palms and acacias and a bamboo altar topped with a withered pink flower.

First he heard the explosions of a Ugandan military aerial bombardment nearby, on the Congolese side of the river. Then LRA fighters, fleeing from the bombers, crossed the river, found him and forced him to march with them into his village with Kalashnikovs and chain guns pointed at his head. The rebels also carried mortars, which the villagers call "papayas" for their shape, in case they met the Ugandans. The LRA entered Ligua and immediately shot a year old villager named Paul Ipa'ingba in the leg when he looked out his front door.

Described at different times as a terrorist, prophet and brutal killer, Ugandan Joseph Kony, who is wanted for war crimes, has escaped capture for more than two decades. His rebel Lord's Resistance Army LRA is notorious for abducting thousands of children to use as soldiers or sex slaves.

At one time he was pursued by Ugandan and US troops but they gave up the chase in arguing that with his dwindling band of followers he had become a spent force. Following a International Criminal Court arrest warrant Mr Kony is wanted on 12 counts of crimes against humanity and 21 counts of war crimes. He is accused of brutalising civilians in northern Uganda through murder, abduction, mutilation and the burning of property. From the s, LRA attacks became infamous.

Rebel fighters would hack off their victims' limbs or parts of their faces. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee their homes, tens of thousands were killed and thousands of others were abducted for fighting and sexual slavery.

Mr Kony himself is thought to have taken many of the captured women as wives. He also has an unknown number of children, two of whom, Salim and Ali, have been sanctioned by the US for their alleged role in LRA activities.

Born in the early s into an Acholi peasant family in Odek, a village in northern Uganda, Mr Kony is remembered as an amiable boy. He became a traditional healer after leaving primary school, but in the s was drawn to the Holy Spirit Movement led by charismatic figure Alice Auma, better known as Alice Lakwena.

She said she was fighting for the rights of the Acholi people who were feeling marginalised in the turbulent politics of s Uganda. They felt excluded from power after President Milton Obote, who was from the north, was overthrown in a military rebellion, and eventually replaced by current President Yoweri Museveni in Despite promising her followers protection from bullets, Ms Auma's movement was defeated in and she fled to Kenya.

The LRA was founded in the aftermath of that defeat saying it continued to support the people of the north and wanted to install a government based on the biblical 10 commandments. At one time the LRA was popular in the north, but that waned as the group's brutality increased.

Mr Kony has used religion and traditional beliefs to inspire his followers but some question his sincere commitment to those ideas. They say, 'You, Mr Joseph, tell your people that the enemy is planning to come and attack,'" he has explained. In a film broadcast on the BBC, one of his close allies, Captain Sunday, said that through the help of spirits the LRA leader could see the future. He was also immortal, the captain added.

He has created an aura of mysticism around himself and his rebels follow strict rules and rituals.