Who Is Joseph Kony?

Elusive and motivated by a purported belief that he is a prophet, Joseph Rao Kony has waged a guerrilla insurgency against Uganda’s government for more than two decades as the head of the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Though the LRA and the government of Uganda, led since 1986 by President Yoweri Museveni, signed a permanent ceasefire in 2008, Kony did not show up to the final signing agreement, and military action against the LRA by the governments of Uganda as well as the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo and Southern Sudan have continued.

Kony was born in Odek, a village in a region of northern Uganda known as Acholiland, sometime in the early 1960s. Not much is known about his early years, though he reportedly served as an altar boy within the Catholic church and was heavily influenced by both Christian and spiritualist teachings.

Kony joined the Uganda People’s Democratic Army, a rebel alliance formed after Museveni’s nascent National Resistance Army came to power in 1986. He became a key ally to Alice Lakwena, an Acholi spiritual healer whose following, the Holy Spirit Movement, led the UPDA and who may have been related to Kony.

After Lakwena suffered a devastating defeat against the Ugandan government in a battle at Jinja, around 100km from the capital Kampala, she fled to Kenya and Kony emerged as the leader of the forces who remained. With Kony’s assumption of power came a shift in the rebels’ strategy and a new name: the Lord’s Resistance Army.

The LRA took to Uganda’s north and began to operate almost exclusively against civilian targets, rather than the Ugandan military. Under Kony’s control, the LRA has waged a durable insurgency utilising brutal tactics, forcing 1.5 million people from their homes and abducting more than 20,000 boys and girls to become fighters or forced “wives” to LRA members.

Sponsored in part by the government of Sudan, the LRA conducted operations in both the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, though activity in the latter has almost ceased due to the forging of a comprehensive peace between north and south and the creation of an independent South Sudan.

Kony has long said that his movement is aimed at liberating Ugandans from oppression and has made himself into a dogged enemy of Museveni, whose career as Uganda’s leader has run in parallel with Kony’s as a infamous warlord.

After Museveni consolidated power, and moved against him, Kony moved his fighters into Sudan, then the Democratic Republic of Congo, then the Central African Republic, typically seeking out spaces where weak governments were unable to reach.

In 2005, Kony was indicted by the International Criminal Court for leading the LRA in a campaign of “murder, abduction, sexual enslavement, mutilation, as well as mass burnings of houses and looting of camp settlements” since at least 1987 and for personally issueing broad orders to target and kill civilian populations.

Since the start of his reign of terror in Central Africa, Kony and his forces have kidnapped over 30,000 children, made approximately 88 of these children his wives, and had 42 children by these “wives”. Over two million Africans have been internally displaced by this madman since 1986.

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Check out this CBS Evening News story about the viral explosion that is KONY 2012. It gives both good information, and brings to light some of the same concerns we have with Invisible Children.