Daily Beast Op-ed on Kony's LRA by Kathryn Bigelow and Holly Dranginis
Posted by Enough Team on Jun 22, 2015
Editor's Note: This op-ed was written by Kathryn Bigelow, the Academy
Award-winning director/producer ("Hurt Locker," "Zero Dark Thirty")
and Enough Project's Policy Analyst Holly Dranginis and originally
appeared in The Daily Beast as "Keep Fighting Joseph Kony’s LRA" on
June 22, 2015.
In February, a man and his teenage daughter floated in a fishing boat
on the Were River, deep in the heart of Garamba National Park, where
Congo’s last elephants roam. Out of the forest, four armed rebels
appeared, wielding AK-47s and speaking a language indigenous to
Northern Uganda.
They attacked the boat and took the girl and her father, marking two
of the roughly 240 abductions carried out this year by suspected
Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) fighters.
Read the full op-ed in The Daily Beast.
Lord's Resistance Army
Keep Fighting Joseph Kony’s LRA
Congress should remain committed to extinguishing the threat of Kony’s
murderous Lord’s Resistance Army, not pull the plug.
In February, a man and his teenage daughter floated in a fishing boat
on the Were River, deep in the heart of Garamba National Park, where
Congo’s last elephants roam. Out of the forest, four armed rebels
appeared, wielding AK-47s and speaking a language indigenous to
Northern Uganda.
They attacked the boat and took the girl and her father, marking two
of the roughly 240 abductions carried out this year by suspected
Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) fighters.
Wildlife experts have said if pressure on the LRA is reduced,
Congocould lose its elephants altogether.
At its peak, the LRA was one of the most brutal armed organizations
that central Africa had ever seen, known for abducting scores of
children and transforming them into killing machines. In an attack
similar to Boko Haram’s most infamous crime, the LRA kidnapped 139
girls from a seminary school in Aboke, Uganda, in 1996, holding them
as sex slaves and torturing them before finally releasing most of them
after years in captivity.
In 2009, the LRA went on a killing spree in Makombo, Democratic
Republic of the Congo, ambushing a fishing market, decapitating its
victims and pulling children along by the wrist into captivity. Its
leader, Joseph Kony, has remained untouchable, despite being the
target of repeated apprehension attempts as well as the International
Criminal Court’s first-ever indictment.
Today, the LRA is massively reduced, down to roughly 200 fighters.
Killings and child abductions have sharply decreased from the peak of
the LRA’s strength, and earlier this year, the group released at least
72 women and children from their grasp to return home.
Congress should remain committed to extinguishing the threat of Kony’s
murderous Lord’s Resistance Army, not pull the plug.
Two of the LRA’s top commanders were recently removed from the
battlefield, one killed in combat with African Union forces, and the
other voluntarily surrendering to U.S. forces to face war crimes
charges in The Hague.
These improvements are thanks in part to a quiet regional operation
led by the African Union that aims to eliminate the LRA threat and
apprehend Joseph Kony. Since 2010, the United States has played a
critical supportive role by contributing targeted funding, needed
equipment, and military advisers.
With a light footprint and sophisticated, cooperative approach, the
U.S. initiative in support of the operation has helped improve the
mission’s intelligence-gathering and operational plans. It has also
contributed to innovative, cost-effective strategies to encourage
defections among low-level LRA combatants and captives, and for the
return of hundreds of women, children, and men back to their
communities.
But the future of the counter-LRA effort is now in jeopardy. The House
Armed Services Committee, in its guiding report accompanying the
National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), raised the specter of
program “termination” for the first time. As Congress is now setting
its priorities and funding levels for the coming year, and with the
NDAA heading toward the President’s desk, the United States should
work to strengthen, not undermine, the mission.
Some say the LRA is on its last legs, but the job is not done. In the
first quarter of 2015, they committed more attacks than during the
first quarter of 2014, and their trading and command systems look more
sophisticated than ever. As his forces shrink, Kony has made key
promotions to shore up his high command, and developed new alliances
with regional militias. The cultish LRA leader has become more
dangerous and desperate as the net closes.
[150621-bigelow-last-days-embed] Annapurna Pictures
Despite its diminishing numbers, the LRA poses a formidable threat to
security in the region, with a new method of terror that doubles as an
income stream. LRA fighters operate under the cover of Garamba’s lush
green canopy where they slaughter elephants for ivory, creatures that
are now in a crisis of impending extinction due to poaching.
Kony orders his fighters to bring him ivory to bolster his coffers as
the LRA fights to survive. The LRA’s strongholds in Garamba’s deep
forests also help grease the wheels of a complex cross-border
trafficking machine that strengthens other murderous groups, such as
Seleka in Central African Republic and the Janjaweed in Sudan.
Each tusk, in the end, generates as much as $175,000 for trafficking
kingpins, traders, foot-soldiers, and Kony himself. Wildlife experts
have said if pressure on the LRA is reduced, Congo could lose its
elephants altogether.
Owing to its successes, the U.S. support to the regional counter-LRA
mission is being seen as a model for light-footprint,
advise-and-assist U.S. military engagement elsewhere in the world,
including the operations against Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab. But this
mission can’t be treated as a model for future engagement if it
doesn’t ultimately succeed.
The United States should maintain a robust supportive role in the
counter-LRA mission to finish the job, ensuring that a dwindling
regional threat does not come roaring back. To reduce U.S. assistance
to the mission now would irreparably damage the effort steps before
the finish line. It would allow all positive momentum in the fight to
unravel, and abandon civilians still in captivity.
The fate of the man and his daughter abducted from Garamba’s Were
River is unknown. Given LRA patterns, it is likely that the daughter
was used as a sex slave, the temporary “wife” of one of the fighters.
The man was likely forced to work as a porter, transporting materials
like the sawed-off tusk of a slaughtered elephant.
If the U.S. draws down its support to the counter-LRA mission now, the
majesty of Garamba’s forests and other remote areas throughout the
region will serve as a safe haven to brutal criminals, rather than the
civilians and wildlife that deserve to live there in peace.
In a region mired in complex transnational terrorism, trafficking, and
violence, this model of atrocity prevention is showing promise. Now is
the time to dig in, not walk away.
Kathryn Bigelow is an Academy Award-winning director/producer (“The
Hurt Locker,” “Zero Dark Thirty”), and creator of the new film “Last
Days,” about the slaughter of elephants and terrorism. Holly Dranginis
is a Policy Analyst at the Enough Project, which works to prevent
atrocities across the Horn, central and eastern Africa.
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