Nothing much has been reported about Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony over the past few years, fuelling speculations about the whereabouts of Africa’s most elusive rebel leader of the past 35 years.
Kony, who turns 61 in September 2022 has not been seen in the open for close to twenty years, adding to the mysticism of the man who has been waging a half-hearted war to overthrow Yoweri Museveni in Uganda and install a theocratic authority based on Christian canons.
Shortly after founding his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) Kony launched his rebellion in 1987, a year after Museveni swept to power after his own guerilla war against the Milton Obote government.
Since he was banished from Uganda, Kony has acquired the reputation of a intrastate warlord and fugitive who was based in South Sudan at a time when that country was waging its own war of independence against Sudan throughout the 1980s and 90s.
A spinoff from an earlier Ugandan rebellion led by Alice Lakwena, for years the LRA had steadily built a notoriety for recruiting child soldiers and sending them into battle, a charge for which the International Criminal Court has been pursuing Kony for decades, making him the most wanted man in Africa for a long time.
Kony is wanted by the ICC which issued an arrest warrant against him in 2005 for war crimes and crimes against humanity, causing the death of some 100, 000 people in the Central Africa region since his bush war began in the mid-1980s using fear as his principal tactic.
According to conservative estimates at least 60, 000 children abducted by the LRA were press-ganged into its combat units.
His troops are being held responsible for the killing of 2,600 civilians in the region since 2008, covering mostly rural parts of the Central African Republic, Uganda and South Sudan.
African states which had witnessed the alleged brutalities of his LRA militia on their own soils declared him wanted for war crimes and other crimes including massacres, cannibalism, the torching of whole villages and their inhabitants among other excesses in the areas ravaged by his troops.
Despite years of manhunt jointly by Ugandan and US troopers and later complemented by an African Union-spearheaded regional campaign to isolate and capture him, the former altar boy at his local church in Uganda continues to evade capture.
There were reports in 2013 of Kony being struck down by illness and suffering declining number of his operational forces from 3,500 to a paltry 100 combatants.
Reports from the CAR at the time painted a hopeless picture of Africa’s most obscure warlord ”wasting away through illness and desperate to negotiate terms for his surrender with then president Michel Djotodia”.
This led to Uganda and US calling off the manhunt for him, convinced that Kony and his LRA were a spent force and no longer posed a credible security threat to his country and the region as a whole.
However, Kony and his LRA have evaded and endured the multinational campaign to neutralise them, taking advantage of porous borders and political instability blighting the region for over thirty years.
Sometimes the best information about Kony’s location results from inspired guesses.
As recently as April 2022, such reports pinned him around Darfur an almost forgotten region in the west of Sudan where a low-intensity insurgency no longer holds the gravitas associated with headline news as consistently as it was in the past.
His alleged choice of Darfur for a quiet retirement from his bush conflict may be informed by this near-anonymity of the area still plagued by lawlessness of one kind or another.
The reports spoke of him as the man still very much in charge of the LRA with undiminished authority to issue orders to his lieutenants although many of his foot soldiers have long disengaged, dispersed and disappeared into countries in the region where they went on trying to live normal lives.
Since then many have put away their guns for the proverbial ploughshare to work as farmers especially in the CAR.
Some former LRA fighters have been quoted as saying the lack of motivation within their ranks for a long time has led many to seek other alternative means of survival instead of prosecuting a war which has rendered many of them tired and worn out after decades of fighting.
As for Kony, he remains holed up in his hideout somewhere in central Africa, cementing his distinctive place in history as Africa’s most enduring warlord of the post-independence era.
WN/as/APA