The LRA Excuse for Ugandan Troops in Congo---Again

LRA militia leader Joseph Kony

KPFA Audio link:  http://goo.gl/0kSN9


KPFA Weekend News Anchor:  Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni's state newspaper, The New Vision, has reported that the UN Security Council and the Democratic Republic of Congo have agreed to join Museveni's army, the Uganda People's Defense Force, in a new offensive to hunt Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, and Jamil Mukulu’s Allied Democratic Forces, or ADF, in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.   The U.S.A.'s LRA Disarmament Act, which President Obama signed into law in 2010, authorizes funding, training, and collaboration with the U.S. Department of State, the Department of Defense, the US Agency for International Development, and the U.S. Intelligence Community to hunt down the LRA.   KPFA's Ann Garrison has more:

Uganda and its neighbors, the
Democratic Republic of
Congo, Central African
Republic, and Sudan. 

KPFA/Ann Garrison:  The Security Council, and the Congolese and Ugandan Defense Ministers said that the Ugandan Army needs to launch this new military offensive in Congo and the Central African Republic, or CAR, because the LRA keep raping and killing civilians there, though the UN Mapping Report released on October 1st, 2010, documents the Ugandan Army's own civilian massacres, mass rapes, and other sexual atrocities in Congo.   


Michael Kirkpatrick is a Black Star News contributor who has traveled back and forth to Uganda and its Acholi region frequently since 1998.  He says that Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army are always the most convenient excuse for military intervention: 

Black Star News contributor Michael
Kirkpatrick in Northern Uganda

Michael Kirkpatrick:   There is a pattern of demonizing Joseph Kony for every atrocity and every crime.  Joseph Kony has become demonized to justify military intervention by the U.S. and by other forces in that part of Africa. He's become a phantom menace.  He's almost like this mysterious fog that is just creeping around Central Africa but he's been able to survive for over 20 years.  He's nothing but a gang leader. He's a thug. He's a rag tag bunch of criminals that's somehow been able to survive for over 20 years. There's a reason he's been able to survive.  He is the bad guy in the battle.  To say that, somehow, modern armies haven't been able to capture, in twenty years, a rebel thug, is preposterous.  

Uganda's Rolling Stone tabloid's cover story
about Islamic "homo generals" with ties
to the Lord's Resistance Army.

KPFA:  Last November Uganda's fanatically homophobic tabloid newspaper Rolling Stone ran a story about what it called Islamic Homo Generals, meaning terrorists, with ties to the Lord's Resistance Army.   

For Pacifica, KPFA Radio, I'm Ann Garrison.