Two decades on, warlord Kony still evades capture

The leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), Joseph Kony's continued evasion of arrest – despite two decades of warrants, bounties and military operations – exposes the limits of both regional security co-operation and international justice, writes Kristof Titeca in an analysis in The Conversation. He says Kony remains at large two decades after the ICC issued its first arrest warrants against him and four of his commanders. Titeca states that recent intelligence and defector accounts suggest he is still alive, operating in the Sudan-Central African Republic (CAR) borderlands. ‘The LRA emerged nearly 40 years ago. Between 1987 and 2006, northern Uganda’s civilians were caught between LRA brutality – massacres and mass abductions – and a government counterinsurgency. The LRA framed its struggle as resistance to President Yoweri Museveni and the sidelining of the Acholi, the dominant ethnic group in northern Uganda. However, over time violence ceased to be merely a strategy. It became the organising logic of the movement itself.’ Titeca points out that the YouTube video Kony 2012, produced by the American advocacy organisation Invisible Children, went viral in 2012. It turned a long war into a global cause célèbre. In 2013, Washington followed with a $5m bounty, which remains in place. ‘Today, the LRA is no more than a small, mobile group (possibly 12 to 20 fighters) living off trade, agriculture and protection in one of Africa’s least governed border zones. It operates within the remote borderlands of CAR, Sudan and the DRC. The LRA may now be small, but its survival matters.’

Titeca believes that two things have been crucial: borderlands and the lack of political priority to ensure its survival endurance since 2011. ‘Borderlands – particularly between Sudan and the CAR, and to a lesser extent with the DRC – have offered Kony and his LRA members a way to disappear, to trade and to buy protection. At the same time, the shifting political priorities of the states tracking Kony have repeatedly undermined their own goals. Given their weak state presence, borderlands are often described as peripheral, marginal or forgotten. But in much of Africa, they are not empty spaces. They are active political and economic zones, shaped by cross-border networks of trade, migration, armed mobilisation and patronage.’ He points out in The Conversation that for rebel groups, borderlands offer a particular set of advantages: access to sanctuaries across borders; rough terrain and low population density; cross-border trade routes; and opportunities to link into alternative centres of power. ‘This is precisely the kind of environment in which the LRA has been operating. For roughly two decades, between 1987 and 2006, the LRA was primarily fighting a Ugandan war. The conflict produced vast civilian suffering, including the displacement of nearly two m i l l i o n people into camps – what has been described as “social torture”. From 1994 onwards, southern Sudan became crucial to the war, as Khartoum offered the LRA sanctuary and weapons. Further, before peace talks began in 2006 between Uganda and an LRA delegation, the rebel group crossed into the DRC and established itself in the dense and (at the time) mostly ungoverned Garamba National Park.’ Titeca notes that following the collapse of negotiations, Uganda launched Operation Lightning Thunder in late 2008. The operation failed, and the LRA retaliated with massacres in north-eastern DRC in 2008-10.

‘These attacks were the LRA’s last moment of large-scale violence. Military pressure did not destroy the group, but fragmented it and pushed it out of the DRC. Anticipating further offensives, the LRA began moving into the remote borderlands between the CAR, Sudan and South Sudan. By 2010, it was operating around the contested Kafia Kingi enclave – a strip of territory that is, in principle, part of South Sudan but has long been controlled by Sudan.’ From this point onward, he says in The Conversation, Kony’s strategy shifted: the group reduced attacks, limited abductions and tried to become less visible. ‘It was no longer trying to win a war, but trying to avoid being found. As looting declined, the LRA needed income streams that attracted little attention. Trade and agriculture became central. In the Sudan-CAR borderlands, established routes for licit goods like bamboo intersect with trade in cannabis, gold, ivory and diamonds. The LRA did not only participate in this economy, but also taxed it. It set up checkpoints along trading routes. It also cultivated a variety of crops on a large scale and was active in the trade of honey. All of this allowed the group to survive quietly from around 2010 onwards, and become part of the border landscape.’

Titeca states that Kony also bought protection with the proceeds of illicit trade, pointing out that borderlands are not only spaces of opportunity: they are also volatile. ‘Under military pressure, Kony divided his troops into smaller units to avoid detection. That made control harder. His violent internal rule – including the killing of commanders – pushed more people towards defection, leading to two splinter groups in 2014 and 2018.’ The outbreak of war in Sudan in 2023 disrupted the borderland economy. Trade slowed dramatically, increasing hardship and fuelling more defections.’ Titeca says  in The Conversation that the LRA has not been a security priority for Uganda, the CAR, the DRC, Sudan or South Sudan for decades. ‘The group operates far from capitals, poses little direct threat to state power and is expensive to pursue. It has largely disappeared from the American political horizon. Advocacy networks that once kept the issue alive have faded.’

Full analysis on The Conversation site