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By Mark A. Drumbl

Because of the Kony 2012 campaign, everyone is talking about the Lord’s Resistance Army, its deranged leadership, and its many victims in northern Uganda, notably child soldiers. Talk is intense.

Amid the constant chatter, however, two crucial issues remain neglected. First, what does justice mean for child soldiers? Second, what contribution does Kony 2012 make to the prevention of child soldiering world-wide?

The Kony 2012 campaign encourages LRA leader Joseph Kony’s capture and transfer to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to face a slew of charges. Included among these charges is the war crime of unlawful recruitment, enlistment, or active use of children under the age of fifteen in hostilities. Coincidentally, last week the ICC entered its first conviction. The defendant, Thomas Lubanga, is a rebel warlord from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Notwithstanding his implication in systematic killings and sexual torture, Lubanga faced only one charge, namely, unlawful recruitment of child soldiers.

Although it remains a war crime to recruit children younger than fifteen, international law increasingly understands child soldiers as being under the age of eighteen. Most child soldiers, after all, are not young children. Most are adolescents, with many aged between fifteen and seventeen. The very young child soldier is an extreme case. Focusing on the extremes, however compelling, also sensationalizes.

Criminally prosecuting and convicting commanders who unlawfully recruit children into armed forces or groups is a step towards justice. But it is only a small step. It is easy to blame a handful of crazed commanders for child soldiering. But the ease of blame fails to uproot the many factors that conspire to facilitate child soldiering. These factors include the small arms trade, state political alliances, poverty, and illegal export of pilfered natural resources. The criminal law presents the allure of the quick-fix — if a couple of evildoers are convicted, the job is done, and justice has been achieved. Such closure, however, is premature. Justice entails much more. It requires reintegrating child soldiers into their communities and supporting local actors. It requires listening to former child soldiers and their priorities, which often include education, reconciliation, and jobs — not distant trials. It requires restoration for persons affected by the violent acts of child soldiers. At times, ironically, long-term justice may depend on short-term injustice. In Uganda, generous use of amnesties from criminal prosecution has helped weaken the LRA by encouraging fighters to abandon the group.

The Kony 2012 campaign and the Lubanga conviction are catalyzing events, to be sure. But these catalyzing events also have a shadow side. The image of child soldiering that they communicate to the public is not representative of the complexities of child soldiering as a whole.

The image du jour of the child soldier is Africanized. Yet only about 40% of child soldiers world-wide are in Africa. Child soldiering is a global phenomenon. The image du jour is of the abducted child soldier barely able to carry automatic weaponry and ammunition belts slung across shoulders and waists. Although this may be the case for LRA child conscripts, world-wide most child soldiers are neither abducted nor forcibly conscripted. Overall, approximately two-thirds of child soldiers exercise some initiative in coming forward to enroll. Frequently, this volunteerism is chimerical. But, at other times, it is quite real. Young people sign up to achieve political goals, topple dictators, acquire training, achieve economic gains, serve their community, and make the best of a bad situation. They suffer terribly in conflict, but it can be counterproductive to stylize child soldiers as dehumanized tools of war. Treating them as automatons programmed to k

Social activism via social media is nothing new, but as yet in the U.S. it’s never reached the scale of the Kony 2012 campaign organized by the non-profit Invisible Children. Almost overnight, Millennials are helping to make Kony, an African... Read the rest of this post

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Gérard Prunier is a widely acclaimed journalist as well as the Director of the French Centre for Ethiopian Studies in Addis Ababa. He has published over 120 articles and five books, including The Rwanda Crisis and Darfur. His most recent book, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe focuses on Congo, the Rwandan genocide, and events that led to the death of some four million people. In this original post, Prunier discusses the history of the Joseph Kony led Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the ongoing conflict that led to almost 200 deaths this Christmas.

The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) had its own way of celebrating Christmas: on December 25th it hacked an estimated 189 people to pieces in the Congolese town of Faradje, 80 km from the Sudanese border.
This homicidal explosion was a direct result of the combined attack by Congolese, Southern Sudanese, and Ugandan troops on the LRA stronghold in Garamba National Park in the DRC where the political-religious sect had been holed up for the past two years.

The LRA is made up of a semi-deranged leadership manipulating abducted illiterate children who have been brainwashed into committing atrocities. Indeed, its leader Joseph Kony has time and time again reneged on promises of turning up in Juba for peace talks with the Ugandan government, but the LRA’s murderous actions put it beyond the pale of civilized society. Beyond this moral judgment it remains for the social analyst to explain – not excuse – what is going on.

• Atrocious as it is, the LRA is the expression of the 23 year old alienation of the populations of Northern Uganda who have been punished beyond reason for the atrocities that they themselves visited upon the Southerners during the period of the Obote II and Okello governments (1980-1986). In spite of being preyed upon by the LRA vultures, the Northern Ugandan Acholi tribe still half supports it because it fights the Museveni regime.

• During its long history of fighting the Kampala government, the LRA has been aided and abetted by the Sudanese regime in Khartoum; not because it is Islamic (Kony’s confused “religion” is a hazy blend of Christianity, traditional cults, and messianic inventions), but because its is both a thorn in the side of Uganda and a problem for the potentially secessionist semi-autonomous government of Southern Sudan. Khartoum’s regime loves to mess things up towards the Great Lakes which it sees as an area of Islam’s future expansion.

• If we broaden our view even more, we can say that unfortunately the International Criminal Court which has indicted Kony and his officers for crimes against humanity (of which they are fully guilty) has cut off any avenue of negotiation with the cult leader who now prefers to die fighting than to end his days in prison in Europe.

• And last but not least, the LRA has acted as an evil magnet for all the social flotsam and jetsam resulting from years of war and insurgency in the whole region, from the Congo to Northern Uganda and from Southern Sudan to the Central African Republic. The LRA traffics in prohibited game animals, exploits various mines, and it gets money and weapons from Khartoum. Worse, it gives “employment” to disenfranchised young men (and even the girls it uses as servants and sex objects) who are left to fall through the supposed “safety net” of their inefficient governments and of a bewildered and slow-moving “international community.”

The tragic dimension of the LRA saga is a direct expression of the situation in Central Africa where neither guns nor diplomatic action seem to get anywhere. Given Kony’s messianic bend the best solution might be an exorcist.