OBO,
Central African Republic —
Pascal was on guard duty when he got word it was
time to leave.
He and
six other fighters were all bodyguards to the accused war criminal Joseph Kony
or his inner circle. After almost a decade in the Central African bush, they
were going to ambush the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army in his camp in
the Kafia Kingi area of South Sudan and make a run for it.
The
boys—four Ugandans and three others from South Sudan and the Democratic
Republic of Congo—wanted to return to their families after being abducted as
children. Their plan was simple. Open fire on Kony’s hut and then flee into the
jungle where they’d cached enough food to sustain them for their 500-mile trek
to Obo, the closest U.S. military base in eastern Central African Republic.
“If I
hear gunfire I’ll start mine,” Pascal told Roland, one of the Ugandans.
The boys
leveled their AK-47s and opened fire at Kony’s hut and the huts of his
lieutenants. After a long burst, Pascal grabbed the cache of supplies and
followed the others into the bush.
The May
2015 defection of seven of Kony’s bodyguards was unprecedented. It was a clear
indicator that the Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, is in its death throes and
of Kony’s diminishing hold on the rank and file, military and advocacy groups
said.
“No one
would have dared to do it before,” said Paul Ronan, director of The Resolve, a
nonprofit that tracks the LRA. “Big picture is the LRA is at its weakest
point.”
The
Daily Beast spoke to four of the Kony 7 in March in Obo and Dungu in Congo. The
base in Obo sat to the end of a road that ran down the middle of the village.
The villagers waved to the soldiers as they drove between the American and the
Ugandan bases. The Special Forces camp was small by the standards of other
conflicts—only a dozen tents and none of the guard towers and heavy weapons. Ringed
by shipping containers and concertina wire, the American’s tan tents were built
on wood foundations. An American flag flew on a pole near the center of the
camp.
The
sounds of helicopters coming and going provided the camp’s soundtrack. A small
detachment of helicopters were based across a runway made of crushed red
volcanic rock. Flown by contractors, the helicopters ferried joint
American-Ugandan patrols into the bush. Both camps sat on top of a plateau that
overlooked miles of jungle, a reminder of just how remote Obo was.
The men
were living on the remote military bases used by an African Union task force
hunting Kony. They are working closely with the soldiers providing intelligence
and greeting defectors fresh from the bush. Once on opposite sides, they now
live, work, and eat side-by-side with their former pursuers. It wasn’t uncommon
to see the defectors sitting elbow-to-elbow with the American Special Forces
soldiers in the dining hall.
All four
of the former bodyguards were reluctant to speak in detail about their actions
while in the LRA as we sat in camp chairs near the base’s gym, but did
acknowledge how a successful propaganda campaign waged by the U.S. Army helped
them defect, and why they are still working with the American military hunting
Kony.
The LRA
was declared a terrorist group in 2001 by the United States. For decades, LRA
fighters looted villages and kidnapped children. The boys were trained to use
AK-47s and forced to fight and murder, cutting off the lips and ears of their
victims. The girls were forced into sexual enslavement. The International
Criminal Court in The Hague indicted Kony in 2005 for crimes against humanity.
In 2010,
President Barack Obama made it U.S. policy to support in the hunt for Kony. A
year later, Obama sent 100 U.S. special operations troops to Central Africa to
help an African Union task force hunting Kony in sparsely populated safe havens
in Congo, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic.............
Please read the article here:
http://www.thedailybeast.com
Σχόλια
Δημοσίευση σχολίου