On Sept. 9, the Worldwide Felony Courtroom (ICC) did one thing unprecedented: It convened a affirmation of costs listening to in opposition to Joseph Kony, the chief of the Ugandan insurgent group the Lord’s Resistance Military (LRA). Kony faces a protracted listing of accusations, together with struggle crimes and crimes in opposition to humanity. The occasion was historic not due to the fees themselves—they have been first issued again in 2005—however as a result of Kony wasn’t there. That is the primary time that the court docket has moved ahead with a trial in absentia. The sight of prosecutors laying out their case earlier than an empty chair solely sharpened the central query: Why hasn’t Kony been captured?
That query has haunted the area for many years. The LRA has existed for practically 40 years, and its chief has persistently outmaneuvered navy offensives, manhunts, and political strain. Regardless of the eye generated by the “Kony 2012” marketing campaign, regardless of the presence of U.S. particular operations advisors looking him for six years, and regardless of a still-active $5 million bounty below the U.S. Warfare Crimes Rewards Program, Kony remains to be at massive. 13 years after his title briefly turned some of the searched on the web, he continues to evade justice.
Kony survived by disappearing into a number of the world’s most inaccessible borderlands and sustaining himself by means of a mixture of illicit commerce and subsistence agriculture. Gold, ivory, and different contraband tied him into regional smuggling networks, whereas honey and small farms stored his fighters fed. Simply as vital have been the alliances that he solid with native armed teams that helped him to slide away at any time when his pursuers drew close to.
The LRA emerged within the mid-Nineteen Eighties in northern Uganda, in opposition to President Yoweri Museveni’s new authorities. The group initially drew on non secular beliefs, mixing Christian millenarianism with native cosmologies. However Kony’s rise was constructed much less on ideology than on coercion. Recruitment rapidly got here to depend on abduction. By the mid-2000s, researchers estimated that the LRA had kidnapped roughly 75,000 individuals, lots of them youngsters. Boys have been pressured into fight models, whereas women have been enslaved as “wives” for commanders.
Concern was central to the LRA’s energy. The group carried out massacres, mutilations, and village burnings, spreading terror throughout northern Uganda and past. For a considerable interval, the Ugandan authorities was unable to guard the inhabitants, as a substitute pushing them into pressured displacement camps.
The violence made the LRA notorious. But it additionally made the group seen, and visibility proved harmful. By 2010, strain from the Ugandan navy and regional forces compelled Kony to shift technique: Giant-scale massacres and abductions dwindled. The group retreated into a number of the least-governed areas in Africa: the distant borderlands between Sudan; the Central African Republic (CAR); and, to a lesser extent, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
Many of the world solely realized Kony’s title in March 2012, when the U.S.-based advocacy group Invisible Kids launched “Kony 2012,” a 30-minute YouTube movie calling for his arrest. The video unfold with unprecedented velocity—greater than 100 million views in its first week. Kony briefly turned a family title, a uncommon case of an African warlord breaking into Western popular culture.
The marketing campaign fueled a surge of coverage consideration. In 2011, the USA had deployed round 100 navy advisors to help regional forces in monitoring Kony. They introduced drones, surveillance plane, and logistics capability. For years, Ugandan troopers, supported by the U.S. property, scoured the bush. However the hunt got here up empty. By 2017, Washington quietly wound down the mission. Kony remained, as ever, uncaptured.
This additionally underscored a deeper reality: discovering a insurgent chief in a number of the world’s most inaccessible terrain, protected by fighters and shifting alliances, proved to be laborious.
How, then, did the LRA endure as soon as its days of mass raids have been over? The reply lies in an improvised survival economic system that tied the group into broader regional networks of commerce, crime, and armed politics.
Central to this economic system was ivory. The LRA focused elephants in Garamba Nationwide Park in northeastern Congo, certainly one of Central Africa’s final nice wildlife sanctuaries. Tusks have been hidden in caches throughout the borderlands, typically for years, earlier than being smuggled out alongside trafficking routes. Gold and diamonds additionally entered the combo. The LRA purchased minerals from native merchants and resold them by means of transnational networks, appearing as brokers moderately than miners.
Not all income got here from high-value commodities. Fighters cultivated small fields, planted maize and groundnuts, and harvested honey. Ali Kony—Joseph’s son, who was imagined to succeed him and styled himself because the group’s “minister of overseas affairs”—described to me throughout a 2024 interview how he used rocket-propelled grenade chargers as crude smoke bombs to drive bees from their hives.
Markets have been the nodes that sustained this economic system. Typically, the rebels slipped into current native buying and selling posts. In different circumstances, they created their very own. One hanging instance was “Yemen,” a makeshift market within the Central African Republic close to the Sudanese border. Accessible solely by motorcycle tracks and footpaths, Yemen turned a hub the place honey, gold, marijuana, weapons, and meals all modified arms. The LRA’s major camp sat close by, housing about 100 fighters and their households.
Commerce was by no means nearly survival: It additionally provided safety. By positioning themselves as intermediaries, the LRA rebels embedded themselves in regional smuggling circuits and armed-group networks. Offers with nomadic pastoralists and CAR rebels gave the group early warning and a level of safety in opposition to authorities assaults.
Amongst these alliances, ties to Sudan have been probably the most consequential. For the reason that Nineties, Khartoum had seen the LRA as a helpful proxy in opposition to Uganda, which backed rebels in South Sudan. Even after formal help waned, the connection by no means vanished.
Round 2009, as regional militaries closed in, Sudanese forces allowed Kony to shelter in Kafia Kingi, a contested enclave in Darfur. Formal safety from Sudanese forces could have ended, however commerce with particular person Sudanese officers continued. Gold turned the principal medium of change, whereas the looks of weapons uncommon for the borderlands recommended that channels to Sudanese suppliers remained open.
Regardless of all this, Kony had a $5 million bounty on his head. Why wasn’t this sufficient to tempt certainly one of his allies to betray him?
A part of the reply lies in distrust. In early 2015, CAR-based Seleka rebels—a free coalition of predominantly Muslim armed teams—captured Dominic Ongwen, one other LRA commander with an ICC arrest warrant and a bounty on its head. They handed him to American forces and later tried to assert the $5 million reward. However they by no means obtained it, and the damaged promise left a bitter aftertaste. For former Seleka rebels who recurrently interacted with the LRA and operated in the identical space, there may be little incentive to threat turning Kony in.
Nonetheless, the LRA’s survival has not been cost-free. Attrition has steadily eaten away at its ranks. Morale amongst fighters eroded as years of hardship dragged on.
“At all times on the run, all the time hungry,” one former combatant advised me three years in the past.
Others grew disillusioned with Kony’s limitless and more and more implausible guarantees of overthrowing the Ugandan authorities in Kampala.
Kony’s unpredictable and paranoid rule has deepened the despair. In 2007, he ordered the killing of his deputy, Vincent Otti, together with Otti’s loyalists. In 2013, extra commanders have been purged. Ongwen, the opposite indicted LRA commander, narrowly escaped as effectively, after Kony started to suspect him of getting helped others to defect. The inner fissures reached Kony’s circle of relatives. Two of his sons, Salim and Ali, deserted him—a very heavy blow to the motion.
The rise up’s survival additionally got here to depend upon ever extra grueling and dangerous missions: trekking throughout distant terrain in the hunt for ivory or minerals. For a lot of fighters, the prices outweighed the advantages.
In each 2014 and 2018, splinter factions broke away from Kony’s command. Disillusioned by Kony’s autocratic rule and bored with being despatched on looting missions within the DRC and CAR with out reaping the earnings, they selected to strike out on their very own. Primarily based within the CAR borderlands, these splinter teams ultimately determined to demobilize. In July and August 2023, a complete of 164 fighters had laid down their arms—the biggest mass defection within the LRA’s practically 40-year historical past.
Amid all this, financial challenges deepened. The outbreak of civil struggle in Sudan in 2023 disrupted the borderland commerce zones that the LRA relied on. With routes between the Central African Republic and Sudan minimize, the group’s illicit commerce dwindled.
In these circumstances, Kony presides over a power believed to quantity solely about 20 armed males, or at most a hundred individuals with girls and kids included. As soon as the phobia of northern Uganda, the LRA now appears to be little greater than a fugitive household compound within the bush: Kony has now elevated a brand new son right into a management place—Candit Joseph.
But Kony himself stays elusive. Over a long time, he has persistently outmaneuvered makes an attempt to seize him. The Worldwide Felony Courtroom, which lacks its personal enforcement arm, depends on state forces—and none have succeeded. A part of the reason being easy: Regardless of their notoriety, neither Kony nor the LRA rank excessive on any state’s precedence listing. In a area crowded with armed teams, they’re harmful however hardly probably the most harmful. For surrounding governments, the LRA is extra of a nuisance than an existential menace.
As lately as final yr, Kony narrowly escaped two assaults on his base close to the Yemen market, carried out by Russia’s Wagner Group and the Ugandan military. Every time, he appears to have been offered simply sufficient warning to fade.
That leaves the query of whether or not Kony himself will ever give up. Well being issues—together with long-rumored diabetes, confirmed by individuals near him, haven’t slowed him down. Former fighters are adamant: Give up isn’t in his nature.
As certainly one of Kony’s former “wives” advised me simply final week: “Kony won’t ever come out; it should by no means occur. He’s a soldier; he desires to remain on the market; he won’t ever come earlier than a court docket—he’s the one who desires to remain in cost.”
His son Ali, even after breaking along with his father, put it in comparable phrases: “He’s a normal; he won’t ever give up to this court docket.”
