Editor's Note: Added the link to a Yahoo news article I'd I'd forgotten to include earlier. Thanks.
The news spread quickly Friday that President Barack Obama ordered 100 U.S. combat-equipped troops to Uganda to help the Central African country track down Joseph Kony, charismatic leader of the Lord's Resistance Army.
Among other things, Kony and his rebel militia leaders are accused of kidnapping and impressing children into slave labor, sex slavery, child soldiery and human sacrifice.
The brew of anti-colonial politics, religion, tribalism and underdevelopment in African countries can pose asymmetric dangers to foreign troops. In the U.S., the insertion of American forces into Uganda raises the inevitable questions:
Will the 100 troops be actively engaged in fighting against the LRA?
The Defense Department says the U.S. troops are there in an advisory role. They can fight to defend themselves from attack, but their primary mission is to help the Ugandan forces to locate and suppress the LRA. The U.S. has also provided four small drone surveillance systems to aid in the effort.
Does the U.S. have a strategic interest in Uganda?
Not directly. The U.S. move likely falls under the same United Nations' "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine, which induced the U.S. to lead the Libya air assaults. R2P missions are not new. U.S. interventions in Kosovo and Somalia were spawned in humanitarian concerns having no direct strategic impact on the U.S. Some argue that a larger profile in Central Africa is a preventative in keeping Islamist forces from expanding their influence in the region.
Who is Joseph Kony and where did the LRA come from?
Uganda has been a country of extremes since the days of the mad dictator, Idi Amin, about whom several films and documentaries have been made. Among the factions fighting for control of the country were Marxist, Islamist, Christian-mystical, and tribal militias. One of the strangest factions was that led by Alice Auma (aka Alice Lakwena), Kony's cousin. Alice was an Acholic tribal mystic who believed she had magical powers to turn sticks and stones into grenades and RPGs. Her army was eventually defeated by government forces, but cousin Joseph Kony took up the mystic-religious banner. Kony's brutality diminished the ranks of his followers and his militia is estimated to number only about 250 soldiers. Kony's brutal criminal enterprise includes robbery, slaughter-for-hire, kidnapping, mutilating, and selling children into sex and chattel slavery and for human sacrifice.
How widespread is kidnapping by the LRA?
Estimates vary, but the number of child kidnappings numbers into the thousands. Ugandan and nongovernmental organizations are inadequately equipped to conduct the kind of record-keeping the U.S. is accustomed to. Multiple child kidnappings by Kony's LRA may result in a single criminal report, making it hard to account for individual statistics. Global Security says that 6,000 children were abducted in 1998 alone, but cites NGO reports that 3,000 kidnapped children are currently in LRA captivity.
Is the information the U.S. received about the LRA reliable?
If there are any redemptive aspects in renegade hacker Julian Assange's theft of government documents, it is in the theft of U.S. state department cables regarding adult and child human trafficking in Uganda. For example, one Wikileaks cable notes the efforts at locating and repatriating child kidnap victims sold into slavery in Sudan, Iraq, and elsewhere. A 2009 Ugandan investigation which repatriated thirteen women sold to Iraq also uncovered 29 "confirmed" cases of child and adult human sacrifice which are said to be on the "increase."
Anthony Ventre is a freelance writer who has written for weekly and daily newspapers and several online publications. He is a frequent Yahoo contributor, concentrating in news and financial writing.
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