Today’s posts focus on Uganda, the LRA, and President Obama’s recent announcement, stating that military personnel have been sent to Uganda.

In his article “Joseph Kony’s Place in Manhunting History”, Benjamin Runkle quotes President Obama, who justified the deployment by citing the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009, which states that “it is the policy of the United States” to provide regional governments with political, economic, military, and intelligence support “to apprehend or remove Joseph Kony and his top commanders from the battlefield in the absence of a negotiated settlement.” 

Runkle examines past manhunts, comparing the search for Kony to the searches for Che Guevara and Pablo Escobar.

The post “Considering Responsibility to Protect” by Mary Page,  focuses on Uganda’s terror-scarred history and on the responsibilities to prevent, to react, and to rebuild.

The post "Murder and Memory in Uganda" tackles the violent reign of Idi Amin, and a son's determination to solve the mystery behind his father's 1972 disappearance. The ensuing search ultimately led him to a shallow grave--and then to three old soldiers, including Amin's military chief of staff.

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Friday, September 14, President Barack Obama publicly announced the deployment of one hundred armed military advisors to central Africa to assist regional forces in tracking down the leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), the cult-like militia guilty of widespread atrocities in four countries.

In justifying the deployment, the President cited the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009, which states that “it is the policy of the United States” to provide regional governments with political, economic, military, and intelligence support “to apprehend or remove Joseph Kony and his top commanders from the battlefield in the absence of a negotiated settlement.”

If strategic manhunts can be broadly defined as “the deployment of American military forces abroad for a campaign in which the operational objective is to capture or kill one man,” than this deployment appears to qualify as the twelfth strategic manhunt in U.S. history, and the seventh of the last 25 years.

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CP Note: The people of Uganda have long struggled to bury the worst of their history, but after the violent reign of Idi Amin, reminders were never far from view. In 2000, lawyer Duncan Laki came across a clue to his father's 1972 disappearance, and the ensuing search ultimately led him to a shallow grave--and then to three old soldiers, including Amin's military chief of staff.Laki's discovery resulted in a trial that, in the end, offered all Ugandans the reckoning they had long been denied.

“With time, Amin’s image is getting cleaned in the memories of people,” said a Ugandan politician, a former member of the underground. “He is becoming less and less of a monster.” The apologists portrayed Amin as a jolly man, a good sport, who loved to box and play rugby and captained the presidential basketball team. (One of the many titles Amin awarded himself was “Uganda’s Sportsman Number One.”) He was a nationalist who had tweaked the country’s former colonial masters and granted economic power to the people. . . .

All that talk about Amin the killer, Amin the illiterate, Amin the cannibal—it had been concocted by a Western press bent on smearing an African leader who could stand on his own.

“It’s just sickening,” Oder said of the revisionism. “A lot of people were killed. People were slaughtered,” he said.

“That’s the problem— history is what somebody in power sees now. Not what he did. Not what anyone else did.

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A prime case for considering the “responsibility to protect” involves northern Uganda, where, for the past twenty years, civilians have suffered from abductions, killings, and maimings by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), abuses by government military forces sent to fight the rebels, and disease and social disintegration in resettlement camps or “protected villages” set up in the northern districts.

The long-term failure of the Ugandan government to provide security for the people in the north clearly raises questions about international action.

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