WHO IS JOSEPH KONY REBEL LEADER OF LORD'S RESISTANCE MOVEMENT?(Richard Petraitis article)

No longer an Acholi boy but a man of forty years, Kony is the self-appointed successor to his aunt, Voodoo Priestess, "Alice Lakwena." (Lakwena is "messenger” in the Acholi tongue.)[3] It was this charismatic woman, the reputed channeler of a deceased, World War I Italian army officer, who led thousands of Acholi fighters to their deaths in one-sided battles with President Yoweri Museveni's military.[4]

During the tribal revolt, from 1987 to 1988, Lakwena's ill-fated Holy Spirit Army tried to storm Uganda's capital city of Kampala, armed with sticks, stones, and voodoo toys. Alice promised her followers that stones thrown at the enemy would explode like grenades.[5] In the bloody battles that followed, with only a few rifles in their possession, the Holy Spirit Army was completely routed by heavy machine gun and artillery fire. Magical belief proved no substitute for the Acholi lack of military arms and training. Having suffered battlefield losses of several thousand dead, the survivors of the Holy Spirit Army scattered to the hills. The bloody losses sustained by Lakwena's rebel army were the heaviest loss of African life, involving magical belief and warfare, since the Maji-Maji Revolt of 1904-05.

However, the remaining Holy Spirit Army survivors rallied to form a new rebel army, the Lord's Resistance Army--enter Joseph Kony center stage.

In 1989, the twenty-five year old Joseph Kony rose to the forefront of the Acholi People's struggle against Museveni's government. Kony's rebels managed to curb atrocities committed against the Northerners by Uganda's military, but soon the rebels began committing their own war crimes. Not surprisingly, Mr. Kony had been tutored by his aunt, the Acholi Priestess, Lakwena, who herself had engaged in brutal kidnappings (forced conscriptions) into her Holy Spirit Army.[6] From the start, Joseph Kony exhibited a ruthlessness in war noted for an arrogant flaunting of the 1949 Geneva Convention.

In one decade alone, over 8,000 children were kidnapped by the Lord's Resistance Army. Most of these unfortunate children are now presumed dead, killed either in combat or in the murderous crossfire of warring sides. Tragically, these prisoners of war are transported, tied in columns by rope as slaves, to LRA (Lord's Resistance Army) camps.[7]

When shooting breaks out, the conscripts often are unable to escape. If the kidnapped children survive the long journey to the LRA camps, they are forcefully indoctrinated into the LRA's grand vision of an Acholi nation based on the Ten Commandments--savage beatings are meted out to all nonbelievers. The child captives are taught the rebel leader's belief in an apocalyptic arrival of "The Silent World." Joseph Kony believes there will be a time in history when all guns worldwide will fall silent and only those knowing how to use crude weapons, like stones, spears, and machetes, will prevail against their enemies.[8] (LRA members are obsessed with the idea of supernatural intervention and battlefield odds favoring the use of primitive weapons.)

LRA military indoctrination consists of beatings, rapes, and the severing of limbs by machete--all based on selected Biblical passages--no doubt some of the harshest found in the pages of the Old Testament. Joseph Kony subjects his child soldiers to an odd blend of Christianity, primarily the fundamentalist kind, mixed with African animistic beliefs which include the practice of witchcraft. Of course, the Biblical passages forbidding engagement in witchcraft are overlooked by Mr. Kony and his entire LRA command structure. Anyone who resists LRA indoctrination, or who attempts to escape, is executed--often savagely beaten to death by those newly abducted into Kony's Spirit Army.