Skip to main content

More on Uganda

Looking back at it, this post was kind of lazy, and not the kind of thing I want to be doing on a regular basis. Let's take a closer look, first with some background from AllAfrica:
Under both Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush, Washington has provided "non-lethal" and logistical support to the Ugandan army in its efforts to subdue the LRA. The aid increased when Kony failed twice to sign a peace accord in 2008. Since 2008, Washington has provided over 40 million dollars in military assistance to regional armies fighting the LRA.
In December 2008, the Ugandan, DRC and southern Sudanese armies launched "Operation Lightning Thunder", a joint effort backed by U.S. intelligence and logistical support provided by Washington's newly created Africa Command (AfriCom) to track down Kony and his armed followers.
 Kony and much of his army escaped, however, and responded later that month by carrying out their own attacks against defenceless villages and civilians in the DRC and southern Sudan, killing nearly 1,000 people and forcing as many as 1.8 million others to flee their homes, according to human rights monitors.
They've also got a decent profile of the man behind the LRA, Joseph Kony:
Inspired by the words and drawn by the gripping charm of his cousin, Alice Auma Lakwena, a spirit-medium-turned-prophet, Kony established the Lords' Resistance Army (LRA), a ragtag force high on a warped blend of apocalyptic Christianity and nationalism.
In the 20 years that it has been in existence, that brutish group has killed more than 30,000 people in Northern Uganda and displaced two million others.
In recent years, their leader Kony has extended his hand across the border to several parts of Central Africa, causing chaos in his wake.
We also shouldn't forget the broader political context. Kony's group sprang out of serious persecution of the Acholi people in Northern Uganda—but in his madness, he's killed Acholi indiscriminately as well. This kind of stuff is forgotten by the US all too frequently; I'll try to stay up to date on it.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that

The Conversational Downsides of Twitter's Structure

Over the past couple years, as I've had a steady writing job and ascended from "utter nobody" to "D-list pundit," I find it harder and harder to have discussions online. Twitter is the only social network I like and where I talk to people the most, but as your number of followers increases, the user experience becomes steadily more hostile to conversation. Here's my theory as to why this happens. First is Twitter's powerful tendency to create cliques and groupthink. Back in forum and blog comment section days, people would more often hang out in places where a certain interest or baseline understanding could be assumed. (Now, there were often epic fights, cliques, and gratuitous cruelty on forums too, particularly the joke or insult variety, but in my experience it was also much easier to just have a reasonable conversation.) On Twitter, people rather naturally form those same communities of like interest, but are trapped in the same space with differe