Fresh attacks in the eastern Central African Republic

Several attacks attributed to the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) have hit the east of the Central African Republic in recent months, and at least 25 children have been abducted during raids on villages carried out by Kony's militia. Authorities in the Central African Republic worry the group is staging a comeback in the country's east and southeast.

Driven out of Uganda in 2006 by the national army, the LRA slipped from public view but stayed active in isolated border areas of Central Africa. Leonie von Braun, Senior Trial Lawyer at the International Criminal Court (ICC) and lead investigator in the Joseph Kony case, said the LRA of today is far weaker than in the 2000s, when it was highly hierarchical with four brigades estimated at several hundred fighters each.

It operates on a much smaller scale now but remains active, she said, running a survival strategy like the one it used in northern Uganda and later in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the Central African Republic, it attacks villages near its camps and abducts and enslaves civilians.

Von Braun said the more people the group abducts, the stronger it becomes, and that the risk for local populations remains very high because such organisations are willing to commit the worst atrocities to ensure their survival. "This information shows that they are still armed and ready to commit acts of violence," she said.

How the LRA abducts and holds its fighters

The LRA kidnaps children because they are easy to indoctrinate, von Braun said, and within a few years turns them into soldiers able to handle rifles and throw grenades. Indoctrination runs primarily through violence: children are put through extremely violent initiation rites before any rules are explained to them.

She said obedience inside the group is enforced through brutal discipline:

• •Severe beatings follow a dropped pot of food.
• •Refusing sex with a commander brings the same punishment.
• •Any escape attempt is effectively a death sentence.

Operations against the group are complicated, she added, because it includes a large number of unarmed children who are not combatants, and because reliable, up-to-date information on the LRA is hard to obtain.

A militia born in 1987

Kony, a former altar boy who proclaimed himself a messiah, prophet and messenger of God, founded the Lord's Resistance Army in 1987 to overthrow Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni and establish a theocratic regime based on the Bible's ten commandments. The group grew out of the Holy Spirit Movement, a Ugandan rebel movement founded in the 1980s by Alice Auma, who called herself Lakwena after the spirit she claimed gave her orders; it failed to overthrow the government before Kony took control.

The militia is infamous for its massacres and mass abductions of children in the 1990s and 2000s, taking children in their thousands, some to fight and others to satisfy the sexual appetites of commanders. According to the UN, the insurgency is one of Africa's longest and most brutal conflicts and has cost more than 100,000 lives and uprooted more than two million people, mainly in northern Uganda.

The ICC case against Kony covers the period from July 1, 2002 to December 31, 2005:

• •The evidence shows thousands of children and women were abducted in that period alone, von Braun said.
• •She described the Kony case as the largest the ICC has ever handled involving crimes against children.

Twenty years of warrants, and a hunt that continues

The ICC issued its arrest warrant for Kony in 2005, and he has now been wanted for more than 20 years. The United States offered a $5 million reward for any information leading to his capture. Calls for his arrest peaked in massive social media campaigns around 2012, the year the United States sent special forces to Central Africa to track him down.

Von Braun attributed his ability to stay hidden to an unusual set of strengths:

• •An in-depth knowledge of the terrain and of the region's geography.
• •A capacity to endure hardship, with extreme physical and psychological resilience, and lessons passed on to members about surviving in the bush.
• •An intelligence network that is technologically unsophisticated but highly effective at evading surveillance and keeping criminal operations running.

Kony is reportedly 65 years old. Von Braun said he is not the only leader within the group and that a hierarchy exists around him; given his age, he is likely not on the front lines of operations.

The latest information indicates he is still alive, and the lead investigator said his presence in the militia has not faded:

Von Braun said the ICC is monitoring the Lord's Resistance Army very closely and doing everything in its power to secure the surrender and arrest of its leader. The court has no police force of its own and depends on states to recognise and execute its arrest warrants. Even so, she said, the ICC is convinced Kony can still be brought to justice: few once imagined that Milosevic or Charles Taylor would be held accountable before international justice.