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African Union to pull together to stop Joseph Kony
Joseph Kony. PHOTO/AFP
The African Union (AU) said Friday it will send 5,000 soldiers to join the hunt for notorious rebel leader Joseph Kony, a new mission that comes amid a wildly popular Internet campaign targeting the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).
The mission is to be launched in South Sudan today and will last until Kony is caught, United Nations and African Union officials said at a news conference in Uganda.
“We need to stop Kony with hardware, with military hardware in this case,” said Francisco Madeira, the African Union’s special envoy on the LRA. “We are on a mission to stop him.”
Friday’s announcement comes the same month an Internet movie campaign by the U.S.-based advocacy group Invisible Children sought to make Kony “famous” so that policymakers would make it a priority to remove him. The video has been viewed more than 100 million times.
Abou Moussa, head of the UN’s office in Central Africa, said soaring international interest in Kony had spurred regional efforts to eliminate the LRA.
“The awareness has been useful, very important,” he said.
The hunt for Kony has primarily been carried out by troops from Uganda, who received a boost last year when U.S. President Barack Obama deployed 100 U.S. forces to help regional governments in the mission. American soldiers are now based in Uganda, Central African Republic, South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
