Joseph Kony: He’s Long Been Famous in Atiak

Rewind 17 years. Back to 1995. That’s when I traveled to a dust-blown corner of Uganda to try to find survivors of a massacre perpetrated by the child soldiers of Joseph Kony. That’s Kony of the Lord’s Resistance Army – the rebel leader featured in the Invisible Children video that went viral last week. Kony’s crimes were well known, even way back then.

At the time, I was a correspondent for Christian Science Monitor Radio. I was sent to investigate an attack in a remote trading town called Atiak, tucked away in Uganda’s notoriously unstable north.

LRA massacres in the region weren’t unusual. This one was big – perhaps the biggest and most gruesome ever. Still, it wasn’t a story that merited coverage from most of the foreign correspondents in the region – even though it took an estimated 250 lives. There were plenty of other grim stories to cover in the region.

Anyway, a colleague and I drove to Gulu, Uganda, then a pot-holed frontier town. The Ugandan Army took us the rest of the way to Atiak, some 40 miles down barren, rutted roads.

We arrived in the morning, as some locals were putting new straw roofs on burnt huts. They gathered to greet us, and told their stories with little emotion.

They said about eight weeks earlier, Kony’s fighters had launched a vicious attack on the town, and over-powered Ugandan local defense forces. The rebels then marched the townspeople to a river, separated the men from the women, and ordered groups of villagers to lie down. Then they started firing.

When they stopped, more than 200 people lay dead.

“They started shooting and asked us to clap our hands and to say ‘Thank you – thank you for the shooting,’ ” Yoneai Auma who’d lost her husband and 15 relatives to Kony’s gunmen told me. “Because we wanted to survive, we clapped.”

The villagers told us the rebels then grabbed some of their young sons and daughters, and marched them back into the bush.

Their children were gone. Hundreds were dead. But nothing went viral 17 years ago.

So when I saw the Kony2012 video last week, and heard Jason Russell talk about the “new rules of the game,” I started thinking about Atiak. Why has Kony been able to evade trial all those years for a massacre on that scale? What “new rules” would bring him to justice?

They’re questions the Kony2012 video considers. But the answers it offers don’t square with what I saw back then.

I remember when we arrived in Atiak, the villagers didn’t have a simple story to tell. Some supported the Ugandan army. Others said the army had deliberately failed to stop the Kony attacks because the villagers belong to an ethnic group called the Acholi. Many Acholis don’t support Uganda’s government, and told me they thought Ugandan officials weren’t interested in ending Kony’s rebellion.

And the town’s loyalties were deeply splintered. Some families had children who fought for the LRA rebels. Some had children who had been slain by the rebels. The poverty was intense. But one thing was clear. There was no national army, or judicial system capable of protecting them.

There were many layers to the story, and lots of blame to go around.

Today, it’s hard to get information about what’s going on in Atiak. You can find posts online about a yearly service commemorating the massacre. And I found one clip from Uganda TV that said villagers in Atiak don’t want Joseph Kony tried by an international court.

Maybe that’s surprising to some. But more surprising perhaps is that the Ugandan government never held an official investigation into the killings in Atiak. Authorities never attempted to explain exactly what happened, and why.

Which brings me back to Kony2012 video. It offers quite a promise. It argues that the advent of social media has created new rules for the game.

What does that mean for Atiak? The rules of social media may have changed, but what about the rules for murder?

I’d like to go back and ask survivors in Atiak what they think of Kony2012. I’d ask them if Ugandans are making progress on creating their own judiciary that will investigate massacres. Are they closer to having an army that can foster stability, and a government that’s held accountable when it doesn’t protect its citizens.

Finally, I’d like to ask them what they think would happen if Kony were arrested, and tried in an international court, but the local problems that originally created the LRA were never addressed. What would change? Without creating the institutions of a functioning civil society, what’s to stop another Joseph Kony from coming along to fill the void?