(Reuters) – Uganda said yesterday it would catch Joseph Kony dead or alive, after a video spotlighting the atrocities of his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) swept the Internet and drew a wave of international support.
The LRA is notorious for violence including hacking body parts off victims and abducting young boys to fight and young girls to be used as sex slaves. Kony and his fighters were driven out of northern Uganda in 2005 after terrorising communities for nearly two decades.
“All this hoopla about Kony and his murderous activities is good in a sense that it helps inform those who didn’t know the monster that Kony is. But of course, this is too late,” Uganda’s defence ministry spokesman Felix Kulayigye told Reuters.
“It might take long but we’ll catch Kony, dead or alive. How many years did it take to end the conflict in Northern Ireland? So our hunt for Kony can take long but it will end one day,” he said.
The 30-minute YouTube video, by a little-known team of filmmakers based in San Diego, made an emotional appeal for the U.S.-backed Ugandan armed forces to capture the LRA leader by the end of this year.
By Thursday, it had been viewed almost 40 million times, while Tweets about Kony had become the No. 1 trending topic worldwide on Twitter.
“NO SILVER
BULLET”
Kony fled northern Uganda to roam the dense forests of Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic and South Sudan. Attempts to corner him and his rump LRA force, believed to be 200-300 strong, have failed.
