Joseph Kony: Trouble in South Sudan - New Yorker (blog)

Uganda has good reason to believe that Bashir’s government is prepared to use the L.R.A. to terrorize South Sudan. In a 2005 video, Joseph Kony confirmed that his forces “helped the Arabs to fight their war in the south while they helped us to fight [Ugandan President] Museveni’s government.” For fifteen-odd years, during the L.R.A.’s insurgency, the Ugandan government accused Sudan of giving the group arms and technical support. (Though the rebel fighters lived in and staged their attacks from the bush, they had equipment like satellite phones, computers, and generators—and seemingly advanced military intelligence.) The L.R.A. was also allowed to have a base across the border in southern Sudan. At the same time, Sudan said that Uganda’s leaders were supporting the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army, which later became the basis for the new government of South Sudan. President Museveni has supported the S.P.L.A. since the nineteen-nineties, and, before the peace agreement, thousands of southern Sudanese refugees spilled southward over the Ugandan border. South Sudan and Uganda are now major trading partners.

The Sudanese civil war, which began in 1983, had catastrophic results for southern Sudan; it decimated the region’s infrastructure and nearly wiped out a generation. Now, the residents of Sudan’s Nuba Mountains are being bombed by their own government, and troops from both sides are assembling in border towns near contested oil fields. More than a hundred thousand Sudanese have been forced to abandon their homes. It’s looking like 1983 again.

Will the L.R.A. also return for another round? If nothing else, the group has shown itself to be capable of ruthlessly murdering, kidnapping, and mutilating entire villages—and has done so through Darfur, southern Sudan, Central African Republic, the Congo, and northern Uganda. Kony2012 supporters may have a new problem on their hands.

Photograph by Adam Pletts/Getty Images.