Activists promised a huge lobbying effort for identical bills in the US House of Representatives and the Senate that call for the elimination of a Ugandan warlord and his Lord’s Resistance Army fighters in eastern Africa.
At a gathering in Washington on Monday, an estimated 3,000 activists discussed plans to win over members of Congress during meetings yesterday in offices of the Capitol complex.
In its statement of policy, the legislation specifies that the US will provide “political, economic, military and intelligence support for a comprehensive multilateral effort to protect civilians in affected areas, to apprehend or otherwise remove Joseph Kony and his top commanders from the battlefield, and to disarm and demobilize Lord’s Resistance Army fighters.”
It would authorize US$10 million in aid for the budget year beginning Oct. 1 to meet humanitarian needs of people in southern Sudan, Uganda and Congo affected by Kony’s fighters.
Many thousands have been killed by Kony’s rogue army, which largely comprises abducted children, and by Ugandan military efforts to capture him since 1986.
In 2005, Kony and his top lieutenants were named in the first arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
The warrants have not been served, however, because Kony has escaped arrest since he began his private war 23 years ago in Uganda and southern Sudan. His forces are now based in eastern Congo.
The ICC prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, who took out the warrants against Kony and his aides, spoke on Monday to the activists who are pressing for passage of the two bills, both filed on May 19.
“Joseph Kony’s army is an army of children,” Moreno-Ocampo said. “They don’t want to fight. He forces them to fight, and when he kills them, he just abducts more. It’s an army of defectors, and that’s why if Kony is arrested, most of the Lord’s Resistance Army will collapse.”
He told the activists: “You are changing the world, but it will take more than one day.”
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