A Mission to Capture or Kill Joseph Kony Ends, Without Capturing or Killing - The New York Times

The United States and the Ugandan military decided to endtheir search for Mr. Kony in late April, abandoning the international effort to bring him to justice. In that effort, Ugandan soldiers are accused of leaving behind their own trail of abuse, according to the United Nations peacekeeping mission, including rape, sexual slavery and the exploitation of young girls.

In Obo, the American military has already begun the so-called retrograde of its mission, which is Pentagon-speak for packing up shop and heading home, taking everything they brought with them. That means sending in planes and vehicles to haul away light infantry tents, cots, communications equipment and all of the weaponry used by the American Special Operations and Ugandan forces trying to hunt down the elusive Mr. Kony and his guerrillas.

Publicly, American officials insist the ceremony is not ill-advised, even if Mr. Kony reappears at some point, as he has done in the past. But they were not rushing to publicize it either; one American defense official attending the African Land Forces Summit meeting last week in Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital, looked pained when a reporter asked about the planned ceremony. “Who told you about this?” he asked.

Photo Mr. Kony in 2006. In 2008, the United States government declared him a “specially designated global terrorist.” Credit Associated Press

A few days later at the summit meeting, Maj. Gen. Joseph P. Harrington, the commander of United States Army Africa, which sponsored the meeting, was fielding a similar question. “Look, I’m not the operational commander that’s looking for Joseph Kony,” he said, when asked why Mr. Kony still had not been found. He added: “Everyone will meet their maker at some point.”

General Harrington said the mission to get Mr. Kony could be looked at, in retrospect, as a mission “to remove a regional threat,” and there, he said, the operation has been successful, degrading the Lord’s Resistance Army to where it is now.

“L.R.A. is really no longer a relevant organization,” he told reporters at a news conference on Thursday.

Mr. Kony, a self-proclaimed prophet, along with his militant force, catapulted onto the Ugandan stage in 1987 to fight President Yoweri Museveni, who at the time was into the first year of his journey to become one of Africa’s longest-reigning strongmen (he’s now on Year 31). Over the course of 19 years, the L.R.A. abducted more than 20,000 children to use as soldiers, servants or sex slaves, according to Unicef, leading to violence that displaced more than 2.5 million people.

In 2005, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Kony for crimes against humanity, and in 2008, the United States government declared him a “specially designated global terrorist.”

As recently as last year, the Treasury Department was imposing new sanctions on Mr. Kony. A Treasury statement on March 8, 2016, blamed Mr. Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army for at least 239 civilian abductions in the Central African Republic between July 2014 and July 2016. The department also accused the L.R.A. of engaging in “illicit diamonds trade, elephant poaching and ivory trafficking.”

Through all of this, Mr. Kony has managed to avoid capture. His troops operate throughout 115,000 square miles of territory in Central African Republic, South Sudan, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo — all areas of conflict where civilians have fallen prey to marauding groups of fighters.

American officials say that even though the mission to find Mr. Kony is at an end, they will keep working with African forces to stabilize the region. And, they say that the effort to find Mr. Kony has not been in vain because it has also helped build trust between American and African troops.

“Any work that we do with African militaries that teaches coordination, collaboration and multinational interoperability is not wasted time,” Gen. Daniel B. Allyn, the vice chief of staff of the Army, said in an interview in Lilongwe.

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