To Stop a Warlord

by Shannon Sedgwick Davis

  My words tumbled out into the silence. “We’re not being true to our mission statement.”

  John looked at me intently. This was one of the ways John was exceptional: never being judgmental and always being curious.

  “We say a world without genocide. But we’re not preventing mass atrocities. We’re picking up the pieces and patching up victims in the wake of violence. It’s like we’re just putting Band-Aids on bullet holes.”

  Our grant partners in Central Africa and all over the world were of course doing incredibly important work—researching ongoing violence, performing analysis, making policy recommendations, creating campaigns to motivate political leaders to prioritize ending crises. But generating reports about a conflict wasn’t really stopping a conflict.

  “It’s not enough,” I said. “It’s not enough for the kids who are being threatened. It’s not enough for the moms trying to keep their kids safe.”

  “Yes,” John said. It was his most-used word, a word that signaled his intense engagement as much as his agreement. “What are you proposing?”

  “We need to either change our mission statement, or do what we say we’re doing.”

  I wanted to test what it would look like to try to actually stop a conflict. And—because of the way children were being used in the conflict, because it was Africa’s longest-running war, because no one in the international community seemed to be taking action—I thought we should start with the LRA.

  4

  A THOUSAND HAYSTACKS

  ON PAPER, THE LRA conflict should have been a relatively straightforward problem to solve. In terms of mass atrocities, it was low-hanging fruit. There seemed to be global consensus that the LRA was in the wrong. Unlike in Sudan, where the head of state was actually inciting the violence, the LRA was not a state actor. A country didn’t have to declare war on another country to intervene against the LRA. The LRA had no country. Unlike our conflict resolution work in the Middle East, where building lasting peace depended on mending tattered and nuanced relationships among many players and navigating historical tensions as well as current hostilities in which it wasn’t always clear which groups were perpetrators and which were victims, counter-LRA work was relatively clear-cut. And unlike our postgenocide reconciliation work in Rwanda, the LRA conflict was happening now. It needed to end.

  But it wasn’t that simple.

  * * *

  —

  In September 2009, a few months after the board meeting when we’d decided to focus on solutions to the LRA problem, I sat on a plastic chair in Ida Sawyer’s Human Rights Watch office in Goma with its bare cement walls. Diesel fumes and the smell of charcoal fires pressed in through the open window. So did the sounds of the streets—the rumble of traffic, music cranked up through car stereos and speakers in street stalls. Goma, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s eastern capital, was a vibrant and hectic city. Ida was a point of calm amid the motion and noise.

  “There’s good news and bad news,” she said. Ida spoke softly, but she was a fierce advocate and brilliant researcher. She wore brown oval glasses and had a metamorphic ability, as comfortable in a rain jacket in Congo as she was wearing a suit to brief the US Congress. Her face, usually serious and studious, would sometimes flash into the brightest smile.

  In the years that we had worked together, Ida had impressed me with her unflinching frankness, even when the truth was profoundly upsetting and devastating. At the same time she reported what was happening in a direct and unemotional way, she developed warm relationships with the community members whose human rights she was there to promote. Everywhere I went, people had an obvious affection for her. Ida’s plain speaking was not a sign of her detachment but of the opposite: her stalwart belief that constantly searching for and reporting the truth gave her the best chance to help.

  She was one person doing the work of many, many people. Congo is a huge and hugely troubled country. Many armed groups routinely terrorized civilians in the eastern region where Ida was the lead researcher. There wasn’t time for her to fall apart in a crisis. She had to keep going.

  “Bad news first,” I said. All summer I’d been following statements issued by military chiefs of staff from Congo, Uganda, and the Central African Republic that said the LRA had been “dramatically reduced,” that the LRA combatants were “fighting for their survival.” But I knew that the view from the rooms where policy was made didn’t always match the truth on the ground.

  “This has been one of the bloodiest years in recent history of the LRA,” Ida said. “There has been a lull in attacks—that’s the good news. But we’ve seen in the past how a downtick in violence can mean the LRA is just gearing up for a large-scale assault. Inactivity doesn’t necessarily mean peace.”

  “Then why the official claims that the danger is over?”

  She explained that it was politically useful to exaggerate the promise of peace. The same had been true when the LRA was still active in northern Uganda. Despite the constant violence and abductions, the Ugandan government had minimized the threat. Even with tens of thousands of kids taken by the LRA, no one had kept an official record of how many children were missing. It had been more politically expedient to deny or ignore what was happening. In Congo, with Kinshasa, the capital, so far away from the affected areas, it was even easier for the official word to bear little resemblance to the truth. And then there was the complexity that followed from allowing Ugandan troops into Congo for counter-LRA missions. The Congolese didn’t want a Ugandan military presence there at all, much less indefinitely.

  Ida explained that obtaining accurate information in such a vast and isolated region was proving to be one of the biggest hurdles in countering the LRA. No one knew where Kony and the splinter groups were hiding. Before Operation Lightning Thunder, the LRA had used satellite phones to communicate, but they were evidently communicating now mainly through runners or predetermined face-to-face meetings. There was little way of knowing if or where they would attack next.

  The only evidence of the LRA’s plans or location was from the information that trickled in from communities after an LRA attack, or from abductees who managed to escape. Given the weak infrastructure in LRA-affected areas, these firsthand reports had to travel by word of mouth, often over huge distances connected only by narrow trails or unpaved roads. The reports of attacks came too late to save lives—if they came at all.

  “These communities need to have a way to talk to each other,” Ida said. “Not hours or days or weeks after there’s new information or an attack. Immediately. In real time.”

  What she said made complete sense. Especially since there was concern that there might be another Christmas massacre.

  * * *

  —

  On my way home, I attended a meeting in New York with Luis Moreno Ocampo, the inaugural prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. Established in 2002, the ICC is an intergovernmental organization and international tribunal that has the jurisdiction to prosecute individuals for international crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Ocampo was in New York for a United Nations conference on improving the coordination of different institutions that work on international justice. He had reached out to hear my updates from the region, and I wanted to know what more we could do, right then, to help bring Kony to justice, especially now that the prospect of more mass reprisal killings loomed. Laren Poole, then of Invisible Children, was also in town for meetings, and I suggested he join us at the Mercer Hotel after dinner.

  I had met Laren in 2005 when he and two other young filmmakers had shown up to pitch a grant, wearing oversized suits they appeared to have borrowed from their fathers. Unseasoned in traditional philanthropy, full of youthful swagger, they weren’t the typical grant partners. But the atrocities they’d witnessed in northern Uganda had transformed them into activists. They were seeking funding to make a film that would rai
se awareness and help repair the damage of Kony’s war.

  They had shown me footage that illustrated the precarious situation of the “night commuters”—the more than forty thousand children in Uganda who slept outside in groups each night, seeking protection in numbers against abduction and murder by the LRA. The crisis was urgent, and Laren and his friends were the ones making it known to the world. Something told me that if what they had witnessed in northern Uganda had prompted them to give their lives to the cause, then they could call forth in others that same passion for change.

  In the four years since that meeting, they had expanded their organization, Invisible Children, into a highly effective movement, providing support and resources to northern Ugandans who had been displaced, orphaned, and brutalized by the LRA.

  In recent months, Invisible Children had begun more direct advocacy efforts. Along with their partners in DC, they had galvanized their force of nearly a hundred thousand global activists to try to move Congress and President Obama to take concrete and effective action to stop Kony. They hoped to introduce legislation through Congress: an LRA disarmament bill that would require President Obama to come up with a solution to the LRA problem within 180 days. Since the spring, Laren and Invisible Children had been tireless in working up support for the bill, flying in constituents from every single state to meet with senators, conducting mass trainings to help people speak more effectively to their elected officials. The mobilization of activists, the meetings with legislators—Invisible Children was demonstrating the absolute upper reaches of advocacy. If they managed to pass the bill, they’d be taking the counter-LRA campaign as high as I’d ever seen a grassroots effort go.

  We sat in a red-upholstered booth facing the twinkling lights of the Manhattan street, Ocampo speaking with his musical Argentinean accent, waving his hands expressively after sips of his martini. I had met Ocampo a few years before when we were focused on work to end the human rights abuses in Darfur. Since our first encounter, he had reminded me of “The Most Interesting Man in the World,” the silver-bearded character in the Dos Equis commercials who is so extravagantly cosmopolitan he “can speak French…in Russian.” His warm and glittering presence always cheered me up. I was even more amused by the fact that Laren, usually so guarded and taciturn, had shown up wearing a gleaming white fedora.

  “I didn’t know this was a costume party,” I said, laughing. Laren had brown curly hair, a narrow, clean-shaven face, and deep brown almond eyes. In the four years we had been engaged in counter-LRA work together, he had proven hard to know. He listened more than he spoke, and when he did speak, he was candid about facts but private about himself. This was the first time I had ever reached across the front he put up, the first time I’d ever teased him. It felt good to have crossed a border into friendship.

  “As you know, the International Criminal Court has no arresting power,” Ocampo was explaining. “We can bring Joseph Kony to justice. But we can’t bring him to The Hague.”

  “No one can,” Laren said. “We don’t know where he is. Tracking Kony is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

  “It’s like trying to find a needle in a thousand haystacks,” Luis said.

  “We can help coordinate efforts. We can leverage resources,” I said. “What do we tackle first? What’s going to have the biggest impact on the ground?”

  Laren gave me a steady look, his eyes unblinking under the brim of his hat. “I have to tell you something,” he said. “We just met with the person on Obama’s National Security Council who’s in charge of Africa. She called me and some of the other bill advocates into a meeting. And she asked us, point-blank, ‘What should we be doing to stop the LRA? What kind of response are you looking for from the Executive Office?’ I was launching into a discussion of past interventions, wanting to discuss what hasn’t worked against the LRA so we can find something that does, and she cuts me off and starts talking about what’s politically viable. People are dying right now, and the National Security Council is talking about what’s politically viable. I always thought that activism plus policy equals results. But, even if this bill passes, I’m not sure it’s really going to make a difference.”

  For the first time, counter-LRA efforts had real political capital and momentum in Washington and there was a huge opportunity for positive change. But the National Security Council didn’t seem to be building a strategy that would decisively end LRA violence. Despite the Department of Defense’s advisory role in last year’s assault on Kony’s camp, stopping the LRA didn’t seem to be a national priority. And Christmas was only two months away.

  5

  A MOTHER’S WISH

  “EVERYTHING OKAY?” MY mom asked, passing me the green bean casserole. It was Christmas. “Little Drummer Boy” played on the stereo and the house was fragrant with my mom’s best attempts at re-creating my grandmother’s pies.

  “I’m just missing Oma,” I said. This was our second Christmas without my grandmother. A year and a half earlier she’d suffered several strokes and begun a rapid decline.

  Oma had been like a second mother to me. My last year of high school I’d lived at my grandparents’ home in the hill country outside San Antonio so I could graduate with my friends and play on my volleyball team instead of transferring to a new school in the neighborhood where my parents had moved. Oma and Opa’s home became my sanctuary. I loved the wild bluebonnets that bloomed all over the hillsides in April, the backyard where the whitetail deer grazed. It was peaceful—no loud little brother, no daily fights with my mom over typical teenage stuff, no chaos of family life. Just long walks with Oma over the property, and afterward doing my homework at the kitchen table, where she’d bring me fresh tapioca pudding, where I’d hear Opa come in from working in the yard, whistling “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?”

  When Oma got sick, it was a very difficult time for all of us. I was sad and afraid to lose her. One morning I went to get Connor from his bed and he said, “Big Oma is in heaven.”

  “No, sweetie, she’s resting at home,” I explained. “We’ll visit her today.”

  That afternoon, I was sitting on her bed, caressing the papery skin on her thin hands, when she stopped breathing. Just like that. “Put your hand on her heart,” the nurse told me. “It will keep beating a little longer.” For seven beats, eight, after her breath had stopped, her heart went on.

  “Can’t you feel her spirit around us now?” my mom asked at the Christmas table, gesturing at the bright cardinal centerpiece, a cherished gift from Oma.

  I could. I smiled at Opa, who sat across from me, and rested in the sweetness of her presence.

  After our Christmas feast, Opa pulled me away from the table and proudly handed me something he’d printed off his computer. A former civil engineer and tank driver in World War II, Opa had stayed active into his old age, walking for miles each day, mowing the lawn, spending hours at the jigsaw in his woodshop making toys for Connor and Brody and the other great-grandchildren. Now that his body was slowing down he’d taken on more sedentary hobbies: following his grandchildren on Facebook and paying close attention to my work. He regularly googled the regions where I traveled, scouring the Internet for pieces of news that he gathered and saved for me.

  Tonight he handed me a short article from the UK Guardian published back in November. The mother of Joseph Kony, one of Africa’s most brutal militia leaders, has issued a dying wish to her son, the article read. Moments before dying she said, “Tell Joseph Kony to make peace.”

  “It’s hard to think of that man as someone’s son,” Opa said.

  He was right. Kony was a destroyer of children, a destroyer of lives. I’d never thought of him as someone’s child. And I had never once thought of what it would be like to be his mother. Instead of longing to protect her child from the harshness and dangers of the world, here was a mother who longed to protect the world from her son.
<
br />   “Let’s hope Kony’s mother gets her wish,” I said, squeezing Opa’s hand.

  * * *

  —

  The new year came. There were no reports of LRA violence, no reports of another massacre. At our first Bridgeway Foundation board meeting in January 2010, John and I exchanged hugs of cautious relief.

  6

  MAKOMBO

  WHEN I GOT to Lac Kivu Lodge, in Goma, Congo, two months later, in early March 2010, the water glistened in the bright morning sun. I was in Goma for a few days, traveling with another humanitarian group, and had invited Ida Sawyer to meet up for breakfast while I was in town. She was already seated at a table on the balcony overlooking the lake.

  “Hey, girl!” I called as I walked toward her. I was excited to catch up, and it was a beautiful setting for our meeting—lush tropical gardens stretched down the hill from our table. Below us the silver-brimmed lake lapped against a low stone wall.

  Ida stood to embrace me and smiled. “Good to see you,” she said.

  “You, too! I’m so glad you were able to meet. What’s up? How’ve you been?” I asked as we took our seats.

  She let out a long sigh. “It’s going to be hard to hear, but I’m glad I can tell you in person.”

  “You’re not quitting, are you?” Ida was a Columbia grad, an experienced journalist. While I knew she was committed to her work at Human Rights Watch, there were lots of places where her skills would be valued and where her bravery and brilliance were needed. If she was ready for a new challenge, I wanted to be the first to wish her well, though her leaving would be an enormous loss to the cause.