KAMPALA – Uganda on Tuesday said the army commandos destroyed camps belonging to Joseph Kony, the fugitive leader of the feared Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), in the Central African Republic. 

The Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF) said the operation was carried out jointly with armed forces from South Sudan and CAR against three camps in the east of the country near the Sudanese border. 

“All camps were destroyed, and equipment was captured,” the UPDF said in a statement on X, formerly Twitter. 

It added: “Remnants of the LRA still taking refuge in CAR or elsewhere on the African continent will be hunted
down.

Unless they surrender to the authorities for proper processing and rehabilitation, they will continue to be considered criminals.” 

Kony is wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity over the LRA’s long reign of terror across several African nations. The former altar boy founded the LRA in the 1980s with the aim of establishing a regime based on the Ten Commandments, launching a rebellion against Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni that spread to the CAR, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan. 

It killed more than 100 000 people and abducted 60 000 children who were forced to become sex slaves, soldiers, and porters. Uganda’s announcement followed a court ruling last week that found a former LRA commander guilty of multiple counts of crimes against humanity in the first such war crimes trial in the East African country.

Thomas Kwoyelo was convicted of 44 offences including murder, rape, torture, pillaging, abduction, and the destruction of settlements for internally displaced people. Kwoyelo, who had been waiting for years behind bars for a verdict in the landmark case, had denied all the charges against him. -Nampa/AFP