‘He’s not a bad person’ says wife of LRA militant leader Joseph Kony

Adye Sunday isn’t sure about the calls to kill or capture Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony. Though the elusive warlord abducted her when she was 13 and forced her to be one of his dozens of “wives”, the 25-year-old says he is also the father of her two children.

“I don’t see Kony as a bad person,” she said as she mixed batter for vanilla cakes to sell in Gulu’s market while her three-year-old daughter, Betty, watched. “Everything done in the bush is blamed on Kony, but to me he’s not a bad person.”

Forces now hunting for Kony in the Central African Republic, South Sudan and Congo are unlikely to find much sympathy for him as they might in Gulu in northern Uganda, just 12 miles from where he was born – but some locals there have other concerns that complicate the military mission.

With more than 3,000 children abducted by the LRA since 2008, according to the United Nations and Human Rights Watch, families worry that troops hunting Kony will not be able to distinguish between the regular LRA fighters and their abducted children. They also fear reprisals if they are thought to be helping the authorities find Kony – depriving military leaders of information that could be key to catching him.

Kony inspires conflicting thoughts among some people in northern Uganda who remember the early days of his insurgency, which started as a popular struggle against the southern-dominated government of president Yoweri Museveni.

Angelo Izama, who runs a Kampala-based think-tank on regional security called Fanaka Kwawote, said Kony is a sympathetic figure among some Ugandans, who see his rebellion as a valid response to the perceived injustices against the north.

He said: “Some people felt that he was a criminal and yet his criminality was in the service of a different type of justice.”

The LRA has been out of northern Uganda since 2006 and is now active across the Central African Republic, South Sudan and Congo. Though now numbering only about 150 to 300 fighters, LRA attacks in the Central African Republic and Congo have risen this year, according to UN figures, with 53 attacks and 90 abductions.

The guerrilla group takes boys to force into combat, and girls and young women to serve as “wives” to Kony and others.

Kony is known for his brutal tactics, such as cutting the lips off women who sound the alarm that his forces are coming, and ordering abducted children to kill their parents.

Adye Sunday said she was taken from her bed by LRA fighters in the middle of the night, then spirited off to neighbouring Congo for ten years.

She said she had a son with Kony seven years ago. Betty was just a baby in 2010 when authorities in Congo attacked the LRA camp she was in. She was caught in the crossfire and shot in the leg. Left behind by the LRA, she and her two children were picked up by the troops that attacked the camp and brought back to Uganda.

She said that at the time the camp was attacked, she thought Kony was in the Darfur region of Sudan, but today she doesn’t know where he is – and is sceptical he can be captured or killed.

She said: “He should surrender through peace talks. He can only come back through peace talks.”

But Ugandan army spokesman Colonel Felix Kulayigye said: “It is in Uganda’s interest that the LRA menace is concluded once and for all, because Joseph Kony, as he has done before, has the ability to rejuvenate when he has a chance. If you want permanent peace in this region, you must apprehend Kony or kill him.”

A YouTube video Kony 2012 released in March by the advocacy group Invisible Children, which has now been viewed more than 88 million times, focused attention on the abductions and violence, spreading the message that Kony can still be caught despite the challenges.

Though the violence is now over in northern Uganda, in Gulu, Adye Sunday is still struggling to make a living.

But she said she is happy to be free from captivity in the bush, saying: “My life is better here.”