Modern cultish figureheads always fascinate me. I just learned of this man Joseph Kony, who runs the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda. The army is mostly made up of abducted children and the warriors are mostly child aged. He claims to want to run Uganda by the Ten Commandment plus another ten his prostitute cousin wrote such as, "Thou shall not have any kinds of charms or remains of small sticks in your pocket, including also the small piece used as a toothbrush." He is possessed by spirits who help him run his people.
They number in the thousands and the government has been forced to negotiate with them. So they're actually becoming a "legitimate" political party. Apparently more than 1 in 10 children in Northern Uganda have been abducted.
Also there's just one ethnic group who make up the LRA, the Acholi. AND the REASON, these people are so war prone, is because when "the British ruled the nation, they mandated that all soldiers had to be over 6 feet tall. Unlike the rest of Uganda's population, which are short and squat, the Acholi are tall and slim — and the Acholi parlayed their positions in the military into subjugating their peers."
Plus they're cannibals.
Fascinating.
An excerpt from the article below,
" According to U.N. documents, Kony's imagined spirits include a Sudanese female Chief of Operations; a Chinese Deputy Chief, Ing Chu, who commands an imaginary jeep battalion; an American named King Bruce, reportedly after martial arts film star Bruce Lee; another American named Jim Brickey, who fights with Kony's troops as long as they obey his commands, and the spirit of Juma Oris, the deceased interior minister under former Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.
Kony is a former altar boy and was part of an earlier Christian fundamentalist rebel movement, the Holy Spirit Movement, which was founded in 1986 by a former prostitute, Alice Lakwena. But that movement came to a quick end — no doubt because Lakwena promised her followers immunity from the bullets of government troops."
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/world/DailyNews/uganda021104.html
Posted by bluprnt at April 16, 2004 03:09 PM