REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK, No. 11: Joseph Kony, the portrait.

Thursday, December 30 2010

REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK, No. 11: Joseph Kony, the portrait.

Today we’re wrapping up a post for the At War blog that will present an insiders’ account of Joseph Kony, the bizarre and feared leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, who remains at large in the face of nearly universal calls for his arrest. (I’ll put the link here when it posts, likely on Friday. Update: here it is.) Mr. Kony is wanted by the International Criminal Court for a host of crimes related to the macabre insurgency he has led for almost a quarter-century in Uganda, southern Sudan, and of late in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The post will mark a new phase for this blog, and also the start of a fresh use of the At War site, in which I will be making publicly available several of the reference materials dug up during the years of researching THE GUN.

Why? THE GUN was nearly an eight-year project. Throughout those years I was often frustrated that important materials were very hard to find. Many government reports had never been placed in the trust of public archives, or remained classified and withheld from public view. Others simply had been lost, or were scattered about the world in far-flung libraries, or had been tucked away in in the personal collections of veterans, historians, ballisticians, enthusiasts and more. As my collection grew, gradually overtaking my garage, I told myself that I would not do what many other researchers have done, which is to complete a project, box up the more rare of the supporting materials, and forget about them, thereby making follow-on researchers repeat the struggle to locate valuable references for their work. This is one reason THE GUN is laden with end notes and footnotes — I wanted to offer the sources transparently and point readers and researchers to them. (My motivations here were fuller than this. Too many books about conflict, tactics, and the tools of war have no footnotes at all and the merits or veracity of some claims are impossible to examine; I didn’t want THE GUN to be of that stripe.)

In the months ahead, and when time allows, I’ll post materials I have plucked from archives or that have been shared to me by sources, so that original references can be accessible to anyone who might want them, for whatever use. Some of these documents will be technical — such as those related to military firearms research. I have, for example, a full copy of the infamous and oft-hyped Thompson-La Garde pistol tests, which as far as I have been able to tell is available nowhere on-line and is an intriguing read by itself. I have a similar set of reports related to research into the mechanisms of wounding. Other references will be historical, bureaucratic or political, such as a desk memo from late in 1962, with its deeply irritated tone, from Robert S. McNamara, the former Secretary of Defense. This is the memo that put the Pentagon on the path to adopt the M-16.

And there will be much, much more. My only real restriction is time, which is ever short.

The first document to undergo this treatment will be the portrait of Mr. Kony made by senior L.R.A. defectors in collaboration with a former American military attache in Uganda. I had a chance to photograph one of the only two printed copies I know to exist at the time. (I have since found the original, which was shared with me this week by its principal compiler and editor.) The post on The New York Times site will provide a fuller explanation and account of the document, and describe its origins. The full document has been converted by The New York Times into a .pdf, and will be included with the post.

Meanwhile, please look at the images posted here now. They also provide a portrait of Mr. Kony, although an indirect one. These are sketches and drawings made from repatriated child soldiers from the L.R.A. Together they provide a visual interpretation of many of the L.R.A.’s tactics — the raids on villages and settlements, the mass abductions, the burning of villages and displacement of civilians, the collective punishment, the use of fear as a tool, the ambushes of civilian traffic, the indoctrination of child-soldiers, and, ultimately, the L.R.A.s frantic fighting against Ugandan government forces, which eventually obtained helicopter gunships to terrify the child-soldier units and help expel them from Ugandan soil.

During reintegration to civilian life, child soldiers are often encouraged by counselors and aid workers to sketch out their memories from the field. In their silent way — made with nothing but looseleaf paper, magic markers and crayons — they hint at horrors most people cannot fathom.

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHS

The opening image is a wire photo of Mr. Kony, who in recent years has had little contact with the world oustide of the L.R.A. The others are all stills of drawings and sketches by former child soldiers. The stills were made with the permission of World Vision, Gulu, by the author, in 2007.