On April, Amnesty USA wrote: ‘Joseph Kony Was Here’. From our Top Stories: While international justice has seen many milestones over the last months, including the surrender of “The Terminator” Bosco Ntaganda, one of the most well known fugitives from the International Criminal Court (ICC) remains on the loose. Joseph Kony, the Lord Resistance Army’s (LRA) notorious leader, has so far evaded arrest.
Last May, ‘US says Lord’s Resistance Army can be stopped‘ was also among our Top Stories. The U.N. Security Council and the United States said Wednesday that the Lord’s Resistance Army’s decades-long reign of terror can be stopped if the international community helps the African Union capture fugitive warlord Joseph Kony and his henchmen.
Yesterday Freelance Journalist Vidhi Doshi posted on the HuffingtonPost UK:
“We were also shooting elephants. The LRA fighters would kill the elephants and cut off the tusks. Then the prisoners were brought to the elephant carcasses to strip off the meat and carry it back to the main camp. During the one year that I was a prisoner of the LRA, I took part in carrying meat from six elephants.” – Testimony from an LRA defector who escaped in 2009.
This testimony may explain how exactly Joseph Kony funds his army. Doshi adds:
Joseph Kony personally gave orders to units of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo to slaughter elephants and bring him their tusks, according to eyewitness accounts and satellite evidence compiled by the Enough Project and the Satellite Sentinel Project. Their seminal report entitled “Kony’s Ivory: How Elephant Poaching in the Congo Helps Support the Lord’s Resistance Army” has illustrated that elephant poaching is not only a heinous environmental crime, fuelled by frivolous whims of Asia’s noveau riche, but is also being used to fill the coffers of a blood-thirsty warlord and foot the bill for the LRA’s disorder and mayhem throughout Central Africa.
In a post we published on April 10, 2013: U.S. trains dogs to sniff out wildlife traffickers, Ed Grace, deputy chief of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Office of Law Enforcement, said: “Elephant and rhino populations in particular are declining at alarming rates. The battle to stop wildlife smuggling is one we simply cannot afford to lose, and using dogs and their phenomenal sense of smell to catch smugglers will give us a real leg up in this effort.”
It is even more important to stop wildlife smuggling that we now have all the necessary proof that elephant poaching in the Congo helps support the Lord’s Resistance Army.
