WASHINGTON -- The first question to U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson during a recent video chat with students at Westside Middle School in Winder, Ga., was about a man halfway around the world from Barrow County.
“What are you doing to find Joseph Kony?” a student asked.
“It shows you the power of the Internet,” Isakson said this week, after returning from a trip to Uganda to inspect U.S. military efforts to apprehend the wanted warlord.
Since the late 1980s, Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army has engaged in mass murder, rape and abduction of children, according to a 2005 warrant for his arrest by the International Criminal Court. About 100 U.S. troops arrived in Uganda in October to help African forces seek Kony, who is believed to be somewhere in the Central African Republic, South Sudan or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Only last month did Kony become a viral Internet phenomenon -- particularly for youths shocked by accounts of child soldiers and sex slaves -- thanks to videos produced by the activist group Invisible Children that, according to the group’s website, have been viewed more than 100 million times.
Isakson, the top Republican on the Foreign Affairs subcommittee overseeing Africa, met with Ugandan leaders and U.S. troops. Kony’s wave of atrocities was centered in Uganda, but the LRA has not been active there since 2006. Ugandans, Isakson said, were troubled by the implication in Invisible Children’s “Kony 2012” that the country remained a land of refugee camps and fear.
The once-ravaged northern part of the country has returned to normalcy, Isakson said. As part of a congressional delegation with U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, a Savannah Republican, and U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., he journeyed to the northern city of Gulu, where he said stable communities have replaced camps for people displaced by the LRA’s swath of destruction.
“Ugandans are very sensitive to the fact that he hasn’t been in Uganda for five or six years and they cleaned up the North and it’s peaceful,” Isakson said. “I can attest to that. We had unfettered access up there and no problem at all.”
The task now is to track down the elusive Kony in vast, heavily forested areas in Central Africa. Johnnie Carson, assistant secretary of state in the Bureau of African Affairs, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday that the 100 U.S. troops are acting as advisers and providing intelligence and other support for African military forces hunting Kony.
Carson testified that the LRA is believed to be down to roughly 150 to 200 members split among four or five different groups, primarily in the Central African Republic. U.S. troops are handing out radios and cellphones and encouraging villagers to alert military forces if they spot Kony or his people, Carson said. He added that the U.S. is starting to increase intelligence assets in the region. Congress recently approved about $35 million for the mission.
“We have clearly helped to degrade the LRA, to disperse it, but we have not finished the mission of decapitating it,” Carson said. “We hope we will be able to continue to work with the countries of the region to bring Joseph Kony to justice.”
At Wednesday's hearing, lawmakers signaled they will push for expanding the State Department’s rewards for justice program to target Kony.
The current operation -- because of Kony’s notoriety and the small amount of money and personnel -- has proved uncontroversial, unlike most overseas military missions. Isakson compared it to the early 1990s intervention in Somalia, which he argued did not go far enough. U.S. troops withdrew after 18 U.S. soldiers were killed in a 1993 battle in which two Black Hawk helicopters crashed, and Somalia remains in chaos with terrorists and pirates roaming free.
"You have to be very careful about deploying American personnel overseas," Isakson said. "But when you've got an internationally indicted mass murderer who's been on the loose for 26 years in a continent that's trying to move into the 21st century, you don't look the other way and not help."
The Associated Press contributed to this article.
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