Map of the Central African Republic, the DRC, Sudan and Uganda. The Ugandan army says it has killed a leading figure in the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in neighboring CAR., a photo by Pan-African News Wire File Photos on Flickr.
October 14, 2011, 6:56 pm
Human Rights Group Welcomes Obama’s Decision to Send Troops to Uganda
By ROBERT MACKEY
“Dear Obama” is a video produced by Human Rights Watch in 2010 in which victims of the Lord’s Resistance Army appealed to the American president to protect them.
As my colleagues Thom Shanker and Rick Gladstone report, “President Obama said Friday that he had ordered the deployment of 100 armed military advisers to central Africa to help regional forces combat the Lord’s Resistance Army, a notorious renegade group that has terrorized villagers in at least four countries with marauding bands that kill, rape, maim and kidnap with impunity.”
In Mr. Obama’s letter explaining the deployment to Congressional leaders, the president wrote that “U.S. military personnel with appropriate combat equipment” would work with armed forces in Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo “that have the goal of removing from the battlefield Joseph Kony and other senior leadership of the L.R.A.”
Just after the deployment was announced, Andrew Exum, a former United States Army officer who blogs about “small wars and insurgencies” under the pen name Abu Muqawama, observed on Twitter that Human Rights Watch, which launched a sophisticated media campaign calling for such an intervention a year ago, has now “successfully lobbied the Obama administration for U.S. military action in two African counties: Libya and Uganda.”
Mr. Exum also joked that American commanders should probably start paying more attention to the human rights group’s campaigns for humanitarian intervention, since they seem to be so effective.
U.S. military officers wanting to know where they will next go to war should probably just read @HRW policy papers at this point.Fri Oct 14 17:58:37 via TweetDeckAndrew Exum
abumuqawama
The Human Rights Watch campaign for intervention, which began last November, included direct appeals for help from victims of the Lord’s Resistance Army in handwritten letters and an emotional video titled “Dear Obama.”
Ken Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, was traveling and unavailable for comment on Friday, but he did post two brief updates on his Twitter feed, in which he welcomed and defended the deployment.
Obama’s decision to send special forces to help capture Kony is a consensual (welcome) deployment, not an invasion. #LRA #R2PFri Oct 14 20:16:14 via Twitter for BlackBerry®Kenneth Roth
KenRoth
Mr. Roth also posted a link to an article he wrote last year for Foreign Policy in which he had argued that “there is no better case for the humanitarian use of force than the urgent need to arrest Joseph Kony, the ruthless leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (L.R.A.), and protect the civilians who are his prey.”
In that article, Mr. Roth also explained that a small number of American Special Forces troops could likely do the job, since “the L.R.A. is not large — an estimated 200 to 250 seasoned Ugandan combatants, plus at least several hundred abductees — but as Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni recently told me, Uganda lacks the special forces, expert intelligence, and rapid-deployment capacity needed to stamp out this enemy.”
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