Tracking the Lord’s Resistance Army
An armed fighter of the Lord’s Resistance Army stands guard on Nov. 12, 2006, during a meeting between the rebel group’s leadership and United Nations Emergency Relief coordinator Jan Egeland in Ri-Kwamba in southern Sudan.
An American activist group called Invisible Children has, for years now, been working toward ending the scourge of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Central Africa.
They were instrumental in persuading President Obama to sign the Lord's Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act of 2009.
That bill paved the way for the deployment of US military advisors to the region to help Ugandan and Congolese troops track and kill LRA leader Joseph Kony, a man wanted by the International Criminal Court.
The latest move by Invisible Children is something they call the "LRA Crisis Tracker." It is hoped that by equipping villagers in northern Congo and southern Central African Republic with hand-held radios and high frequency transmitters, it will be possible to track the LRA’s movements and whereabouts to produce a realtime database of their atrocities.
The impetus for the Crisis Tracker was an attack in the area of Makombo in December 2009, an area so remote in northern Congo that news of the massacre did not get out for three months.