In the middle of March, public screenings in Lira in northern Uganda of the now infamous Kony 2012, the YouTube sensation calling for the arrest of rebel leader Joseph Kony, were abruptly cancelled because they had whipped up so much anger and incomprehension among people who had actually experienced the Lord’s Resistance Army firsthand.

The 30-minute video was made by Invisible Children, an American activist group, to create pressure to get the US government to do something about Kony. An estimated 50 million people have seen the video.

But many people in Uganda and elsewhere feel the video glossed over an otherwise serious situation; that the makers didn’t take time to understand what the problem was.

It’s not that detailed information about Kony and his guerrilla army isn’t available.

Back in 2006, British journalist Matthew Green set off from Nairobi by bus to northern Uganda to track down Kony.

Two years later he published his insightful story The Wizard of the Nile.

Throughout history, the Acholi and other northern tribes have borne the brunt of forging modern-day Uganda.

Overhearing the conversation between two Acholi war veterans, Green writes: “It was as if, over the past 150 years, the people of northern Uganda had been thrust into a confrontation with a series of outsiders.

"Each wave had played a role in shaping their destiny, whether Arab slavers, British colonialists, or even governments which exerted their authority from distant Kampala...

"Ultimately the Acholi were the losers, confined to camps, preyed on by rebels, fearful of soldiers and politically powerless. The man who claimed to be fighting on their behalf had turned them into his chief victims.”

Strange as it may sound, President Yoweri Museveni and Kony could be two sides of the same coin.

The history of Uganda shows that guerrillas sit uneasy on the throne.

After Museveni’s National Resistance Movement guerrillas fought their way to power in January 1986, their first mission was to pursue the fleeing Acholi soldiers who had shored up the ranks of the toppled government’s army.

They fled to Gulu, their tribal hometown, where they met up with Kony, a former Roman Catholic catechist, and the handful of adherents he had won over with witchcraft and quasi-religious talk.

These fleeing soldiers formed the core of Kony’s LRA fighters.

Alice Lakwena’s role

The ground for Kony’s emergence had been prepared by the mystic Alice Lakwena, a distant cousin.

After the NRM routed her forces near Jinja, forcing her to flee to Kenya, the void she left was ready to be filled by another “prophet.”

According to Green, the NRM government’s “colonising” of the northern regions, specifically Acholi, only made matters worse.

By forcing the villagers into colonial-style settlements, Museveni not only fomented rebellion but also further alienated even prospective collaborators.

The government set up the camps as part of a classic “drain-the-lake-to-catch-the-fish” strategy designed to deprive Kony’s movement of support by emptying the countryside.

But instead of ending the rebellion the move rendered huge numbers of people dependent on monthly food deliveries from the United Nations.

The swollen camps soon turned into virtual prisons, with the people the prisoners, the soldiers the jailers, and the UN on hand to feed the prisoners.

But once the UN had begun feeding the people, it couldn’t stop.

By supporting the World Food Programme instead of seeking a solution to the crisis, Western governments, the UN and the relief organisations became part of the system.

And for 20 years Acholi civilians were caught in the crossfire while their children were abducted into the LRA.

The rebels castigated the civilians for supporting the government, and the government accused them of supporting the rebels — their children.

Kony the proxy

Green pulls back the curtain to reveal the puppet masters as it becomes apparent that Kony was a bit player in a much larger drama that sucked in the likes of the US.

By arming Kony, Sudan, already a pariah in the West, wanted to use him as a proxy to fight the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army.

Add to this Museveni’s support for the SPLA, and it gets murkier.

And so, as the Khartoum government signed a peace agreement with the SPLA in Nairobi in January 2005, the big question that seems to have been overlooked was: What would happen to Kony?

The last section of the quest for the slippery Kony reads almost like fiction as he left Uganda and melted into the great African forest of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and now, the Central African Republic.

The on-and-off chase veers from frantic diplomatic efforts at peacemaking and skids into the quagmire of what-after.

What happens when it’s all over? What happens to deserting Kony abductees when they come home?

What is their position in law? There are no easy answers.

But for Green, at least there’s a verdict: “Casting Kony as an arch villain of the piece made it easier for Museveni’s powerful backers in London and Washington to turn a blind eye, not only to his failure in dealing with the conflict, but to their complicity in tacitly endorsing his strategy.”

Following the successful conviction of DRC warlord Thomas Lubanga for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court, the sights are now set on Kony. But his capture will certainly not bring this conflict to an end.