Zerla was posted in Obo for two years, and during that time she was known to sprint across the airfield to alert Ugandan officers about actionable intelligence. Invisible Children sees nothing remarkable about its military cooperation.
But its approach contrasts sharply with other nonprofits in the region. CRS, however, does not share its data directly with the U. The American Red Cross has long set the industry standard for independence from armed actors. While the Red Cross works with governments, militaries, and rebel groups to provide emergency medical services, a spokeswoman told me, it enforces a policy of neutrality in war zones.
Later, he took a job at Bridgeway to help coordinate the effort. Invisible Children is expanding its cooperation with armed actors who want access to its valuable intelligence network. The park recently created an intelligence unit, led by a French army veteran, to coordinate the movements of rangers armed with AKs and a Bell helicopter.
Unlike the LRA, which has become less violent in recent years as it seeks to keep a low profile, poachers armed with assault rifles have become more aggressive. Last April, just a few months before my visit, poachers murdered three rangers during a shootout in the park.
I dipped out of the training session to join the afternoon radio call. Floribert, the operator on duty, was receiving more news from Masombo, the border village attacked a few days before.
While looting a hut earlier in the week, LRA fighters had found a uniform belonging to a villager who worked as a park ranger. They were now stalking his home, hoping to assassinate him.
The ranger had fled with his family. There was non-LRA news too. A radio operator in Bangadi reported that a pregnant woman had had an emergency cesarean section the night before. Her baby had died, and she had just passed away that morning. Could someone notify him? Prosper, the year-old network engineer, has a brow perpetually knitted in concentration. He seemed an appropriate bearer of the bad news.
When we arrived, the landlord told us we were too late. The man had left for Bangadi that morning, as scheduled. He was on the back of a motorcycle, bouncing home. The road was bad. It would be five or six more hours before he learned that his daughter-in-law and grandchild were dead. In the fall of , the mayor of a remote Central African village biked 70 miles over two days to reach the town of Sam Ouandja to request that Invisible Children install a radio in his community.
Some villages also earn money by charging roving traders a few Congolese francs to make calls. Isolated communities in Congo and the Central African Republic are desperate for more radios, which are often the only lifelines to the outside world. Villages use them to exchange news about commodity prices, request medical help, and keep in touch with family.
While he grumbled about the lack of pay from Invisible Children, Ambroise likes that the job broadens his horizons. Whatever their complaints, volunteer operators — and, indeed, many Congolese in this neglected region — are grateful to Invisible Children for providing connectivity in a corner of the country almost devoid of social services.
But I sensed that operators were only partially aware of the risk they were running by becoming veritable intelligence operatives. Invisible Children clothes its operators in T-shirts with a logo — a handset surrounded by emanating radio waves — emblazoned on the chest. On my last full day in Dungu, I drove with two operators to check on a malfunctioning radio in Duru, a town some 50 miles away, near the South Sudanese border.
On the way back, we stopped in a flyspeck village with a high-frequency radio operated by Catholic Relief Services. A Congolese army officer was inside using the radio, which would be against Invisible Children protocol. I asked the operator if the army listens to his daily calls. Absolutely not, he replied. They do not have our frequency. A few kilometers down the road, I stopped at several Congolese army checkpoints, which are usually just two or three soldiers living in thatched huts and farming small plots to feed themselves.
The checkpoints appear every few miles or so marked by dummies dressed in helmet and fatigues, both to alert drivers and sometimes draw LRA fire as soldiers beat a retreat. At the second checkpoint, I introduced myself, handed out cigarettes to lighten the mood, and asked the Congolese soldiers if they ever listened in to the CRS radio network. He puffed on his cigarette and then recited the two daily call times. Kony himself may be dialing into the twice-daily rondes for all Invisible Children knows: He uses high-frequency radios to direct his scattered fighters from the safety of Sudan, where he is believed to have taken refuge some miles away.
There is no way to know who is on the line. American and Ugandan troops responded within a few hours; when they left, the rebels running the village beat the operator, believing that he was collaborating with the LRA he was not and the U. Gunmen asked if anyone had a phone, and residents immediately led them to the home of an Invisible Children operator with a Thuraya satellite phone, which the group distributes in some areas of the Central African Republic where installing a high-frequency radio is too difficult — or where it might attract the wrong attention.
When American soldiers entered the fray in late , the LRA numbered just people, including women and children, divided into at least seven groups operating in three countries. All of the groups had settled into survival patterns that included poaching and raiding villages. None were carrying out offensive operations against military targets. The Americans provided vital air assets that carried food, materiel, and troops from Uganda to South Sudan and the Central African Republic.
Their spy planes also collected intelligence that was funneled to Ugandan soldiers on the ground. During this time, there was at least one daring and possibly illegal Ugandan commando incursion into Kafia Kingi that missed Kony by a matter of hours. But by the end of , the joint mission was losing momentum. Mounting discord between the Ugandans and their American partners undercut the effectiveness of the mission, according to Ugandan officials.
Some Ugandan officials resented the fact that American soldiers, who had limited knowledge of the LRA and were stationed in air-conditioned units far from the frontline, wanted to teach veteran Ugandan soldiers how to chase Kony. Some Ugandan commanders had expected to lead the mission and exercise control over American air assets, including transport planes and helicopters. They were upset when the Americans treated them as junior partners in their own backyard.
According to U. Ugandan soldiers allegedly also became involved in sexually exploiting underage girls and looting natural resources in the Central African Republic, behavior that increasingly put them at odds with local communities and their American partners. Rumors abound that he is still based among several small outposts in Kafia Kingi, making periodic incursions into the Chinko River basin in eastern Central African Republic. Now the Trump administration has ended the party, throwing the legacy of the mission into question.
Through a combination of military pressure and defection campaigning, Observant Compass managed to cull the LRA to fewer than fighters, though it never achieved its ultimate goal. If he manages to survive and regroup, however, it will be because the United States declared mission accomplished before it actually finished the job. To help the UPDF chase Kony across the rugged central African bush, Davis also contracted with a private air transit company to provide the Ugandans with a bush plane and Bell helicopter for their exclusive use.
To manage the radio network, Invisible Children hired Camille Marie-Regnault, from France, and Pauline Zerla, a Belgian with a family connection to the region: Her mother was born in Leopoldville now Kinshasa to a bureaucrat in the Belgian Congo colonial administration. Marie-Regnault, 26, and Zerla, 30, are upbeat and tireless when we meet, often working hour days in the field.
I asked what would happen if the LRA came upon us now. Zerla and Marie-Regnault have worked hard to increase cooperation with troops working to rout the LRA from the region, which by the time the two were hired in included Ugandan and Congolese soldiers, U. Invisible Children has refused, though it would not be difficult for the U. I had more luck with Lt. Islam Arif, a Bangladeshi officer tasked at the time to the U. Arif explained that the early-warning network is integral to his intelligence gathering.
Invisible Children is the only NGO invited to his weekly intelligence meetings. As our interview wrapped up, Marie-Regnault entered the office, and Arif gave her a double-cheek kiss. The military alliance is just as tight across the border in Obo, an even more remote settlement in the Central African Republic that is essentially a 3-mile dirt road connecting the Ugandan military base on one end and the AFRICOM and U.
Between and , U. At night the front yard glows with the smartphone screens of soldiers trying to poach their wireless internet. Zerla was posted in Obo for two years, and during that time she was known to sprint across the airfield to alert Ugandan officers about actionable intelligence. Invisible Children sees nothing remarkable about its military cooperation. But its approach contrasts sharply with other nonprofits in the region.
CRS, however, does not share its data directly with the U. The American Red Cross has long set the industry standard for independence from armed actors. While the Red Cross works with governments, militaries, and rebel groups to provide emergency medical services, a spokeswoman told me, it enforces a policy of neutrality in war zones.
Later, he took a job at Bridgeway to help coordinate the effort. Left: Joseph, right, helps lead a training for volunteer operators who near Garamba National Park. Rangers want to use Invisible Children's radio network to track poachers. Invisible Children is expanding its cooperation with armed actors who want access to its valuable intelligence network.
The park recently created an intelligence unit, led by a French army veteran, to coordinate the movements of rangers armed with AKs and a Bell helicopter.
Unlike the LRA, which has become less violent in recent years as it seeks to keep a low profile, poachers armed with assault rifles have become more aggressive. Last April, just a few months before my visit, poachers murdered three rangers during a shootout in the park.
I dipped out of the training session to join the afternoon radio call. Floribert, the operator on duty, was receiving more news from Masombo, the border village attacked a few days before. While looting a hut earlier in the week, LRA fighters had found a uniform belonging to a villager who worked as a park ranger.
They were now stalking his home, hoping to assassinate him. The ranger had fled with his family. There was non-LRA news too. A radio operator in Bangadi reported that a pregnant woman had had an emergency cesarean section the night before. Her baby had died, and she had just passed away that morning. Could someone notify him? Prosper, the year-old network engineer, has a brow perpetually knitted in concentration. He seemed an appropriate bearer of the bad news.
When we arrived, the landlord told us we were too late. The man had left for Bangadi that morning, as scheduled. He was on the back of a motorcycle, bouncing home. The road was bad. It would be five or six more hours before he learned that his daughter-in-law and grandchild were dead. Isolated communities in Congo and the Central African Republic are desperate for more radios, which are often the only lifelines to the outside world.
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