War Is Boring

The blog Excuses and Half Truths praises my new graphic novel.

Kony Hunter with Christopher Meloni from Christopher Meloni

The humanitarian group Enough! praises my graphic novel ARMY OF GOD.

Chapter two of my graphic novel ARMY OF GOD is now online at Cartoon Movement.

I crossed paths with the San Diego-based aid group Invisible Children in October 2010 in Dungu, a town in eastern Congo. I was there reporting on the Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group. Invisible Children’s Adam Finck was there for the LRA, too. The aid group had scored some big corporate grants that it was using to buy radios for isolated Congolese communities. The idea being: when the LRA attacked, the villagers could radio for help.

In February 2006, an army of rapists descended on Duru, a farming community of 5,000 in eastern Congo. They called themselves, without a trace of irony, the “Lord’s Resistance Army.”

Don’t continue reading this post if you have weak stomach. Seriously, just stop. If you can stand it, below the jump are photos of recent victims of Lord’s Resistance Army attacks in northeastern Congo. As you can see, the LRA likes to mark its victims in distinctive ways. The photos come courtesy of a Catholic priest who survived LRA abduction in 2008. More on that, later.

by DAVID AXE Author’s note: The aid group Invisible Children, whose work is featured in this 2011 post, has launched a very effective viral video and Twitter campaign (#Kony2012) aimed at mustering support for the international military campaign to hunt and capture or kill Joseph Kony, the leader of the murderous Lord’s Resistance Army rebel [...]

An old woman had died. Before burying the her, the residents of the village of Obo — in southern Central African Republic, just north of the Congolese border — gathered around a campfire to eat, drink, cry and sing in celebration of the woman’s long life. It was a night in March 2008, just another beat in the slow rhythm of existence in this farming community of 13,000 people.

Burkina Faso
Ten people were killed in clashes between neighboring communities in Guenon, a village about 80 kilometers south of the capital Ouagadougou. According to reports by state media, the deaths resulted from a dispute about the position of the local chief, who at the moment is a member of the Akonga ethnic group. This is a longstanding grievance of the Liliou group, who have pleaded for a chief of their own. Tensions escalated over the weekend, when the son of the current chief was killed with nine further people dying and about 100 houses burned down in the ensuing fighting.