The Phantom of the Operation

The Ugandan military drove the rebels out of Uganda about five years ago and the rebels have been mostly hiding out in a thickly forested area of northeastern Congo ever since. There have been several high-profile efforts, backed by the United Nations and the United States, to persuade Joseph Kony, the rebel’s phantom-like commander, to surrender.

 
That’s Jeffrey Gettleman writing today in the NY Times about the Lord’s Resistance Army and Operation Lightning Thunder, a military campaign launched by the Ugandan army two weeks ago in DRC. According to my search, it’s Gettleman’s sixth article in the NY Times about the LRA since 2006. Again today, he refers to the LRA commander, Joseph Kony, as “phantom-like.”

Phantom-like?

See also:
“the notorious, phantomlike leader of a brutal rebel army” (April 11, 2008)
“the phantom rebel commander who is said to live deep in the jungle with 60 child brides” (September 15, 2006)

Merriam-Webster defines phantom as:
(1a) something (as a specter) apparent to sense but with no substantial existence
(1b) something elusive or visionary
(1c) an object of continual dread or abhorrence
(2) something existing in appearance only
(3) a representation of something abstract, ideal, or incorporeal

To be sure, Kony is elusive (1b) and a person of continual dread or abhorrence (1c). But to characterize him as phantom-like seems to only perpetuate the “mystical” (another popular Kony descriptor) narrative of the man at the expense of a more complex framing of the conflict. Why not just call him elusive? It would be true. See a previous post on proclamations about the end of the LRA in 2002.

Interestingly, Gettleman described Kony as “the rebel movement’s fugitive leader” in an April 12, 2008 NY Times article. Interesting because the LRA is not commonly referred to as a “movement” with a political agenda. See Adam Branch’s 2005 article in African Studies Quarterly:

The most commonly heard position in the debate is that the LRA is, in a word, “bizarre.” This is  part of what anthropologist Sverker Finnstrom has termed the “official discourse.” Promoted by the Ugandan government, international news media, many NGOs, and some academics, this discourse sums up the motivations of the LRA in the ubiquitous coda to news reports that, “The rebels have no clear political agenda but have said they want the country governed in accordance with the Christian Ten Commandments.” The LRA, embodied in Joseph Kony, is portrayed as simply insane, the latest manifestation of incomprehensible African violence.

 
Last night I started reading Matthew Green’s book about his personal quest to meet Kony, “The Wizard of the Nile: The Hunt for Africa’s Most Wanted.” Maybe terms like “wizard” and “phantom” are required in all writing about conflicts in Africa.