In an interview with France 24, the ICC's lead investigator on the Kony case says the Ugandan warlord remains active within the Lord's Resistance Army, as fresh attacks in eastern Central African Republic are attributed to the group. Twenty years after the arrest warrants, the manhunt endures — and so does the man.
Published 2 October 2026 · 23:52 GMT
For twenty years, the world has known where Joseph Kony probably is — and still has not laid hands on him. The leader of the Lord's Resistance Army, wanted by the International Criminal Court since 2005 for crimes against humanity and war crimes, is one of the longest-hunted fugitives alive. This week, in an interview with France 24, Leonie von Braun, the ICC's lead investigator on the Kony case, described the Ugandan warlord as still "active" within a group the world believed was dying — a claim that lands just as several attacks in recent months in the eastern Central African Republic have been attributed to the LRA.
It is an uncomfortable admission, and it explains why the story matters far beyond the jungles of the Uganda-Congo-CAR borderlands. The manhunt for Kony has outlived presidencies, military missions and entire peacekeeping mandates. It has survived the withdrawal of American special forces, the transfer and conviction of his former deputy Dominic Ongwen, and two decades of attrition that reduced his once-feared army to what analysts believe is a rump of fighters scattered across three countries. And yet the ICC's investigator says the old man at the center of it is still there, still issuing orders, still the reason a 2005 arrest warrant remains open.
What makes the France 24 interview striking is not the discovery that Kony is alive — few who followed the case ever believed otherwise — but the assessment that he still matters. The LRA of the 1990s and 2000s was a machine of horror: massacres of civilians, the systematic abduction of tens of thousands of children, forced into soldiering, porterage and forced marriage. That army is gone. What remains, according to the established record, is a shrunken band living off ivory poaching, artisanal mining and looting in some of the least-governed territory on earth. A group that small should have dissolved into the landscape. That it has not — and that attacks are still being pinned on it in eastern CAR — is the puzzle the ICC investigator is asking the world to look at again.
To understand the puzzle, it helps to remember what the manhunt has already consumed. In 2005, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Kony and four other LRA commanders, the Court's first cases in its Uganda situation. In 2011, the United States deployed around a hundred special forces advisers to the region to assist the Ugandan military's hunt, the mission later formalized under an African Union regional task force. In 2015, Dominic Ongwen — himself abducted as a child, raised inside the LRA, and eventually a brigade commander — was transferred to The Hague. In 2021 he was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In 2017, the Americans packed up and went home, judging the LRA sufficiently degraded.
The degradation was real, but "degraded" turned out to mean something less than "finished." Estimates of the LRA's remaining strength have long sat in the low hundreds — fighters, abductees, and the women and children held with them — spread across the eastern Central African Republic, northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo and the borderlands of South Sudan. Without a conventional supply chain, the group mutated: elephant ivory moved through illicit markets, gold and diamonds from artisanal diggings, food and fuel taken from villages at gunpoint. It is a subsistence insurgency now, not a strategic one — which is precisely why a report of renewed attacks in eastern CAR raises the question of whether the subsistence model is changing, or whether other armed groups are being misread as the LRA, or whether Kony himself is attempting to reassert relevance.
The "what we don't know" here is doing a great deal of work, and honesty requires saying so. Attribution in eastern CAR is notoriously difficult. The region hosts a tangle of armed groups, self-defense militias, bandits, and poaching networks, and in the confusion after an attack the LRA label can be applied quickly — sometimes by frightened survivors, sometimes by local authorities with their own reasons for naming a familiar enemy. The recent attacks attributed to the group have not been publicly documented with the kind of casualty or evidence detail that would allow outsiders to verify them independently. What can be said with confidence is that the ICC's own investigator considers the group alive enough to keep investigating, and that the Court has not let the warrant gather dust.
That distinction matters, because the Kony case has become a test of what an international warrant means when the fugitive is beyond reach. For more than twenty years the ICC has carried Kony's file: witness testimony preserved, evidence catalogued, the legal machinery maintained in the hope that the day comes when he stands in a courtroom. Von Braun's role as lead investigator is, in effect, the institutional memory of that hope — a signal that The Hague does not consider the case closed by the passage of time, and that the prosecution office believes there is still evidence to be gathered and, potentially, still a network of facilitators to be understood.
The Ongwen conviction showed what the end of this particular road looks like when a senior LRA figure actually reaches The Hague. The 2021 judgment ran to hundreds of pages and addressed the moral thicket at the heart of the LRA story: Ongwen was a victim — a child stolen from his family — and also a perpetrator who commanded atrocities as an adult. The trial chamber convicted him, and the judgment became one of the most closely studied in the Court's history, a precedent about culpability that followed abduction. It did not, however, touch the man at the top of the hierarchy. Kony remains the unfinished case, the name on the warrant that everyone in the region knows.
Geography explains why finishing it is so hard. The LRA's surviving elements operate across a frontier where three weak states meet — the eastern CAR, the northeastern DRC and South Sudan's borderlands — terrain that is vast, roadless, and contested by multiple armed actors. Uganda's army, which once chased the group across this terrain, has long since refocused. The African Union's regional counter-LRA task force wound down. The UN peacekeeping mission in the CAR, MINUSCA, has its hands full with a broader armed-group landscape and a fragile central government in Bangui. There is, in short, no single authority with both the mandate and the means to hunt a few hundred fighters through bush the size of a European country.
The politics of the region have also shifted under the manhunt's feet. South Sudan's civil convulsions absorbed attention and resources. The DRC's northeast remains a patchwork of armed groups. The Central African Republic has seen its own security architecture transformed — including a prominent Russian security presence that arrived after 2018 and reshaped the country's military partnerships. None of this was designed with the LRA in mind, but all of it affects who would chase Kony, under what flag, and with what priority. A fugitive who survives by being nobody's priority has, in a sense, adapted to the international system better than the system has adapted to him.
This is where the tri-perspective picture the Bureau insists on becomes essential rather than ornamental. From the Western institutional angle — The Hague, the UN system, the departed American advisers — the Kony file is a matter of international justice: a warrant must mean something, or the Court's credibility in Africa, already battered by accusations of selectivity, erodes further. From the regional angle — Kampala, Bangui, Kinshasa, the African Union — the question is practical and political: which government owns the problem, who pays for the operation, and what does cooperation look like when trust between these capitals is thin? From the angle of the communities in northern Uganda, eastern CAR and northeastern Congo — the Global South's ground truth — the question is simpler and older: will the children be safe, will the harvest be looted, will the night bring gunfire?
Those communities are the reason the story refuses to die, and they deserve more than a line in the consensus box. In northern Uganda, the LRA's two-decade war displaced nearly two million people at its height and left a generation shaped by abduction, displacement camps and the particular trauma of children turned into killers. The region has rebuilt — Gulu is a functioning city now, not a war zone — but the memory is fresh enough that any rumor of the LRA's return travels fast. In eastern CAR and northeastern DRC, where the group has operated for years, the fear is current: villages that cannot tell a poacher from a fighter, a bandit from a soldier, living with the knowledge that the men with guns answer to a warlord most of the world stopped thinking about.
It is worth pausing on the word the ICC investigator used: "active." It is a careful word, the kind an investigator chooses when she cannot, or will not, say more in public. It does not claim the LRA is resurgent as an army. It does not promise an imminent arrest. It asserts presence and function — that Kony still directs, still decides, still exists as a command figure rather than a rumor. For a prosecution office that must husband its resources across many situations, spending investigative effort on a twenty-year-old case is itself a statement: the file is live because the fugitive is live.
There is a broader lesson in this for how the world handles the long tail of atrocity. The international justice system was built for moments of rupture — the tribunal after the war, the warrant after the massacre. It was not really built for the twenty-year fade, the fugitive who simply outlasts the news cycle and waits in the bush while attention moves to the next crisis. Kony's survival is an argument that the system needs a different kind of stamina: not just the drama of the arrest, but the dull, expensive, unglamorous work of keeping a case alive across decades — witnesses aging and dying, evidence degrading, political will evaporating — so that when the moment comes, the machinery still works.
And moments do come. History is full of fugitives who seemed permanently beyond reach until they weren't — arrested at a border crossing, betrayed by an aide, caught when a patron fell. The LRA's own history provides the example: Ongwen ended up in The Hague because the group's internal dynamics shifted and defection became his best option. The same logic applies to whatever remains around Kony. A shrunken, isolated group held together by one aging leader is brittle in ways a real army is not; the question is whether anyone is positioned to exploit that brittleness when it cracks.
For now, the practical picture is unchanged: the warrant stands, the investigator keeps working, the group endures in the borderlands, and the attacks in eastern CAR — whoever precisely carried them out — are a reminder that the file marked "Kony" is not history yet. The France 24 interview is valuable less for what it reveals than for what it refuses to let the world forget: that international justice deferred is not international justice done, and that a warlord who has been on the run for twenty years is still, by the ICC's own account, on the run — not dead, not retired, not gone.
The honest forecast is a narrow one. The likeliest near-term outcome is more of the same: a low-level, hard-to-attribute pattern of violence in the borderlands, periodic rumors of Kony's movement, and the ICC maintaining its case without a breakthrough. A genuine resurgence — the LRA as a strategic actor again — would require resources, recruits and a permissive environment that the group does not appear to have. But the least forgiving reading of von Braun's "active" is also the simplest: as long as Joseph Kony is alive and commanding, however diminished his force, the story is not over. Twenty years of running is not the same as twenty years of hiding. At some point, the running has to stop — in a courtroom, in the bush, or in a grave. The world has been waiting two decades to find out which.
There is one more actor in this story that the France 24 interview implicitly summons: the public that once cared, loudly, and then moved on. In 2012, the "Kony 2012" campaign made Joseph Kony the most famous warlord on the internet for a few weeks — thirty million views, celebrity endorsements, a US Congress briefed, a generation of students wearing the name on T-shirts. Critics at the time called it slacktivism, a simplification of a complex war; defenders called it the only reason Washington kept its advisers in the field. Both were partly right. What the episode really demonstrated was the attention economy's cruelest feature: a fugitive can survive the spotlight, but the spotlight cannot survive a fugitive. Kony outlasted the hashtag by fourteen years and counting. The ICC investigator still working the file is, in a sense, the institutional answer to that failure of attention — someone whose job is to care on schedule, whether or not anyone is watching.
The selectivity debate that has dogged the Court in Africa shadows this case too, and von Braun's public profile invites it. Critics of the ICC have long argued that its Africa-heavy docket reflected the path of least resistance rather than the hierarchy of atrocity. The Kony file complicates that charge in both directions: it was the Ugandan government itself that referred the situation to the Court in 2003, and the LRA's victims were overwhelmingly African — the very people the selectivity critique claims the Court instrumentalizes. Whatever one thinks of the Court's record elsewhere, the Kony warrant is the rare case where the demand for justice came from the soil where the crimes were committed. Letting it lapse into symbolism would betray not an abstract principle but actual communities that asked for it.
Those communities include the people the manhunt literature too often counts only as "abductees." The LRA's survival strategy has always depended on stolen children — not only as fighters, but as porters, cooks, lookouts, and forced wives. Defection programs run over the years, with radio broadcasts and leaflet drops urging fighters to come home, produced a slow bleed of escapees whose testimony forms much of what the outside world knows about the group's inner life. Each escapee is also a witness the ICC needs, and each is a person northern Uganda or eastern CAR must somehow reabsorb. The "active" group von Braun describes is therefore not just a military remnant; it is a continuing captivity. Every year the manhunt runs without resolution is another year of childhoods spent in the bush.
That is the moral arithmetic the France 24 interview ultimately puts on the table, and it is why the story belongs on the wire even without a dramatic new development. A warlord who abducted children in the 1990s is, by the ICC's account, still commanding in 2026. The warrant issued when today's university students were toddlers is still open. The attacks in eastern CAR may prove to be misattributed, or the first tremor of something worse — the honest position is that we do not know, and the dishonest one is to pretend the ambiguity means the problem is solved. Twenty years of running is a long time to keep the world's conscience on hold. The investigator's message, stripped of diplomatic varnish, is that the hold cannot continue indefinitely — and that the file, the warrant, and the man at the center of both are still, stubbornly, unfinished business.
