The case against Joseph Kony, and four other senior leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group is one of the ICC’s first cases, referred to the court by the Ugandan government in December 2003. The LRA is a Christian militia founded by Mr. Kony to fight for the Acholi ethnic group of northern Uganda. But it has morphed into an ill-defined mass-murder movement for hire, drawing members – often child soldiers, usually by abduction – from several countries: Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and the Central African Republic. Twenty-one counts of war crimes and 12 counts of crimes against humanity have been filed against Kony and the other leaders (Raska Lukwiya, Okot Odhiambo, Dominic Ongwen, and Vincent Otti). Lukwiya was killed by Ugandan military in Aug. 2006, but charges remain against the other four, who are fugitives.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
