Matthew Green talks Kony

[video:brightcove:1420186693] West Africa Correspondent for the Financial Times and former East Africa reporter for Reuters, Matthew Green talks at the Frontline Club about General Joseph Kony and unveils hidden and forgotten layers of the bloody conflict that plagues Northern Uganda. Matthew has been getting a lot of press lately for his book. Reuters has a good summary of the author’s motivations for writing it,

Green’s question was simple. How could one maniac hold half a country hostage for 20 years? “I thought something about this doesn’t add up – there’s got to be more to it than one lunatic with an army of child soldiers,” said Green, who has written about his hunt for Kony in a new book, “Wizard of the Nile: The Hunt for Africa’s Most Wanted”. “I wanted to demystify the conflict. Because of the strange image of Kony and the sheer bizarreness of the LRA the explanations tend to stop there. There was very little serious journalistic work about why this conflict persisted.” link

Fellow Frontline blogger Rob Crilly is looking forward to thumbing a copy of Green’s book, not least because he has met Kony,

A bunch of hacks was flown into the dense jungle of South Sudan, close to one of the Lord’s Resistance Army assembly points which had been established as part of peace talks. All week hopes had been raised and then lowered that Kony himself was going to emerge from the bush to meet Jan Egeland, then UN humanitarian relief co-ordinator. But as we stood sweating gently in the jungle clearling, the half-dozen or so of us realised we had a problem. No-one knew what Kony looked like. link