After much deliberation that morning in July 2000, Ben Hoffman decided on dress pants and a pressed shirt with no tie. He would carry no recording devices, fearing that the Ugandan rebel leader Joseph Kony might mistake him for a spy. Hoffman, one of the world’s top international conflict mediators, needed to be careful. Nothing suggesting he was a cowboy, nothing suggesting ulterior motives. Although not widely known in the West, Kony, the leader of the terrorist Lord’s Resistance Army (lra), was then, and remains now, one of the world’s most dangerous men, and quite possibly its cruellest. Hoffman had just heard that Kony had executed the last two men who tried to negotiate with him.
His nerves jittery, Hoffman, then forty-nine, left for the Khartoum airport with his associate, former US diplomat Doug Archer. A few hours later, they landed in Juba, in southern Sudan, where they were greeted by two officers working for the Sudanese deputy director of external security, Yahia Babikar, who oversaw secret operations in Sudan. When Hoffman had asked to meet the elusive Kony, Babikar, a man Hoffman invariably found charming, had made it happen.
Before leaving for Nsitu Camp, Kony’s secret military base, the group stopped at a corner store to buy a crate of Pepsi. They set off through the forest, finally reaching a checkpoint where an lra soldier waved them through. Surprisingly, the soldier was an adult. Kony’s army at the time included some 6,000 children abducted from northern Uganda, making up an estimated 90 percent of his corps. Some were as young as seven; some were girls who served double duty as sex slaves. Hoffman hoped to negotiate the children’s release, paving the way for a peaceful end to the civil war the lra had been waging in Uganda for the past fourteen years. From there, perhaps, he could achieve the primary aim set out for him by his boss, ex-US President Jimmy Carter: an end to one of the world’s longest-running conflicts, the Sudanese civil war. Getting the lra to stop interfering in southern Sudan would be a good start.
Forty-five minutes later, Hoffman’s entourage pulled up to Nsitu Camp. Many who have escaped from Kony have reported that the dead and dying bodies of children hang around the perimeter as a warning to those who think of leaving, though Hoffman saw no evidence of this. He went inside the thatched compound and found Kony, a tall, lean man in his mid-forties with glasses and short hair, surrounded by his senior commanders. They greeted each other warily as the Sudanese cracked open the crate of Pepsi and passed the bottles around as an icebreaker.
Kony quickly launched into a diatribe, spewing insults and grievances at the group as he theatrically waved a small red book Hoffman thought might have been the Bible. Hoffman’s years of experience as a negotiator had built to this moment. He would not be defensive. He would try to relate to Kony and, above all, show no fear.
“The fear, you’re aware of it,” Hoffman would later reflect. “You’d be a fool if you weren’t.” Standing near him was Kony’s right-hand man, Vincent Otti, who had overseen mass slaughters and routinely commanded his troops to hack off the lips, noses, and ears of Ugandan military sympathizers. “This was not a politician,” Hoffman recounts. “This was a soldier, a warrior.”
Kony was the politician in the room. He demanded that Hoffman tell him why unicef was stealing his children and argued that his army wasn’t made up of criminals living in the bush, that they had a political objective. He was upset that he had been excluded from talks held seven months earlier that had produced an accord between Uganda and Sudan.
Hoffman was surprised. He’d expected a juvenile, spirit-possessed psychopath. But here was a man who seemed to make sense. He told Kony he was there to request that the rebel leader hold talks with representatives of the Uganda government, headed by Yoweri Museveni. He explained that he’d been hired as an impartial mediator to help Uganda and Sudan become better neighbours and that he’d been authorized by Museveni’s government to request talks. Kony stretched his forefinger and thumb into the shape of a gun and pointed at Hoffman’s head. Hoffman imagined the sensation of a bullet going through the back of his skull. Then Kony placed his gun hand on the table. “You are not my enemy. My enemy is Museveni,” he said. “We agree to talks.”
That night, Hoffman and the Sudanese officers ate goat stew on the out skirts of Juba, their spirits high with the thought that peace was on its way. That was the best meeting with Kony in a long time, the Sudanese said. But their hopes would soon be dashed. Kony would not meet with Hoffman again, thousands more children would be abducted, and Sudan’s internal strife would continue along its path to Darfur, and genocide. What made this civil war so unstoppable?
Hoffman’s long journey to Sudan began decades before, in 1971, when, as a long-haired twenty-three-year-old, he quit his job driving a dump truck in Kitchener, Ontario, to become a correctional officer. When his brother-in-law, a prison guard, first suggested the idea, Hoffman responded with distaste. “You mean being a guard?” he asked. “We don’t call ourselves guards anymore,” his brother-in-law replied. “We’re correctional officers. Your psychology degree will serve you well.”
