If you have not seen the KONY 2012 YouTube video by now, you must have been living under a rock. But just in case you don’t know what I am talking about, Joseph Kony, (a.k.a. the Bad Guy) is the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a terrible rebel army that abducts Ugandan children and forces them to become child soldiers.
Kony and his illicit activities have been brought to the attention of the American public and legislature thanks to Invisible Children, a non-profit headed by Jason Russell (a.k.a. the Good Guy), most notably through the widespread publicity of that video.
There have been mixed responses to this video and to the efforts of Invisible Children worldwide. On one hand, the extensive support shown by the American public has influenced the U.S. Senate to send troops into the African Union to fight crimes against humanity, which, as the video suggests, are prevalent in Uganda. On the other hand, there has also been a massive negative backlash, including the accusation by Foreign Affairs that Invisible Children “manipulated and exaggerated” the facts of the story to make it appear more black and white than it really was, effectively creating a “good guy” and “bad guy.”
On the very surface it looks as if there are good guys and bad guys, but things are never that simple. No one really wants to look any further because once you dive deeper, the sketchier things become and the more you begin to lose faith in humanity.
Invisible Children’s financial dealings are especially shady. Their financial records are public and can be accessed through their website (www.invisiblechildren.com/financials). Page six of the record states that of the 8,676,614 dollars Invisible Children spent in 2011, only 32 percent went to direct services, with the rest going to salaries, transportation expenses and video production.
Speaking of things nobody wants to see, Jason Russell was recently confined to a mental ward after an indecent exposure incident, which may have been due to the sudden popularity of the video and the subsequent close scrutinization of him and his organization. Russell’s actions are all the more suspect when we hear that according to Dr. Beatrice Mpora, director of a community health organization in Gulu, neither Kony nor any of his associates in the LRA have been reported to be in Uganda since 2006.
The entire movement culminated with “Cover the Night” last Friday, April 20, when people were to organize community service projects and hang posters literally errywhere to raise awareness about stopping Kony. According to the KONY 2012 website, 3,590,051 people pledged to do so and a far fewer number of people actually did.
Even Gustavus had its very own faction of do-gooders bent on covering the night. United by moral fiber and a Facebook page, 124 Gusties pledged to “cover every inch of the campus and the streets of St. Peter” with Kony awareness. A total of six people showed up.
This disproportion between people who promised to “cover the night” and those people who actually did is unsurprising and a little bit disturbing.
Russell’s video makes us feel as though we, the ordinary people sitting behind our computer screens, have contributed our blood, sweat and tears to stopping the Bad Guy. People felt like they’d already done their part by pressing their “like” button and, all the while remaining sympathetic, washed their hands of the situation.
Complacency is a dangerous thing. It is that “let somebody else take care of it” mentality that leads to fascist governments with radical ideologies in the first place.
However, there are those people that mistake any action for constructive action. For example, vandals spray painted the Spoonbridge and Cherry and two other sculptures in the Walker sculpture garden this past weekend with Kony’s name. Despite the good intentions of the many Facebook participants, this single YouTube video and its false characterization of Good Guys and Bad Guys has led people to do things that are bad in themselves, like putting a warlord’s name on a beautiful work of art. Is this the sort of activism you want to support?
I didn’t think so.
IN addition, Invisible Children chooses not to highlight the horrific role that the government of Uganda itself played in the suffering of Northern Ugandans during its long conflict with Joseph Kony’s LRA. As researcher Adam Branch, author of the 2011 book Displacing Human Rights: War and Intervention in Northern Uganda (Oxford University Press, 2011) describes, on page 92,
“In September 1996, the government began what would prove to be a policy of long-term mass forced displacement and internment in Acholiland. The UPDF drove
hundreds of thousands of Acholi peasants out of their villages and into camps through a campaign of intimidation, murder, torture, and bombing and burning entire villages, as discussed in chapter 2. After the formation of the camps, the UPDF announced that anyone found outside of the camps would be considered a rebel and killed. Although the government euphemistically called the camps “protected villages”, they were most accurately identified as internment or concentration camps, given their origin in forced displacement and the government violence used to keep civilians from leaving…
Forced displacement had devastating consequences for the interned civilians. …with excess mortality levels reaching approximately 1,000 per week by the mid-2000s. Moreover, the camps were tragically unprotected, and accusations that the government soldiers failed to protect the camps, refused to respond to LRA incursions, and thus turned civilians into easy targets for the LRA, were heard regularly from camp inhabitants.
Despite a record of extreme anti-civilian violence by both sides, as explained in the last chapter, dominant international portrayals of the conflict have tended to cast it in unambiguous moral terms, celebrating the Ugandan government and demonizing the LRA. This portrayal has been in the interest of the Ugandan government and its Western donors, but it is also in the interests of aid agencies
…The irony, of course, is that the internment camps were, by far, the greatest cause of children’s-and adults’-suffering in Northern Uganda and, if anything, made abductions by the LRA easier.”
More recently, in 2011 Ugandan troops and police violently drove an estimated 20,000 Northern Ugandans from their farmlands and burned their homes – so that a British corporation could begin a tree-farming operation.
Hunting for Joseph Kony in the Democratic People’s Republic of the Congo, the Ugandan army has been accused of raping and looting – a possible continuation of a long pattern — in a 2005 ruling from the International Court of Justice at The Hague, Uganda was accused of systematic looting in the DR Congo, and substantial human rights violations there.
The government of Uganda is also currently engaged in a brutal crackdown against political opponents of the regime of Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni.
Given Invisible Children’s claim that human rights are the overriding consideration, it is very strange that the nonprofit has steered a wide berth around the government of Uganda’s own dismal human rights record.
Curt,Earlier this week one of my son’s friends, home from coeglle, stopped by to hang out with us and was talking about the Kony video. Prior to that, I hadn’t heard about it, although my daughter and son had (I’m too often in the dark, I don’t watch much TV or read news feeds). I still haven’t seen the video, but I’ve since purposely checked out the on-line news feeds and have seen it featured on TV news shows. What I also found disturbing, obviously besides the whole content/story line, is how the media is referring to this video as an Internet sensation,’ making it sound like some kind of cool, pop-culture documentary or just another YouTube video gone viral. As always, you’ve wisely and intentionally put things into perspective with your blog post here, and I thank you so much for that and for being the voice of reason. Grace & peace,Pam