Web discovers warlord after 25 years of terror
New film, social media make Joseph Kony ‘famous’ — but will it make a difference?
Joseph Kony has been terrorizing Uganda and other African countries for 25 years, killing thousands and kidnapping 30,000 children to use as soldiers in the Lord’s Resistance Army.
A film about Kony’s atrocities in Uganda, along with a social media campaign to stop him, blew up on the Internet Wednesday. The Kony 2012 campaign by a group called Invisible Children “aims to make Joseph Kony famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice.”
But some are questioning why the campaign is happening now.
“It’s not really news — we know what Kony’s been doing for decades,” Kampala resident Jeff Anguyo told the Star.
Filmmaker Jason Russell said there was no reason for the timing, except that they decided last summer to push the brand Kony 2012.
“It took us nine years to make this movie and we just needed to finish it,” Russell told the Star. “We decided 2012 was the last year for Joseph Kony to continue his crimes against humanity.”
Kony has been indicted for war crimes and human rights atrocities by the International Criminal Court, but he still roams free. The Ugandan army has been searching for Kony throughout Central Africa for years without luck. The United States recently sent 100 special forces advisers to help out.
Kony’s shadowy army now finds refuge in South Sudan, Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo, always on the move and only seen when it attacks villages for food and supplies. It no longer has any ideological purpose for fighting, according to Human Rights Watch — it simply fights for its own survival, and continues to kidnap children, some as young as 10, to serve as soldiers.
After a lull in violence in 2011, there has been a surge in attacks in early 2012. Since January, the group has killed at least 35 people, abducted 104 others and displaced more than17,000 in Orientale province in northeastern Congo, the UN refugee agency said last week.
“If Kony was kidnapping children in the United States, giving them guns and killing dozens in towns across the country just to steal food and supplies, this would have ended a long time ago,” said Anneke Van Woudenberg, a researcher with Human Rights Watch.
But it was Russell’s 30-minute film about Kony that made news Wednesday. It begins with the story of Jacob, a north Ugandan boy whose brother was killed by Kony’s army and who fears abduction. “We are also going to do everything that we can to stop them. Do you hear my words?” Russell tells him.
Invisible Children hopes its awareness campaign will help track down Kony. Among its initiatives, it has planned an international poster plastering event on April 20.
But Mark Kersten, a Canadian at the London School of Economics who is working on his doctoral the- sis about the International Criminal Court, questioned the group’s focus on Kony. “(To say) all that is needed to end this conflict is to cut off the head of the army, which the film suggests, and everything will be resolved, is narrow-minded,” he said. A blog set up to criticize the campaign, called Visible Children, said money from Russell’s group “supports the Ugandan government’s army and various other military forces” — a claim Russell emphatically denies. Critics also say raising awareness through campaigns like this isn’t enough. Only 31 per cent of Invisible Children’s charity dollars go to helping Ugandans, according to an audit of the organization by Considine and Considine. “That is the old way of thinking,” Russell said. “We stand by our use of a third of our money going to our film budget so we can build a realtime website of sightings of Kony’s army.” Anguyo, who noted few people in Uganda have seen the documentary, said victims of Kony and the LRA need attention, too. “A whole generation of kids got destroyed because they did not go to school and were used as soldiers,” Anguyo said. “Now those people are back in the north and need help.”