Tag Archives: Kony2012

#Ugandans 2012: An article by JRP’s co-founder Erin Baines

Blog, , , , ,

Our co-founder and advisor, Dr. Erin Baines, has written a response to the media phenomenon by Invisible Children, “Kony 2012.” (As many of you are aware, “Kony 2012,” is a short film by IC that has garnered more than 75 million views in less than a week.) Erin’s article, titled “#Ugandans 2012,” highlights the work of many local organizations in northern Uganda who have been working tirelessly for peace and justice for conflict-related atrocities.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on  Twitter to read similar articles that highlight local peacebuilders and their reactions to this latest campaign to put an end to LRA violence.

And as always, you can view all of our past publications on this site to learn more about the dimensions of the conflict and victims’ views on justice and reconciliation for northern Uganda and conflict-affected regions.

“#Ugandans 2012,” Canadian International Council, 12 March 2012

In the News, , , ,

“#Ugandans 2012,” Canadian International Council, 12 March 2012

http://www.opencanada.org/features/ugandans2012/

By Erin Baines

After being relentlessly pursued by the Ugandan military for more than a year, eight-year old Aling – a daughter born of forced marriage to one of the high commanders of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) – was tired and scared. One morning after a particularly deadly attack, she turned to her mother and asked, “Mama, why can’t we just leave this army?”  Her mother had spent 14 years as a forced wife. She knew the risks involved in betraying the rebels, yet she could not refuse her child. They left that night.

The commander was enraged.  He sent 20 of his best soldiers to bring back his daughter and kill his wife. As they went, one of the soldiers said to the others, “Aling’s mother is a good woman. She has helped us many times when we were injured or needed comfort. Why should we not follow her instead of the commander?”  They too escaped, joining Aling and her mother at a rehabilitation centre in Pajule, Pader District. 

Some days later, having heard that his soldiers, wife and daughter were in the nearby centre, the commander dispatched another 70 soldiers to attack the place, ordering them to kill everyone.  As they got nearer, the soldiers surrendered their guns to the local officials.  They too followed the lead of Mama Aling, the mother of the child who asked if it was not time to go home.

Since the early 2000s, the Ugandan initiative, the Justice and Reconciliation Project (JRP), a Ugandan initiative, has recorded some of the worst human rights abuses that have taken place during the war, and the efforts of people like Mama Aling to stop them.  JRP documents the stories of ordinary people caught between the warring parties – of those pressed into fighting against their will, and those who are born of circumstances not of their choosing.  The organization got the help of dozens of persons in displaced camps who, for years, volunteered to keep track of, and record, what was happening there.

At the height of the war, the original JRP team walked, rode bicycles and boda boda (motorcycles), and travelled in the backs of trucks to reach areas that no international journalist or advocate would go to.  At the time, people weren’t permitted to travel even a few kilometres our to town after curfew.

Members of the JRP team – who are about the same age as Jason Russell, the maker of the Kony 2012 film – document the memories of massacre survivors.  They record stories of sexual violence and the ways women and men resist armed soldiers. They speak to parents whose children are still missing. They listen to commanders who surrendered and who regret the atrocities they committed. They try to move beyond the good-guy-bad-guy model, recognizing the extraordinary circumstances in which soldiers commit violence against others, as children who grew up in war and were forced to fight.

Sometimes this work is overwhelming. It often feels like documentation and advocacy is not enough. At some point, each member of the team has held heads in hands and wept following an interview, or after meeting a community. After the tears, they gather courage and write it all down. Then they go and talk about it with local officials and request a resolution.

They publish reports and news articles, do tours and hold radio programmes in order to bring the voices of communities to national and international debate and attention. This isn’t always an easy task.

In 2007, Boniface Ojok, the project’s coordinator, met with the LRA and government representatives to the peace talks. He sat in between the heads of the two delegations and told them what he has seen and learned about justice from people on the ground.  

Co-founder Michael Otim put his life on hold for more than two years, attending each and every peace talk between 2006 and 2008 as an advisor to a delegation of cultural and religious leaders.

JRP’s advocacy is not just with officials and leaders, however.  It also engages the communities most affected by the war. JRP’s members utilize oral history, dance, song, drama, poetry, radio programs, community dialogues and public marches to share what they have learned at national debates, and to promote ownership of advocacy. They help survivors found their own advocacy groups, and when resources are available, they bring survivors to meet with officials and leaders.

For example, JRP supports storytelling sessions among a group of war-affected women Gulu, a town in northern Uganda. These sessions provide a space in which women can speak freely about their memories of war and the challenges of daily life. As word spread about the group, so many women wanted to join that new groups started to form.  On International Women’s day this year, IRP formally launched the Women’s Advocacy Network, with over 200 members.  The group’s chairperson, Evelyn Amony, spent more than 10 years in captivity. She believes she survived the war to tell her story, and to help others tell theirs.

This is courageous and exhausting work, but JRP is not alone. Hundreds of local and national organizations work to document and remember, and to insist on justice. There is Human Rights Focus (HURIFO), for instance, which operated as the only human-rights organization in the region for many years.  There is also the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative, an interdenominational group (Catholic, Presbyterian, Anglican and Muslim) that has repeatedly met with the rebels and government in attempts to persuade them of the need for peace talks.  

There is Alice Achan, who rallied her community together to build a shelter for the hundreds of children who escaped rebel captivity but had no where to go, and no way to find their parents.  In the shelter, she loved and nourished each one of them until they could be reunited with their families. Then there is the Concerned Parents Association, which formed after 139 girls were abducted from St. Mary’s College in Aboke. Women like Angelina Atyam travelled the world over and back (she even met Oprah!) to find their children.

During the nearly 10 years I have worked in Uganda with advocates, survivors and researchers, I have never heard them lobby for military intervention.  In fact, the opposite is true: Ugandans have consistently insisted on an amnesty process for rebels, recognizing that many soldiers were forced into combat as children. Most prefer to talk peace rather than wage war. It is common knowledge that the first to be killed in military raids are the most recently abducted kids.

This is not to say that Ugandans do not want to stop Kony, or that they do not want justice. Nor is it to say that local leaders are perfect and know all the solutions, or that they speak with one voice. This is not the case. 

The point is, Ugandans, along with people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Sudan and many other countries around the world, are working for peace in both extraordinary and ordinary ways that are often off “the grid”.  

They do so that the world is a better place for their children – so that it is better for Jason Russell’s children – and they do it without ever being called a hero.

So alongside the current media hubbub around Kony 2012, how about celebrating the heroism of thousands of Ugandans like Aling, Boniface, Evelyn, and Alice, building peace and working for justice despite the war.  How about #Ugandans2012?

“More on Kony 2012,” The Daily What, 12 March 2012

In the News, ,

“More on Kony 2012,” The Daily What, 12 March 2012
http://thedailywh.at/2012/03/12/more-on-kony-2012/

JRP is referenced twice in this opinion piece on “Kony 2012” — “… in an effort to perpetuate “myths” about Kony…” and “…are desperately trying — peacefully, through reconciliation – to move away…”

Author Unknown

More On Kony 2012: If this past week has taught us anything, it’s that people love — love — being aware of things. More than that, they love telling other people that they are aware of things. Most of all, however, people are absolutely, unconditionally, head over heels in lifelong love with other people liking the fact that they are aware of things.

But why do people love being aware of things as much as they do? In a 2008 blog post, Stuff White People Like attempted to get to the core of the Western world’s  codependent relationship with awareness. By raising awareness, wrote Christian Lander, ”you get all the benefits of helping (self satisfaction, telling other people), but no need for difficult decisions or the ensuing criticism (how do you criticize awareness?).”

Of course, what makes awareness so alluring is precisely what makes it so pointless: It doesn’t — in and of itself — actually accomplish anything.

Awareness, beyond argument, is the first step towards fixing a problem. But, invariably, that shared endorphin boost people experience when banding together to rally around awareness for a cause wears off, and all that’s left is a bunch of people with no answers looking around for someone — anyone — to take the next step.

And then someone does. And we pat them on the back for their willingness to put in the elbow grease and leg work necessary to actually get something done. And we happily sign their petitions or open our wallets to them: After all, it’s the least we can do to help this selfless do-gooder advance our cause beyond awareness. And we send them on their way, content in the thought that, if we couldn’t spare the time, at least we could spare a few dollars and a signature.

But what if that person, or that organization, we just bankrolled doesn’t understand the problem or what needs to be done about it? What if, instead of helping, their actions end up hurting not only the people they claim to want to help, but also the people who are actually helping? And, perhaps most importantly, what if the people supposedly being helped don’t want help? Should it still be foisted upon them against their will?

Take KONY 2012 for example.

 

A lot has been said over the last several days about Invisible Children‘s ultra-viral awareness campaign that targets infamous central African warlord Joseph Kony, and his 26-year-old rebel militia, the Lord’s Resistance Army.

IC’s finances have been called into question; their “emotional  porn” approach toward awareness solicitation has been criticised as a “fund-raising stunt” which employs “blatant dishonesty” in an effort to perpetuate “myths” about Kony thereby achieving their stated goal of direct military intervention; the group’s leadership troika — seen above posing in 2008 with members of the then-child-soldier-recruiting Sudan People’s Liberation Army – has been referred to as self-promoting colonialists by the AP photographer who snapped the shot. But, through all the op-eds and the think pieces and the public polls, the only ­opinions worth heeding have remained largely invisible: Those of the people who are actually from there.

“[Invisible Children] are not known as a peace building organization and I do not think they have experience with peace building and conflict resolution methods,” wrote Anywar Ricky Richard, the director of the northern Ugandan organization Friends of Orphans, and a man who knows first-hand the horrors of the Lord’s Resistance Army, having been a former child soldier in its service. “I totally disagree with their approach of military action as a means to end this conflict.”

Ugandan-born activist TMS Ruge, co-founder of Project Diaspora, agrees wholeheartedly with Richard. Of KONY 2012 he says: “It is a slap in the face to so many of us who want to rise from the ashes of our tumultuous past and the noose of benevolent, paternalistic, aid-driven development memes.”

Indeed, in the rush to condescend to the central Africans who are “just not working hard enough” to get rid of Kony and his ilk and finally start improving their quality of life, what many overlook (or willfully ignore) is the already-visible progress that has been made thanks to the hard-earned grassroots efforts of central Africans themselves.

“Uganda was voted by Lonely Planet amongst the top destinations for 2012 but has this NGO just undone the potential for Uganda’s tourism?” asks Ida Horner, a Ugandan expat who remembers well a much harsher life under Idi Amin. “After all the tourism industry provides a real opportunity for Ugandans to work their way out of poverty through providing services that tourists want to consume.”

Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole takes it a step further and slams what he calls the “White Savior Industrial Complex,” which cares little for the end, so long as it gets satisfaction from the means. “The white savior supports brutal policies in the morning, founds charities in the afternoon, and receives awards in the evening,” says Cole. “The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice. It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.”

And all this before we’ve even touched on the dark heart of the matter: Joseph Kony.

Kony is, without a doubt, a despicable human being. His 25-year reign of terror has resulted in hundreds of deaths, thousands of abductions, and hundreds of thousands of displacements. But to suggest that Kony is anywhere near worthy of cheap, throwaway comparisons to such historical horror-mongers as Hitler is not only irresponsible, it might actually be what Kony wants.

IC’s video appears to suggest that Kony is currently in possession of over 30,000 child soldiers. According to the UN’s latest report, the LRA has “less than 500 combatants,” and was “dislodged” by Ugandan security forces in 2002 — meaning they are no longer there, and are unlikely to return.

Kony and the LRA are now but a horrible memory to many in northern Uganda who don’t need an Internet campaign to make Kony popular. They know all-too-well who he is and what he was once capable of, and are desperately trying — peacefully, through reconciliation – to move away from the shadows of their traumatic past.

“Now we have peace, people are back in their homes,” says Dr. Beatrice Mpora, who runs a community health organization in the rebels’ former northern Uganda stomping ground of Gulu. “They are planting their fields, they are starting their businesses. That is what people should help us with.”

That is not to say that Kony is entirely done away with; he is still able to menace remote areas in neighboring countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic — his last known hideout. But rather than an ascending fuhrer, Kony is an aging monster, thrashing about blindly in hopes of remaining relevant for a little while longer.

Sadly, it seems IC’s KONY 2012 campaign may end up doing exactly what it aims to do: Provide a spent villain with a second wind of infamy.

“Most madmen love the idea of fame,” says Marc DuBois of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), “so Joseph Kony’s wet dream just came true.” By focusing all available attention on a bygone bogeyman whose days are numbered, the IC may be unwittingly rejuvenating the perception of Kony as an intimidating and influential force with a wider reach than his true resources allow.

“Making Kony ‘famous’ could make him stronger,” says well-respected Ugandan blogger Javie Ssozi. And that strength puts a lot of people in danger, including both locals and aid workers such as DuBois and colleague Avril Benoît. “MSF teams in LRA-affected regions of DR Congo, Central African Republic & South Sudan are likely wary of retaliation risks,” said Benoît.

IC, with its support for direct military intervention in Uganda, may not care that Uganda’s own government considers it “totally misleading to suggest that the war is still in Uganda,” but Kony does. To him, KONY 2012 represents a rebirth — a chance to restore a stifling grip that has been slipping for years.

So say KONY 2012 succeeds. America plants even more bootprints on the ground, smokes Kony out of his cave, and turns him over to the International Criminal Court. A job well done and stogies all around. Now there’s just the small matter of the fact that nothing has actually changed, because KONY 2012 doesn’t do a lick to address any of the big-picture problems currently facing central Africa.

All it has succeeded in doing is propping up Uganda’s war-crimes-perpetrating military and its brutal, corrupt, human-rights-abusing dictatorship, and strengthening the alliance of four-term-president Yoweri Museveni with his US counterpart at a time when a foothold in Uganda would be extremely advantageous to American oil interests.

Meanwhile, actual problems in need of actual solutions are being rendered inaudible by the beating of war drums.

Gulu, the Ugandan town ravaged by the LRA in a previous life is now home to the highest numbers of child prostitutes in Uganda, according to Ugandan journalist Angelo Izama. It also has unacceptably high rates of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis, even when compared to the rest of Africa. And the real bane of Ugandan children — the mysterious “Nodding Disease,” which has killed scores and debilitated hundreds — is no closer to a cure.

“Last year I went to Gulu, Uganda, where Invisible Children is based, and interviewed over 50 locals,” writes Columbia University student Amber Ha in an open letter to IC’s Jason Russell. “Every single person questioned Invisible Children’s legitimacy and intention.”

Adam Branch, a human rights advocate who has worked for years in northern Uganda, elaborates on what precisely has given so many people in the area pause:

The warmongering, the self-indulgence, the commercialization, the reductive and one-sided story they tell, their portrayal of Africans as helpless children in need of rescue by white Americans, and the fact that civilians in Uganda and central Africa may have to pay a steep price in their own lives so that a lot of young Americans can feel good about themselves, and a few can make good money.

By now it should be abundantly clear that KONY 2012 doesn’t offer a single enduring solution to any of the problems it pretends to want to fix. At the very least, it makes things worse. At the very most, it makes things much worse.

But beyond the reasons why lies a simple truth: Lasting change — the kind that makes people’s lives truly better — doesn’t come from awareness, or even from doing something: It comes from doing what needs to be done. And knowing what that is requires paying attention, listening to the victims, and understanding the whole story.

You’ll notice that I haven’t once mentioned money. There is plenty to say about IC’s accountability and transparency (or lack thereof) and the way it goes about spending the piles of cash it is making off KONY 2012 — and piles of cash are definitely being made considering the ubiquitous ”sold out” heraldic standards that popped up almost instantaneously next to the all-important “awareness swag” IC is hawking in conjunction with the video campaign — but that discussion is mostly moot.

IC is not a charity in the true sense of the word. It is a private interest group that allocates the overwhelming majority of its budget (nearly 70% in 2011) toward travel, compensation, administration, fundraising, making movies, and lobbying celebrities and congress [pdf] to support its central aim: Direct foreign military intervention in Africa.

Whether or not that is what IC should be spending its money on is a question best left to IC. The real question that you should be asking yourself is whether or not that is what you should be spending your money on.

It should be well-evident by now that KONY 2012 is a poorly thought-out and oversimplified campaign with shortsighted objectives that are detrimental to every relevant cause except making money. More than that, it is a campaign that is unwelcome by local civilians, politicians, experts, and humanitarian aid workers.

Asked about the video’s glossing over major aspects of regional history and culture, IC co-founder, and the star of KONY 2012, Jason Russell told the New York Times, “No one wants a boring documentary on Africa. Maybe we have to make it pop, and we have to make it cool. We view ourself as the Pixar of human rights stories.”

That’s great, except Africa is not a feel-good animated feature for the whole family. It is a real place with real people who would suffer real consequences if KONY 2012 succeeded in convincing well-meaning individuals that all it needs for a happy ending is to catch the “bad guy” with the help of American soldiers.

Africans deserve better than to be treated like two-dimensional Wacom sketches by a group of sensationalist jet-setters who — by their own admission — oversimplify the issues to sell their cause (and their bracelets). The people of Africa — nay, the people of everywhere — deserve real, long-lasting solutions; not quick-fix half-remedies that look good on Facebook.

There are plenty of ways to help without trampling all over self-determination. There are good, honest, transparent not-for-profits based in Africa that have been working for years to promote self-sufficiency through education, health services, rehabilitation, democracy-building initiatives, and myriad other programs that have resulted in empowering change. These organizations help the people help themselves without condescension or remote imperatives.

But don’t take my word for it: Do the research. Find a cause you support and make sure it is what it says it is, and, more importantly, that it helps the people it claims to help. Invisible Children and KONY 2012 do not meet that criterion, and for that reason, above all other reasons presented here and elsewhere, it should not be allowed to speak on their behalf.

“Uganda: How you can help,” Washington Post, 9 March 2012

In the News, , ,

“Uganda: How you can help,” Washington Post, 9 March 2012
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/blogpost/post/uganda-how-you-can-help/2012/03/09/gIQANxuE1R_blog.html

By Elizabeth Flock

Whether or not you support the very viral Kony 2012 campaign created by the charity Invisible Children, Joseph Kony and the child-recruiting Lord’s Resistance Army he leads are undeniably brutal. Uganda, where the LRA has long operated, has been ravaged by conflict for decades.


Villagers sit in the back of a Ugandan army truck as they are moved to a safe area from the site of a massacre carried out by the Lords Resistance Army in 2004. (KAREL PRINSLOO – AP) The country suffered grave atrocities under the dictatorial regime of Idi Amin in the 1970s. Since the LRA, a violent religious and military group, began operations in Uganda in 1987, it has abducted and forced about 66,000 children in the country to fight with them, according to the World Bank. Nearly 90 percent of the region’s population has been forced to leave their homes. And while the LRA has weakened in recent years, Uganda, with a population of 32 million, continues to suffer from serious human rights problems. A U.S. State Department report in 2010 gave a chilling list of abuses, including arbitrary and vigilante killings, trafficking in persons, sexual abuse of children and the ritual killing of children. It is worth reading the entire list here.

Since BlogPost began covering the Kony 2012 campaign Wednesday, many readers have expressed in e-mails or in the comments that they would like to better know how to help Uganda. Below, we have rounded up a partial list of the many groups doing aid work in the country. Some of these charities have ratings or reviews on Charity Navigator or Great Nonprofits to help you make a choice; others do not. The Web site for Invisible Children is here, or watch their film first below:

Oxfam Uganda

Oxfam, an international oganization that works to fight poverty and injustice, focuses in Uganda on supporting people affected by conflict, lobbying for peace and working to better livelihoods, especially in the north. View its Web site here.

The International Rescue Committee Uganda

The IRC works internationally to help people rebuild after humanitarian crises. In Uganda, where the IRC has been since 1998, the committee works to protect women and children from violence and encourages education, peace and development. It also helps small farmers and businesses. View its Web site here.

BRAC

BRAC says it is the largest NGO operating in Uganda, and has been in the country since 2006. Its focus areas are health and education, women and girl empowerment, and microfinance for the poor. BRAC claims to have reached more than 2 million Ugandans, and says 10,800 students have graduated from its schools, which operate in post-conflict zones in the north. View its Web site here.

The Refugee Law Project (RLP)

The RLP works to ensure human rights for asylum seekers, refugees, and internally displaced persons in Uganda. It offers legal aid as well as counseling, clinical and mental health services. View its Web site here.

Grassroots Reconciliation Group (GRG)

GRG works in northern Uganda to rehabilitate former child soldiers and help reconcile them with their communities. The group says it has assisted 525 former child soldiers and their communities on micro-finance, counseling, and livelihood projects such as agriculture and goat-rearing. View its web site here.

African Youth Initiative Network (AYINET)

AYINET provides physical and psychosocial care and rehabilitation in the Uganda’s war-affected northern region. It specifically works to support victims of brutalities suffered at the hands of the LRA, through medical rehabilitation or the promotion of youth leaders who will work for peace and justice. View its Web site here.

Christian Counseling Fellowship (CCF Pader)

CCF is a community-based organization in Pader, northern Uganda. Its goal is to promote Christian values and provide education, child protection, health care and livelihood opportunities to war-affected women and children.View its Web site here.

Justice and Reconciliation Project (JRP)

JRP, in Gulu, northern Uganda since 2005, works to empower war-affected communities by getting them to participate in the processes of justice, healing and reconciliation, and involving them in research and advocacy. View its Web site here.

Gulu Support the Children Organisation (GUSCO)

GUSCO is an indigenous NGO that works to promote the well-being of conflict-affected children in the north. It provides psycho-social support, capacity building of communities, education, advocacy and peace-building. View its Web site here.

St. Mary’s Lacor Hosptial

The hospital, founded in 1959 by Catholic missionaries, says it provides diagnostic, therapeutic and preventive medicine services for more than 300,000 patients annually, half of whom are children younger than 6. View its Web site here.

Caritas Uganda

Caritas Uganda provides access to food as well as initiatives for democracy-building, gender equality and HIV/AIDS eradication. View its Web site here.

“Taking ‘Kony 2012′ Down A Notch,” Justice in Conflict blog, 7 March 2012

In the News, , , ,

“Taking ‘Kony 2012′ Down A Notch,” Justice in Conflict blog, 7 March 2012
http://justiceinconflict.org/2012/03/07/taking-kony-2012-down-a-notch/

JRP is cited (below: “majority of Acholi people”) in reference to our December situational analysis on amnesty.

By Mark Kersten

As we speak, one of the most pervasive and successful human rights based viral campaigns in recent memory is underway. Invisible Children’s ‘Kony 2012‘ campaign has taken Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and every other mainstream social media refuge by storm. In many ways, it is quite impressive. But there’s one glaring problem: the campaign reflects neither the realities of northern Ugandan nor the attitudes of its people. In this context, this post examines the explicit and implicit claims made by the ‘Kony 2012′ campaign and tests them against the empirical record on the ground.

Before jumping into the fray, however, I should preface the post by noting that, in many ways, Invisible Children have done a fantastic job in advocating for the rights of northern Ugandans, highlighting the conflict and providing tangible benefits to victims and survivors of LRA brutality. Indeed, this post is not intended to take aim at Invisible Children as an organization but rather to debunk some of the myths its ‘Kony 2012′ campaign is propagating.

The Problem is Popularity? 

Kony 2012 is about making Joseph Kony, the leader of the notorious LRA, famous because, the line of reasoning goes, if everyone knew him, no one would be able to stand idly by as he waged his brutal campaign of terror against the people of East Africa.

I am actually stupefied that any analysis of the ‘LRA question’ results in the identification of the problem being that “Kony isn’t popular enough”. The reality is that few don’t know who Joseph Kony is in East Africa and the Great Lakes Region, making it all-too-apparent that this isn’t about them, their views or their experiences. But even more puzzling is that Joseph Kony is one of the best known alleged war criminals in the world – including in the United States. This is the case in large part because of the advocacy of Western NGOs, including Invisible Children and the Enough Project as well as the ICC arrest warrants issued against Kony and his senior command.

I would understand if this were the 1990s or even the early 2000s when the misery plaguing northern Uganda flew completely under the radar. I would understand if this campaign was about the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But a campaign in 2012, premised on Joseph Kony not being famous enough is just folly.

'Kony 2012'

A poster from the ‘Kony 2012’ campaign. (Poster: Invisible Children)

Umm…what about northern Ugandans?

It is hard to respect any documentary on northern Uganda where a five year-old white boy features more prominently than any northern Ugandan victim or survivor. Incredibly, with the exception of the adolescent northern Ugandan victim, Jacob, the voices of northern Ugandans go almost completely unheard.

It isn’t hard to imagine why the views of northern Ugandans wouldn’t be considered: they don’t fit with the narrative produced and reproduced in the insulated echo chamber that produced the ‘Kony 2012′ film.

‘Kony 2012′, quite dubiously, avoids stepping into the ‘peace-justice’ question in northern Uganda precisely because it is a world of contesting and plural views, eloquently expressed by the northern Ugandans themselves. Some reports suggest that the majority of Acholi people continue to support the amnesty process whereby LRA combatants – including senior officials – return to the country in exchange for amnesty and entering a process of ‘traditional justice’. Many continue to support the Ugandan Amnesty law because of the reality that it is their own children who constitute the LRA. Once again, this issue is barely touched upon in the film. Yet the LRA poses a stark dilemma to the people of northern Uganda: it is now composed primarily of child soldiers, most of whom were abducted and forced to join the rebel ranks and commit atrocities. Labeling them “victims” or “perpetrators” becomes particularly problematic as they are often both.

Furthermore, the crisis in northern Uganda is not seen by its citizens as one that is the result of the LRA. Yes, you read that right. The conflict in the region is viewed as one wherein both the Government of Uganda and the LRA, as well as their regional supporters (primarily South Sudan and Khartoum, respectively) have perpetrated and benefited from nearly twenty-five years of systemic and structural violence and displacement. This pattern is what Chris Dolan has eloquently and persuasively termed ‘social torture‘ wherein both the Ugandan Government and the LRA’s treatment of the population has resulted in symptoms of collective torture and the blurring of the perpetrator-victim binary.

Kony and Egeland

Kony and his former second in command, Vincent Otti, with former UN Undersecretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Jan Egeland (Photo: New York Times)

The Solution?

Given Invisible Children’s problematic identification of the issue, it becomes impossible for them to come up with an appropriate vision of resolving the crisis.

Invisible Children is, perhaps rightly, proud that it put the ‘LRA question’ on the Obama administration’s agenda. In this context, last year’s announcement that the administration would send 100 military ‘advisors’ to Uganda was widely celebrated. But this triumphalism occludes key realities.

The sending of 100 troops was not, in any sense, an altruistic move by the administration. First, it went unreported that many of the troops were already in Uganda. Second, the announcement was, at least in part, a tit-for-tat response for the Government of Uganda’s military engagement in Somalia – where the US refuses to deploy troops. As Matt Brown of the Enough Project conceded:

“The U.S. doesn’t have to fight al-Qaida-linked Shabab in Somalia, so we help Uganda take care of their domestic security problems, freeing them up to fight a more dangerous – or a more pressing, perhaps – issue in Somalia.

It is clear that the ‘Kony 2012′ campaign sees the 100 US troop allotment as inadequate. Here they are right – 100 US troops is not the solution. But their own answer is highly problematic.

We know what the makers of “Kony 2012″ believe should happen but they won’t say it explicitly, except to say that Kony must be “stopped”.

Obama’s orders for his 100 troops – presumably supported by those behind ‘Kony 2012′ – is to “kill or capture” Joseph Kony. I don’t think it is a stretch to suggest that many of the same individuals who will form the legion of participants in ‘Kony 2012′ were on the streets celebrating the killing of Osama bin Laden. It thus likely holds that they bought into the belief, proffered by Obama himself, that bin Laden’s killing amounted to justice and if you didn’t agree, you should get your head checked.

The solution then, is something similar: an American-led intervention into at least four countries where the LRA is or has been active (Uganda, the DRC, the Central African Republic and South Sudan) to hunt down Kony. Capturing him, after all, is secondary to “stopping” him.

The idea of “stopping Kony”, of course plays into the narrative created by the ‘Kony 2012′ campaign where what actually happens to Kony and the LRA is irrelevant. The unspecific aim of “stopping” him is sufficient. Who, after all, doesn’t want Kony “stopped”? But then what? If Kony is killed or captured, then what? What happens to the other members of the LRA? ‘Kony 2012′ offers no answers here.

In this context, it is worthwhile remembering that massive regional military solutions (Operations Iron Fist and Lightning Thunder most recently), with support from the US, have thus far failed to dismantle or “stop” the LRA. These failures have created serious and legitimate doubts that the ‘LRA question’ is one that can be resolved by military means.

Incredibly, there is no mention in the film or the campaign that northern Ugandans are currently enjoying the longest period of peace since the conflict began in 1986. Virtually every single northern Ugandan I spoke to during my own field research believes that there is peace in the region. While sporadic violence continues, particularly as a result of bitter land disputes, there have been no LRA attacks in years. In the mid 2000s, the ‘LRA problem’ was exported out of Uganda. The LRA is currently residing in the DRC, CAR, and perhaps parts of South Sudan and even Darfur. Today, land issues and the recent Walk to Work crisis are higher on the agenda than the LRA in northern Uganda.

Lastly, killing Kony cannot resolve the actual sources of the crisis which are far more structural than superficial (to put it lightly) analyses like ‘Kony 2012′ would like to admit. As respected scholars of northern Uganda, Mareike Schomerus, Tim Allen, and Koen Vlassenroot, recently argued,

“Until the underlying problem — the region’s poor governance — is adequately dealt with, there will be no sustainable peace.”

Kony (left) with Otti. (Photo: AFP)

The Need for a Sober Second Thought

In the end, ‘Kony 2012′ falls prey to the obfuscating, simplified and wildly erroneous narrative of a legitimate, terror-fighting, innocent partner of the West (the Government of Uganda) seeking to eliminate a band of lunatic, child-thieving, machine-gun wielding mystics (the LRA). The main beneficiary of this narrative is, once again, the Ugandan Government of Yoweri Museveni, whose legitimacy is bolstered and – if the ‘Kony 2012′ campaign is ‘successful’ – will receive more military funding and support from the US.

Of course, as a viral campaign launched through social media, ‘Kony 2012′ is impressive, if not unprecedented. It will, undoubtedly, mobilize and morph a horde of sincere American youths into proxy war criminal hunters. It will further succeed in increasing the ‘popularity’ of Joseph Kony and the LRA in the United States. But it will do so for many of – if not all – the wrong reasons.

I remember when I was in grade school and a teacher told the students that it was actually difficult to fail. “You have to try to fail,” he said. If ‘Kony 2012′ is to be judged by its reflection of the realities on the ground in northern Uganda and how it measures up against the empirical record, the makers of Kony 2012 tried – and succeeded.

——————————

UPDATE: I’ve now published a response to the main criticisms that this post has inspired. See here: Taking ‘Kony2012′ Down a Notch – Responding to Criticism.

Check out this excellent account by Daniel Solomon over at his blog, Securing Rights.

Also, big thanks to my friend and colleague, Paul Kirby, for his insightful comments on a draft of this post.