Joseph Kony. The man who, as of early yesterday, no one knew. Now, pretty much every blogger, Facebooker and Tweeter has at least seen his name. For those of you who still haven't seen the video, it's a half hour documentary on Kony, the head of the Lord's Resistance Army, a resistance force of around 2-3,000 members. The main atrocity they commit is raiding villages, abducting the children, and either forcing them into their military (if they're boys), or making them their sex slaves (the fate of the girls). Resistance results in death. What Invisible Children is trying to do is to make him a household name, so the government comes under pressure to find him and capture/kill him. However, it's at this point after watching the video that I've become sceptical of the whole thing. The documentary is below
There's so many questions I want answers to with this. I'll try and tackle some points, but I could literally rant all day. Firstly, IC wants to aid the Ugandan military in finding this guy. They want the money they raise to be used by the military (which, from what I've read is only about 1/3 of what they raise, the rest is all spent on PR and wages!) of Uganda. Now, something about that just doesn't seem quite right with me. First off, without trying to cause offence, Uganda is corrupt. It has a CPI rating of 2.1 (1 being very corrupt, 10 being saint-like). Their military is known for committing atrocities in itself, gang rape, looting of villages etc. Are these really the people we want to be helping? Also, if the LRA's army is made up of kids, surely he'll retaliate if he comes under attack with...well, kids. So, in order to save these children, some of them are going to have to die, probably a large number of them. We don't even know how Kony's going to react when he finds out the entire world knows is onto him. These people like to keep a low profile. So what's to say he won't order the mass killing of all these children? The Nazis attempted to burn all their evidence, what's to say he won't? This should've stayed covert.
I also must say that I found the video to be borderline propaganda. If all it takes to vilify one person on a global scale is one guy on a documentary with a huge PR budget, then that's quite terrifying, in all honesty. Think about it, if I was stupidly rich and was a bit of a bastard, all I'd have to do is make a well thought-out video portraying my chosen person to be the next Hitler and use the genius marketing tool of social networking to spread my malicious lies like wildfire. I'm not saying this video is a lie, or that Joseph Kony isn't evil, but all we've seen is one documentary on the man. Are we all willing to believe this one guy? I also disagree with the use of his son in the video. Remember that American political broadcast that tried to tell us that if gays can marry then it would confuse the children? It got completely lambasted. Because it used kids to get their message across. Well this guy is using his own son in a video to say "if my son was kidnapped and made to kill people, it would be all over the news", along with cute clips of his son doing cute son-ish things. Same principle, but when the subject is largely agreed with, it seems it becomes okay. That's because they know it tugs at our heart-strings. This is what's so propaganda-ish about it.
Another point, in a typically American fashion, the picture is that by killing one person, the problem will be solved. The fact that this force is made up of thousands of people hasn't been thought of. Think about it. There's 100 U.S. troops there at the moment to aid the Ugandan military. They have to provide the equipment to help them fight potentially 3,000 people, that's without bringing the abducted children into the equation. It doesn't add up. This isn't a fox killing chickens, this is a complex organisation, in which if one guy is killed, a new one will pop up in another base. Don't forget, they're acting "on God's command" so I'll bet they aren't exactly going to be scared of death either.
There's so much more I can say on this, but for now, I'll leave it (maybe a part 2 rant?). I understand the cause, but I'm not quite sure I support the methods and the way they're going about capturing this guy. Why this one guy? The number of paedophile ring leaders, human traffickers, etc. out there, why aren't we trying to capture them as well? This sort of thing isn't completely unheard of in Africa. Civil wars break out all the time. Look up 'necklacing' on Wikipedia. The civilians aren't afraid to conduct this sort of thing on children. Why aren't we trying to stop that? As I said, this is wholly wrong and sick. But I don't think donating to IC is going to do much good.
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