Comment

Comment by Paul Murphy on March 7, 2012 at 7:37pm

Invisible Children responds to criticism about ‘Stop Kony’ campaign

By Elizabeth Flock

A new campaign spreading across the Internet says it has one goal in mind: Make Joseph Kony, the Ugandan leader of the violent Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) “famous” so he can be brought to justice.

Joseph Kony. (Stuart Price - AP)

The viral film was created by Invisible Children, a charity that seeks to end the conflict in Uganda and raises awareness about the use of child soldiers and other human rights abuses by Kony and the LRA.

But some activists have voiced concerns about the methods used by Invisible Children to raise awareness.

Jedediah Jenkins, director of idea development for Invisible Children, called the criticism “myopic” and said the film represented a “tipping point” in that it got young people to care about an issue on the other side of the planet that doesn’t affect them.

#StopKony has been trending worldwide on Twitter since Tuesday, and, as of this writing, the video “Kony2012” has a combined 15 million views on YouTube and Vimeo.

Kony is undeniably brutal, and the World Bank estimates that under his leadership the LRA has abducted and forced around 66,000 children to fight with them during the past two decades. In October, President Obama committed 100 U.S. troops to help the Ugandan army remove Kony.

But in November, a Foreign Affairs article pointedly challenged the tactics used by Invisible Children and other nonprofits working in the region to raise awareness. “Such organizations have manipulated facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders and emphasizing the LRA’s use of innocent children as soldiers, and portraying Kony — a brutal man, to be sure — as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil,” the magazine wrote.

One of Invisible Children’s partner organizations, Resolve, responded to the accusation at the time in a blog post, calling it a “serious charge ... published with no accompanying substantiation.”

Jenkins maintained Wednesday that the numbers the charity uses are not exaggerated, as they are the same numbers used by Human Rights Watch and the U.N.

Charity Navigator, a U.S.-based charity evaluator, gives Invisible Children three out of four stars overall, four st

Comment by Paul Murphy on March 6, 2012 at 8:28pm

Profile: Joseph Kony
The Lord's Resistance Army leader believes he is a prophet and has led a brutal insurgency for more than 20 years.
Last Modified: 15 Oct 2011 14:15
inShare0
Email Article
Email
Print Article
Print
Share article
Share
Send Feedback
Feedback
Kony's elusive LRA is dwindling in numbers, and an armed US special forces advisory group may
spell the end game for the former altar boy and internationally wanted warlord [EPA]

Elusive and motivated by a purported belief that he is a prophet, Joseph Kony has waged a guerrilla insurgency against Uganda's government for more than two decades as the head of the Lord's Resistance Army.

Utilising central Africa's dense bush for strategic advantage and occasionally expanding his fight to neighbouring countries, Kony has become an internationally wanted war criminal and the head of a dwindling band of fighters.

Though the LRA and the government of Uganda, led since 1986 by President Yoweri Museveni, signed a permanent ceasefire in 2008, Kony did not show up to the final signing agreement, and military action against the LRA by the governments of Uganda as well as the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo and Southern Sudan have continued.

The United States maintained increasingly close relations with Museveni's administration during the presidency of George W. Bush, and in November 2010, the Obama White House announced a policy entitled "Strategy to Support the Disarmament of the Lord's Resistance Army," of which one of the main objectives was to "apprehend and remove from the battlefield Joseph Kony".

Kony was born in Odek, a village in a region of northern Uganda known as Acholiland, sometime in the early 1960s. Not much is known about his early years, though he reportedly served as an altar boy within the Catholic church and was heavily influenced by both Christian and spiritualist teachings.

Kony joined the Uganda People's Democratic Army, a rebel alliance formed after Museveni's nascent National Resistance Army came to power in 1986. He became a key ally to Alice Lakwena, an Acholi spiritual healer whose following, the Holy Spirit Movement, led the UPDA and who may have been related to Kony.

After Lakwena suffered a devastating defeat against the Ugandan government in a battle at Jinja, around 100km from the capital Kampala, she fled to Kenya and Kony emerged as the leader of the forces who remained. With Kony's assumption of power came a shift in the rebels' strategy and a new name: the Lord's Resistance Army.

The LRA took to Uganda's north and began to operate almost exclusively against civilian targets, rather than the Ugandan military. Under Kony's control, the LRA has waged a durable insurgency utilising brutal tactics, forcing 1.5 million people from their homes and abducting more than 20,000 boys and girls to become fighters or forced "wives" to LRA members.

Sponsored in part by the government of Sudan, the LRA conducted operations in both the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, though activity in the latter has almost ceased due to the forging of a comprehensive peace between north and south and the creation of an independent South Sudan.

Kony has long said that his movement is aimed at liberating Ugandans from oppression and has made himself into a dogged enemy of Museveni, whose career as Uganda's leader has run in parallel with Kony's as a infamous warlord.

He has reportedly claimed to be a prophet, possessed by spirits and to believe in the power of the Christian cross and holy oil to protect him and his fighters from physical harm.

After Museveni consolidated power, Kony moved his fighters into Sudan, then the Democratic Republic of Congo, then the Central African Republic, typically seeking out spaces where weak governments were unable to reach.

In 2005, Kony was indicted by the International Criminal Court

for leading the LRA in a campaign of "murder, abduction, sexual

enslavement, mutilation, as well as mass burnings of houses and looting

of camp settlements" since at least 1987 and for personally issueing

broad orders to target and kill civilian populations.

 

 

The indictment was partly based on intercepted radio communications

where Kony could be heard praising LRA forces for attacking camps of

displaced persons and calling on them to find targets with "even more

people".

 

 

Though not fully endorsed by international observers, Uganda's two

recent multi-party elections have both delivered Museveni back into

power, and Kony has become increasingly pursued, both by Ugandan troops

- including ex-LRA fighters - and now by a contingent of about 100

American "combat-ready" special forces, apparently aimed at ending the

fight once and for all.