Campaign to make Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony ‘famous’ goes viral

Updated Wednesday at 6:33 p.m. to include reaction to and questions raised about Kony 2012 and Invisible Children. 

Joseph Kony is becoming more famous with every click of a mouse: he’s trending on Twitter and his video is becoming a viral hit on YouTube.

And the group behind the campaign to make him an online sensation hopes everyone around the world knows his name by the end of this year in hopes of brining the war criminal to justice. 

Kony, the leader of the Ugandan rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), is the target of the Kony 2012 campaign led by Invisible Children, a group started by three American travellers who visited the central African country nine years ago.

Kony was indicted on war crimes charges by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2005 and is accused of kidnapping and forcing as many as 66,000 children to fight for the LRA, or to become sex slaves, and of forcing the displacement of more than 200,000 people in a northern area of the country.

He was one of the first people charged by the ICC and remains at the top of the court’s most wanted list.

He was indicted on 21 counts of war crimes and 12 counts of crimes against humanity including murder, enslavement, sexual enslavement and rape.

ICC Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo said at the time “Kony was abducting girls to offer rewards to his commanders.”

Jason Russell, Bobby Bailey and Laren Poole, who travelled to the Central African nation in 2003, have made it their mission to tell the story of the so-called ‘invisible children’ and the atrocities Kony has committed.

The trio had originally planned to go to Sudan to document human rights abuses and genocide in the troubled Darfur region.

But when the trip hit a roadblock, the friends returned to Uganda where they happened upon a young boy named Jacob in the town of Gulu.

Jacob was one of many children who traveled from their villages each night to avoid being taken by LRA soldiers and forced to become warriors.

Their 2006 documentary, titled Invisible Children, garnered widespread attention online and was shown at schools and university campuses across the United States.
That led to successful, large-scale public events lobbying the U.S. government to take action to help combat the LRA.

Their message and their movement eventually got the attention of the president.
In October 2011, President Barack Obama sent 100 troops to the region – to “remove (Kony) from the battlefield,” by either capturing him or killing him.

The troops, mostly Special Operations Forces, would work not only in Uganda, but also South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo and Central African Republic to track down Kony and LRA forces, but would only provide training and equipment to local military personnel and not engage in combat themselves.

A government official also stated at the time the U.S. had spent $33 million on assistance to the Ugandan military in the previous three years.

Invisible Children wants to make sure the government maintains its commitment, and released the video “Kony 2012” Monday in a bid to make Kony “famous” in the most notorious of senses. 

More than 7.3 million people have viewed the video in the two days since the Kony 2012 video was uploaded to YouTube and the hashtags #StopKony and #Kony2012 have been trending globally on Twitter.

Russell explains in the video his desire for Kony to become a household name.

 
“In order for Kony to be arrested this year, the Ugandan military has to find him. In order to find him they need the technology and training to track him in the vast jungle. That’s where the American advisors come in. But in order for the American advisors to be there, the U.S. government has to deploy them. They’ve done that, but if the government doesn’t believe the people care about arresting Kony the mission will be cancelled.”

Invisible Children owes a lot of its notoriety to social media, but now it’s using the platform to take the campaign further. The organization is asking people to bombard celebrities, athletes and pop culture personalities on Twitter with the Kony 2012 campaign, and to target those “20 culture makers and 12 policy makers” that are either known for their activism or have the power to make a difference.

He says 20 on the list represent “the most diverse and influential culture makers.” Among them are: actress and activist Angelina Jolie, singer Rhianna, talk show host Ellen Degeneres and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

The dozen policy makers, he says, “have the authority to see Kony captured.”

The campaign will go beyond the online realm in just over a month’s time, Apr. 20, when Invisible Children hopes to see Kony 2012 posters and stickers plastered all over the U.S. (and beyond) as a part of an event called “Cover the Night.”

Questions raised about Kony 2012 facts and finances

Going viral at the same time as Kony 2012 is the backlash to the campaign

A blog post by a student at Acadia University, in Wolfville, N.S., has called into question both the story presented by Invisible Children and the organization’s finances.

Grant Oyston, a second-year sociology and political science student, posted a new blog called Visible Children on Tumblr Mar. 7, shortly before the Kony 2012 video took off.

People are taking interest in the other side of this story and, according to Oyston, his post has gotten more than a million views in less than 24 hours.

He admits he’s not an expert and “there are flaws in (his) rhetoric,” but he’s not the first to raise questions about Invisible Children’s work and the organization’s finances, the majority of which went to salaries, transportation and the production of their online films.

Invisible Children is incorporated and posts its finances online, but Oyston points out the organization got a two-out-of-four star rating for accountability by the website Charity Navigator.

He draws on several sources to present an alternative view of the rapidly popular campaign, including Foreign Affairs magazine which published an article in Nov. 2011 saying organizations such as “the media-oriented Invisible Children” and the Canada-based Gulu Walk 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.”

There’s no denying Kony is “a bad guy,” Oyston writes, but he points out the war criminal hasn’t been active in Uganda since 2006.

That’s a fact that can be backed up by the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, which says on its website “the LRA has been largely inactive in northern Uganda since 2006,” conducting most of its activities in neighbouring nations.

The LRA is now active in South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of Congo, where the warlord has been taking refuge, but not so much in Uganda itself.

There’s also the question of the human rights records of the LRA’s main adversaries: Uganda’s president Yoweri Musaveni, the Ugandan Army and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.

As Foreign Affairs article infers, “The violence in Uganda, Congo, and South Sudan has been the most devastating — anywhere in the world — since the mid-1990s. Even conservative estimates place the death toll in the millions. And the LRA is, in fact, a relatively small player in all of this — as much a symptom as a cause of the endemic violence. If Kony is removed, LRA fighters will join other groups or act independently.”

Oyston writes in his post the founders of Invisible children undoubtedly have the best of intentions in their ambitions and by getting behind the Kony 2012 campaign, unwitting followers are thus supporting the Ugandan military, which has been similarly accused of rape and recruiting child soldiers.