Kony 2012

Several People have asked if I can include sources in this blog post. Much of the information comes from books which I don't have with me in Arua but I can give you the title and the author of the books which the information comes from and that you can refer to for further information.

Also to give you some additional context, I have an M.A. in International Development Studies from Dalhousie University and wrote my thesis on Armed Violence in the DRC. I have presented a couple of conferences on the topic and I was a member of War Child Dalhousie. I have also participated in the Gulu Walk which does a fantastic job of raising awareness about the use of Child Soldiers by the LRA and I have volunteered with the All Party Parliamentary Committee on the Prevention of Genocide. I really appreciate that so many people have taken the time to read this post and send me feedback.

I have spent the last four weeks in Northern Uganda and will be here for one more week. I am currently conducting research through which to identify conflict indicators for the project that I'm working on. I have also just finished training over 120 people in conflict sensitivity and conflict transformation with help from the Centre for Conflict Resolution. My work has been in Lira, which was directly affected by Joseph Kony's Northern War, Masindi where many of the internally displaced people from the Northern War resettled between 1988 and 2008 and West Nile which receives refugees from North Eastern DRC which is currently being affected by the LRA among other things.

When I was in Lira last week I met a child soldier for the first time. It was a 16 year old boy who was kidnapped when he was about 7 and released when he was about 14. He is not in grade 6 at school and is being cared for the owner of the hotel I stayed at, not his parents. He didn't talk much and seemed very timid although he warmed up to me over the week that I was staying at the hotel. One of the questions I ask as part of my research is whether participants feel that their communities are peaceful. In Lira, several participants indicated that they were not at peace because they feared the return of Joseph Kony.

Who is Joseph Kony? Joseph Kony is the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). Its stated purpose is to enforce the 10 commandments in Uganda and to oppose Musevini's governing party the National Resistance Movement (Aboke Girls, de Temmerman and The Lords Resistance Army Myths and Reality, eds. Allen and Vlassenroot).

If you've watched the film "Kony 2012" you probably didn't get that information, in fact you probably heard that the LRA has no stated objective. That's only one of the factual errors

The LRA emerged out of the Holy Spirit Movement in Northern Ugandan which combines Christianity and traditional beliefs. The LRA started to advance towards Kampala in the late 1980's after Musevini ejected a Northern leader, Okello, out of office in 1986.

When you consider the LRA's tactics including the abduction of children to be used as child soldiers, rape, murder and mutilation. Victims eyes, mouths and ears were often cut off so they could not see or hear the attrocities that were being committed around them or so that they could not tell the authorities (Aboke Girls, de Temmerman). And for years the Ugandan government did nothing about it, until it launched a military operation in 2008 which all but exiled the LRA in Sudan, the DRC and the Central African Republic.

If you haven't seen "Kony 2012" it is a 30 minute film by the organization Invisible Children demanding immediate action in Western countries to demand that Kony be arrested by any means necessary.

I agree that Kony must be stopped, but they are leaving out some information you might care to know.

The first point of the video that I would like to challenge is that the "LRA uses girls as sex slaves and boys as child soldiers." In fact this is a very gendered take on the LRA where both boys and girls are used as child soldiers AND both boys and girls are used as sex slaves, although girls are the more common victim (Aboke Girls, de Temmerman AND They Fight Like Soldiers and Die Like Children, Dallaire). Children are also used to cook, care for wounded soldiers and to carry equipment.

The second point is that Kony has no clear objective which I've already addressed.

Third, the movie claims that Kony enjoys no international support, when in fact he is known to have received direct support from the government of Sudan and from AlQaeda (U.S. Exclusion List for Terrorist Organizations AND The Lords Resistance Army, Myth and Reality).

Fourth, the movie fails to acknowledge that the LRA has not been active in Northern Uganda since at least 2008 and that they now operate in North-Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic (Dancing in the Glory of Monsters, Stearns). That's where the movie falls apart. The U.S. did send 100 troops to Uganda to support UPDF (read Ugandan army) operations against the LRA, but since they aren't in Uganda, the operation also requires support from Congolese and CAR troops. I don't know much about the CAR but I do know that the Congolese Army does not have the capacity to hunt down Kony (I wrote my M.A. Thesis on the DRC so I'm not including a citation here if you want to read my thesis you can google my name).

And one might also ask why the group is supporting the use of a military solution at all considering the fact that the Ugandan Army has also been accused of using Child Soldiers, not repatriating returned abductees with their families and committing rape, as has the Congolese army.

I'm also concerned about the treatment of the subject of Child Soldiers by the film. First as my colleague Tanja Bergen points out, the fact they are showing video clips of a young Jacob crying over the loss of his brother, at an age where he could not have consented to be in the video is highly questionable from a research ethics standpoint. The second thing is that the movie oversimplifies what happens to returned child soldiers. Child soldiers who are rescued or escape are rarely able to return to their homes either because their parents were killed or because of the shame that their actions have brought to their families and communities. If these former abductees are lucky, they get to participate in a rehabilitation program led by UNICEF, Save the Children or War Child but many don't and their families and communities simply don't have the resources to support them (They Fight Like Soldiers and they Die Like Children, Dallaire). On another point you might notice that while the film focuses on the use of Child Soldiers it discusses the other atrocities committed by the LRA very little. This is likely because they would have to acknowledge the the abducted children are forced to kill, rape and mutilate their family members and others which makes them "Victim-perpetrators" which means that they were forced to commit crimes through their victimization and were revictimized through the process. And of course, that would just confuse people... (?)

As a fundraiser last year, I learned that sometimes it was better to have less knowledge on an organization to try to get people to support it because it raised fewer questions and made it simpler to explain, and perhaps that's what Invisible Children is going for.

When Amnesty International runs advocacy campaigns, they do not ask for money anywhere in the body of their campaign. However the fundraising component of this campaign is quite apparent as they indicate that in order to receive an advocacy kit that one must commit to making monthly donations. What is particularly worrisome about that is that the campaign targets you people who are least able to make that form of commitment. As my friend Jesse points out Invisible Children has never been externally audited and has other questionable rankings as a charitable organization.

Any reputable add campaign should promote activism before donations. Full Stop.

Although I think that the rhetoric the movie uses and the methods it is suggesting for activism are interesting and relatively effective I am also going to take a moment to cover on some of the theoretical underpinnings that bug me about the film.

First, I find it highly problematic that the film focuses on a small white child to try to help viewers relate to the plight of child soldiers. Although the kid is cute I think this undermines the viewers compassion and their capacity to understand that childhood should have universal norms.

The second problem that I think is more significant is that there is no discussion of what the victims of the LRA would like to see happen. Many of the former heads of the LRA have been subject to amnesty laws and have participated in traditional peace processes. Although I would personally love to see Kony tried in front of the International Criminal Court, I am not certain that, that is what most of Northern Ugandan's want.

To conclude, I would like to point out the almost complete absence of the voices of Northern Ugandans in the video which I think is its biggest flaw.

Joseph Kony must be stopped, together we can do something about it.

Like the video suggests, you can send your MP or Prime Minister Harper/Obama or whoever your leader is a letter, you can organize a march, put up posters and spread the word. But you can do that without Invisible Children, and certainly without donating to them.

If you want to watch the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc

If you would like to read about the Norther War I would recommend reading "The Aboke Girls" or referring to War Child's Website.

If you would like to read more about Child Soldier's you can read "They Fight like Soldiers and Die Like Children" by Romeo Dalliare

If you would like to read about Justice in East Africa you can read "Drink the Bitter Root.

If you would like to send me an email I can be reached at k_van_houten@hotmail.com