Invisible Children In Uganda: The Other Face Of Kony 2012
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Dinaw Mengestu, an Ethiopian American writer and Africa researcher, wrote that the real world Kony is \"not a click away\" and a simple solution of raising popular awareness is \"a beautiful equation that can only work so long as we believe that nothing in the world happens unless we know about it ... only works in the myopic reality of the film, a reality that deliberately eschews depth and complexity.\"[67] Amanda Weisbaum of the charity War Child said that \"just getting rid of one person does not solve the problem\" and that the focus of the film should rather have been on helping ex-child soldiers.[68] Anne Goddard, president and CEO of ChildFund International, wrote that \"by narrowing the focus on Kony, by defining success so singularly, it gives people a greater sense that the issue [of globally widespread conscription of young children] can be resolved. And that hope feeds on itself in a way that becomes infectious.\"[69] United Nations Under-Secretary-General Radhika Coomaraswamy called for the Kony2012 campaign to divert its donation funds from supporting military action to capture Kony to rehabilitation and reintegration programmes for former child soldiers.[70] Victor Ochen, founder and director of Ugandan rehabilitation NGO Ayinet, said that campaign \"to promote [Kony] or make him famous\" is \"offensive\", in part because of the Cover the Night event's date (an anniversary of the Atiak massacre by the LRA in Uganda in 1995 and the date of birth of Adolf Hitler), adding \"How do you think Americans would have reacted if people in another country wore Osama bin Laden T-shirts\"[71]
Mahmood Mamdani, of the Institute of Social Research at Makerere University, Kampala, argued that the LRA is \"a Ugandan problem calling for a Ugandan political solution\" and against \"mobilisation of millions [to] be subverted into yet another weapon in the hands of those who want to further militarise the region.\"[78] Ugandan journalist Rosebell Kagumire said that \"the war is much more complex than one man called Joseph Kony.\"[79] A more recent showing of Kony 2012 at Pece War Memorial Stadium in Gulu, Uganda sparked a riot in which dozens of people were injured. The archbishop of Gulu, Rt Rev. John Baptist Odama, was reported as saying that the video \"has ill motives and geared towards igniting anger in the population to cause violence.\" Margaret Aciro, whose picture appears in the video showing her face mutilated by the LRA, said she \"became sad\" after seeing it being \"used to profit.\"[80]
A bit more about invisible children:I hope I do not rile you any further johene but Givewell are not the only people to have made diggs at the film makers motives, see for example: There has been significant internet backlash surrounding the KONY 2012 campaign. In fact this has lead to a very detailed response from invisible children and increased transparency
\"Invisible Children has been canny about marketing the film through social media via the use of Twitter hashtags (#kony2012) and celebrities. Rihanna, Stephen Fry, and The Onion's Baratunde Thurston have all tweeted about the film. In addition, Invisible Children is organizing a celebrity pressure campaign to get, among others, Oprah Winfrey, Mark Zuckerberg, and Lady Gaga to publicize #kony2012.\"
Now, in 2013, Uganda's once-kidnapped children might as well be truly invisible. Aid projects in the damaged northern region have collapsed and former refugee camps stand abandoned. Thirty-thousand returned former child soldiers have, after years in the camps, been left to their own devices. The 'Invisible Children' project itself is preparing an exit strategy, much like the hundreds of foreign programmes in the region. \"Returned to their villages, the [former child soldiers] may be worse off than they were in the [refugee] camps,\" notes a report from the UK aid agency DFID. The report, as well as other reports, mentions the fate of the many returnees: disease, alcohol, vagrancy, petty crime.
They managed to pull each other through the classes, too. \"At first things were so hard,\" said Victoria. \"They were so hard that you would think, 'will I pass' But we would encourage each other.\" They helped each other through all the challenges that any former child soldier or sex slave would have faced: social stigma as well as interrupted education and housing issues. Phoebe* had to live alternately with her grandmother and other relatives. Like most returnees, the Aboke women experienced cruelty from neighbours who saw them as 'bad girls' and rebels 'from the bush', and made heartless remarks about their rebel-fathered children. They had to ward off advances from suitors: after what they had been through, few of the women now wanted to date or have relationships.
Perhaps most galling, \"Kony 2012\" completely fails to mention the brutality of the nations who fight against the L.R.A. Recently elected to his fourth term, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has been in power for over 25 years. Human Rights Watch claims the Museveni administration engages in severe human rights abuses, like illegal detention, torture, even extrajudicial killings (like another president). Visiting northern Uganda, Museveni even vowed he would defeat the L.R.A. in \"just one week.\" That was in 2003. Even more alarming, Museveni has been accused of kidnapping children and turning them into child soldiers, using the same tactics as the L.R.A.
So, while I do have an informed, professional response to the claims made by Kony 2012, but that response is short circuited by my feelings at seeing East and Central Africa explained by showing two mugshots to an adorable blond boy from San Diego: a good African victim and a bad African warlord. The film expects its audience to identify with the little blond boy. Indeed, it obliges it to. Africans however, must identify with those flat images on the table. With Jacob Acaye the former child soldier, yes, but with Joseph Kony too. We know that these are two side of a single coin, and that when we are seen as the one, the face of the other is always lurking beneath. 781b155fdc