Notes on Invisible Children's "Kony 2012"

Lately, a new video produced by the American NGO Invisible Children focusing on Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army has been making the rounds. Having just returned from the Acholi region of Northern Uganda myself, where the LRA was born, I thought I might share some of my thoughts on the subject, for what it's worth.

I think it is easy for Invisible Children and other self-aggrandizing foreigners to make the entire story of the last 30 years of Northern Uganda about Joseph Kony, but there is a history of the relationship between the Acholi people and the central government in Kampala that is a little more complicated than that. Kony is a grotesque war criminal, to be sure, but the Ugandan government currently in power also came to power through the use of kadogo (child soldiers) and fought alongside militias employing child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, something that Invisible Children seem wilfully ignorant of.

The problem with Invisible Children's whitewashing of the role of the government of Uganda's president Yoweri Museveni in the violence of Central Africa is that it gives Museveni and company a free pass, and added ammunition with which to bludgeon virtually any domestic opposition (people like Kizza Besigye and the Forum for Democratic Change, for example).

By blindly supporting Uganda's current government and its military adventures beyond its borders, as Invisible Children suggests that people do, Invisible Children is in fact guaranteeing that there will be more violence, not less, in Central Africa.

I have seen the well-meaning white person do plenty of damage before, most notably in Haiti, so that is why people understanding the context and the history of the region is important before they blunder blindly forward to "help" a people they don't understand. Bill Clinton thought he was "helping" in DRC in the 1990s and his help ended up with over 6 million people losing their lives.