Most Americans began this week not knowing who Joseph Kony was. That’s not surprising: most Americans begin every week not knowing a lot of things, especially about a part of the world as obscured from their vision as Uganda, the country where Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) commenced a brutal insurgency in the 1980s that lingers to this day.
A viral video that took social media by storm over the past two days has seemingly changed all that. Produced by Invisible Children, a San Diego-based NGO, “Kony2012″ is a half-hour plea for Americans and global netizens to pay attention to Kony’s crimes — which include abducting over 60,000 children over two decades of conflict, brutalizing them and transforming many into child soldiers — and to pressure the Obama Administration to find and capture him. Within hours of the slick production surfacing on social media, it led to #StopKony trending on Twitter, populated Facebook timelines, was publicized by Hollywood celebrities and has been viewed some 10 million times on YouTube. Suddenly, a man on virtually no Westerner’s radar became the international bogeyman of the moment.
(VIDEO: The Lord’s Resistance Army Hunts Children in Sudan)
It’s an incredible public relations coup for the NGO, which congratulates itself in the film for spurring U.S. Congress last October to send 100 military “advisers” to aid Ugandan forces in their war against Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army. The LRA is without a doubt a nasty outfit, responsible for massacres of civilian populations, mass rapes, contemptible acts of mutilation and, most notoriously, the creation of an army of child soldiers, forced to perform gruesome deeds. In 2005, the International Criminal Court in the Hague put Kony at the top of its most wanted list, indicted on 33 counts including war crimes and crimes against humanity. Sure, the U.S. remains in the minority of nations yet to officially recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction, but that, Invisible Children’s members would likely argue, ought not change the need for a moral clarion call: Kony must be brought to justice. Read the rest of this entry »
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