UGANDA - Two Views on Joseph Kony (PERSPECTIVE)

"MY UGANDA" by Prime Minister Amama Mbabazi

(Video PM Office, Uganda)

(HN, April 20, 2012) - Last Saturday April 14th,  the Prime Minister of Uganda Amama Mbabazi posted a video on YouTube entitled “Visible Uganda” aimed at what he says is correcting the inaccurate portrayal of Uganda resulting from the “Kony 2012” video by the Invisible Children Organization which over 100 million people worldwide have viewed and portrays Uganda as unsafe due to the activity of Joseph Kony's Lord’s Resistance Army.

The video recognizes that in the past Uganda did suffer atrocities as a result of LRA activity. Similar atrocities are very much a reality in neighboring countries tho, says the Prime Minister.  Further he goes on, "The government is determined, having suffered the ravages of Kony in Uganda not to let any other country or communities suffer the same”.

The video points out that Uganda is now a "thriving peaceful country" where the Peace, Recovery and Development Programme implemented by the Government has greatly assisted in the last 6 years of lasting peace, rejuvenation and rebirth of the Northern Region of the country where the LRA was most active.

(PHOTO: Prime Minister of Uganda, Amama Mbaba)“My Uganda is a country endowed with great resources and captivating natural beauty,” Mbabasi says. “My Uganda is a country that is poised to take off. We have registered success after success in the last 25 years and we are determined to build on this success to bring about in the next few years a new and prosperous nation.”

He invites people not only in Uganda but across the world to share their Ugandan experiences and he ends by saying, “That is my Uganda. Please tell us about your country”

--Source, Uganda Prime Ministers Office

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Kony 2012 & Cover the Night - promoting international justice starts here at home

(Video Kony 2012)

By Noelle Jouglet

Over the last several weeks, our organization Invisible Children, has seen what is possible when you have the right idea at the right time…and have spent nine years unwittingly laying a foundation for it. 

Our idea was to make Uganda's Joseph Kony, the notorious head of the Lord's Resistance Army famous - not as a celebrity - but as an international war criminal who has committed mass atrocities with impunity for 26 years. 

We made a 29-minute documentary about what he had done and what policy experts and region leaders told us needed to happen if Kony was to be apprehended and his crimes permanently stopped.

(PHOTO: Joseph Kony/NNDB)We set an ambitious goal aiming to get 500,000 people to view the film before the end of 2012. Instead, it vastly exceeded our expectations. The film swept the globe and surged past 100 million views in a matter of days. 

But beyond the exposure for Invisible Children, and much more importantly, the global reaction to our film started real conversations about international justice, development work, Joseph

Kony, and whether there was any action—like a tweet—that was too small.   

In the weeks since the film’s release we’ve been amazed by the responses from middle schoolers who are bringing up Joseph Kony in their social studies classes and equally amazed that US Senators and Representatives are putting partisan politics aside for the sake of a conflict in one of the remotest parts of Central Africa. 

Between the House and Senate, 107 Members of Congress have signed onto bipartisan resolutions that call for robust U.S. support for regional efforts to protect communities and help bring Joseph Kony to justice.

Many have expressed surprise at Invisible Children’s apparent overnight success. 

But that is hardly the case. We have actually produced 12 documentaries and met more than three million people face-to-face during our 13 tours around the country where our representatives show our films at high schools and colleges and answer questions about the conflict. 

When Invisible Children launches a new campaign, it’s not just the forty people in our San Diego office launching it, it's the millions we have met on the road.   

There were many celebrities that shared KONY 2012 in the first hours and days after its release through social networks and other means. We are so grateful that they used their influence to share the story, but I do not believe that those celebrities would have heard about the film if our core supporters hadn’t rallied around the campaign in their own local communities and shared it in such great numbers using their personal networks.

(PHOTO: Joseph Kony, center, in white/Guardian)The original goal of Cover the Night, as introduced in the KONY 2012 film, was to make Joseph Kony famous. That happened in a matter of days thanks to millions of people around the world who shared the KONY 2012 films. The event has expanded into a global day of action that actually started earlier this week with daily “missions” to engage our national and international leaders.

Tonight, Friday, April 20, 2012, we are earning the right to be heard globally by serving locally.

Everyone who wants to participate is encouraged to form a small team with friends, colleagues, or neighbors. Each team should volunteer in their own communities for a few hours (picking up trash, washing cars for free, donating blood, etc.) and then spend the evening promoting justice for Joseph Kony in creative ways (posters in the windows, sidewalk chalk, painting a mural, etc.)

What I’ve learned in the seven years that I’ve worked for Invisible Children is that a personal, human interaction is more valuable than a digital one. 

Every time. 

Cover the Night in its simplest form is an event that acts out that truth. We’re taking the anonymous conversation about a viral video into the streets where the relationships are formed and the future is forged.

We always tell our supporters, “You are more powerful than you think you are.” When they begin to believe that about themselves, amazing things start to happen. We’ve seen students wake up to their own power and begin organizing school-wide screenings of Invisible Children documentaries or donate $12 each month to our scholarship program. Other students call their senators and lead local lobby meetings. 

(PHOTO: Labuje camp, Uganda 2005 where 14,000+IDP's lived due to LRA activity/Wikipedia)There are thousands of these students out there–some of whom have grown up and become teachers or filmmakers in their own rights. They are the ones who will be leading the way tonight.  They may be young, but they can earn the right to be heard online and around the globe by acting offline in their own communities.

We know that these stories will be rolling in for weeks and Invisible Children will do its best to share those stories and amplify the life change that will come as a result of trying to promote justice for Lord's Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony, a man whom many people had never heard of just six weeks ago. 

But rather than wait to hear the reports of life change, we encourage you to go out into your community tonight with your family or friends and experience it for yourself.

-- Noelle Jouglet is the Director of Communications at Invisible Children. Her editorial originally appeared on FOXNEWS.COM

Kony 2012: Political Protest or Propaganda? (PERSPECTIVE)

(Video: Kony 2012, Part 2, Beyond Famous)

By Bridgette Gamble

Over the past few days the Facebook and Youtube communities have proved that the power of social media is still quite overwhelming. A thirty minute documentary, known best as the Kony 2012 video, created by Jason Russell, is the source of all the internet mayhem and is a call to action against a rebel military group called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), that has been fighting in Uganda since the 1980s.

The video names Joseph Kony as the main target, as he is the leader of the rebels in Uganda, and calls for American’s to “make him famous” by buying T-shirts, posters, bracelets, and making contributions to the Invisible Children organization that is behind the video.

(PHOTO: Jason Russell, Invisible Children, Kony 2012 producer/IBTimesJason Russell promises that the American people will stop Joseph Kony and his rebel army, and starts the 20-12 campaign. He swears to target 20 policy makers and 12 Culture makers to help him spread the word about Kony and make the people care; in order to keep American military advisors in Uganda to train their forces, therefore furthering the movement to capture Kony.

However, there seems to be a few things wrong with the facts at hand. First, reports from various newspapers state that Kony has not set foot in Uganda since 2006.

The video depicts the children of Uganda to be paralyzed with fear, as the camera crews follow a group called “The Night Commuters,” a group of children who travel from their homes at night to avoid abduction. Of course, every scene is filled with tears and heart-wrenching stories about lost loved ones, but the video shows one of Russell’s interviewees, Jacob, first as a young child and later as a grown man, around his twenties or so. The time gap between the shots of young Jacob and older Jacob is significant, therefore can we really be sure what happened in that time frame?

(PHOTO: Joseph Kony, centre, in white; surrounded by Lord's Resistance Army officers/Guardian)Not to mention the interview conducted with Kony himself, found on worldstarhiphop.com, in which Kony denies that the LRA has been involved with any of the alleged abductions, rapes and other heartless acts so vehemently protested and covered by the Invisible Children’s video campaign. Not only are the soldiers who appear in the video adults, but they attest with Kony that they have not abducted any children in the past.

When asked about the brutal mutilating of children’s faces, the rebel leader appears shocked as he answers. “I have not cut the faces of my brothers. I would not hurt my brothers, kill my brothers,” Kony said. He made it clear that he has been fighting for the freedom of Uganda, and feels he has posed such a threat that the Ugandan government is raining propaganda down on him in order to shut down the rebellion.

If we lay the fact that Kony may actually be an innocent man aside, we still have to assess the Invisible Children organization. Research drawn directly from the organization’s website shows that only thirty two percent of the millions of dollars they are raking in is actually sent to Uganda.

A look at the federal tax information raises the question, where exactly is our money going? It is not specified anywhere on the website (invisiblechildren.com), yet contributions in the form of donations and purchases of the “action packs,” posters, and t-shirts continue to pour in at overwhelming rates.

It is clear that somewhere along the lines, the truth is not being told. Either Kony is a malicious killing machine who rapes young girls and recruits boys for his army of wrong-doers, or there is quite a mountain of propaganda and slander crushing an innocent man’s name.

--- Bridgette Gamble is the Photography Editor at the The Knight Times Online John I. Leonard High School in Lake Worth, FL.  This article first appeared there.  

Ugandans React with Anger to Kony Video (REPORT)

By Malcolm Webb

Uganda has, in the last week, been propelled to the top of the international news agenda, for a brutal rebellion that has not operated in the country for the last five years.

On March 5, American charity Invisible Children posted a video on Youtube, entitled Kony 2012. The 30 minute film, narrated by one of the organisations founders, Jason Russell, campaigns for the arrest of Joseph Kony, the ICC-indicted Ugandan leader of the rebel Lords Resistance Army.

It went viral, and in nine days has attracted over 76 million views, along with a lot of support and also substantial criticism.

Critics argue that the film relies on footage nearly ten-years-old of children fleeing the LRA in northern Uganda, implying the situation remains the same to this day, and so failing to represent the real issues now facing post-conflict Northern Uganda.

The LRA now operates in the Central African Rrepublic, Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, and is now thought to number no more than 300 fighters.

Invisible Children argue that they have the main facts correct, and that raising awareness is their primary goal, and a necessary step towards any further change.

Public screening

While Youtube, Twitter and Facebook have gripped Uganda's middle class in recent years - and social networking sites have been key forums for the many Ugandan critics of the Kony 2012 video - most people in rural areas, including post-conflict northern Uganda, are still excluded from the internet revolution.

That means many of Joseph Kony's thousands of victims, most of whom live in rural villages, have never even heard of Kony 2012, Invisible Children or even Youtube.

Invisible Children's publicity machine is immense. Aside from the millions of internet users it has reached, and Kony 2012 already being described by some as the most effective viral campaign in history, it must also be the first ever Youtube video to be publicly screened in the northern Ugandan town of Lira.

A local charity, the African Youth Initiative Network, thought that the communities worst affected by the LRA, when it operated in Uganda, also deserved an opportunity to see what all the fuss was about, and so organized the event.

It was heavily publicized on local radio stations, and a crowd of thousands turned up at the Mayor’s Gardens in the centre of Lira for the sunset screening.

Having heard so many great things about the film, the crowd’s expectations were high.

Angry and offended

People I spoke to anticipated seeing a video that showed the world the terrible atrocities that they had suffered during the conflict, and the ongoing struggles they still face trying to rebuild their lives after two lost decades.

The audience was at first puzzled to see the narrative lead by an American man – Jason Russell – and his young son.

Towards the end of the film, the mood turned more to anger at what many people saw as a foreign, inaccurate account that belittled and commercialised their suffering, as the film promotes Kony bracelets and other fundraising merchandise, with the aim of making Kony infamous.

One woman I spoke to made the comparison of selling Osama Bin Laden paraphernalia post 9/11 – likely to be highly offensive to many Americans, however well intentioned the campaign behind it.

The event ended with the angrier members of the audience throwing rocks and shouting abusive criticism, as the rest fled for safety, leaving an abandoned projector, with organisers and the press running for cover until the dust settled.

It seems that the while the film has a viral power never seen before in the online community, it did not go down nearly so well with the very people it claims it is meant to help.

Originally published by AlJazeera under Creative Commons License