Should we support the Invisible Children Campaign against Kony?

Yes

With the recent upsurge in interest surrounding the Lord’s Resistance Army and in particular Joseph Kony, there has been a mixed reaction on Facebook. While some of it I believe is justified, large swathes of it are just hopping on either band wagon, neither side properly thinking through what they are supporting, or the full situation. This counts particularly for those who oppose the NGO Invisible Children.

The initial excitement of people blindly supporting Invisible Children, while done with the best intent, was often not thought through. This resulted in people supporting a charity that they didn’t fully understand; one that was primarily an advocacy based charity, when they thought they were supporting a primarily project based charity. This was often combined with a certain sense of smugness that they were doing something great when they weren’t, as these Keyboard warriors often don’t bother to sign any of the petitions associated with it, or don’t go out and physically protest on the streets, or raise money for the cause.

This resulted in a backlash mainly accusing the movement of being a simple fad. However these accusers are themselves failing to understand the complexities of what they are reading, taking most of their information from poorly researched articles. From what I can understand the start of this reaction was from the Visible Children Tumblr (admittedly not the first to write about it). This was written by a Photographer (a quick Google search will tell you that) and he is also an Undergraduate at a university that does not make into the top 400 universities in the world. While this doesn’t make his opinion any less valid it may explain some of the deficiencies in the argument.

Primarily he attacks Invisible children’s lack of spending on direct services (projects), which is 32%. The charity’s founders openly admits this as they have three prongs; to document and make the world aware of the LRA, channelling the energy and awareness from informed viewers of IC films into large scale advocacy campaigns and to operate programs on the ground in the LRA-affected areas to provide protection, rehabilitation and development assistance. Spending is roughly split between all 3. There is also a large amount spent on travel expenses, which is required for their advocacy campaign as they not only fly to Uganda but also fly Ugandan children to America to pass on their experiences.

He then attacks the 2/4 star rating on charitynavigator. This is firstly only for accountability and transparency and was given in part due to a failure to have an external audit committee and largely due to it only having 4 independent voting members on its committee instead of the required 5 (they are in the process of interviewing a new candidate). For their projects charitynavigator gives the 4/4 so it sees Invisible Children’s work is positive and effective.

He then proceeds to accuse them of supporting the Sudan’s People Liberation Army (PLA) and Ugandan Army, which is not true. The latter appears to have arisen from a photo of them posing with small arms with the PLA, this photo was taken as a joke at the peace accord signings between the Ugandan government and the LRA in Sudan being protected by the PLA (which neither Kony nor any of the LRA leaders turned up too while using the ceasefire to re-arm and kidnap more children). Their explanation of the joke was that they are fighting for peace, but trying to not use weapons (this stance has clearly changed to greater encouraged intervention).

His point is that the USA through Africom has actually been intervening for many years largely with little or no success. While this is true I don’t understand the point he is trying to make here. Failure doesn’t mean we should give up, it required 10 years and repeated failures to catch Osama Bin Laden, even longer with many Nazi war criminals. There have also been rumours circulating that drone surveillance flights over the LRA’s operational area are starting to close in on Kony’s location, therefore we may have been close to catching him already.

The last point is clearly a good one, the Ugandan army has a bad human rights record and it is hard to trust them with the task. The difficult problem with this is that there is no other effective force for this matter; it is neither a NATO nor UN mandated mission, as it is not an attack or threat to a NATO member and it is not genocide. We must remember UN forces are primarily peace keepers so all they could do is provide protection for the civilian population. They could not resolve the primary issue which is the LRA.

We then come to the major issue of what the charity is advocating; most people claim that this is an armed intervention by American soldiers. This is a misinterpretation of the facts. They are calling for support from American military advisors and intelligence gathering systems for local forces to be able to find Kony. Both of these rolls in warzones are largely carried out by Special Forces who train for insurgencies and helping to collect and provide intelligence. While they are advocating the deployment of what are essentially US Special Forces these are never in a combat role, and thus it is not a military intervention similar to Iraq or even a Libya.

A major sticking point in all of the debates surrounding intervention is the question do we have a right to use forceful intervention? I have found most of this has arisen in the wake of David Starkey commenting on a possible Libyan intervention on Question Time, which I agreed with. He made the point that we have no right to intervene in a state in the name of providing liberty/democracy to a people usually requiring regime change. People have then misinterpreted it to mean that any intervention is not justified, he did not mention the use of force to catch an internationally wanted war criminal. Maybe he is opposed to it as well but I personally think that argument is weak. It is not an attempt to tell any other state how to function or how it should go about it’s business. An intervention like this is an attempt to up hold peoples basic human rights to live without fear, and to bring to justice a horrendous criminal.

Starkey also brought up the Balkans in his argument and the failure there to resolve an issue by intervention. A large group of political analysts including people who were in power in the US government at the time blame the failure of the rapid intervention in the Balkans as one of the major reasons for the problems we are facing now, where as if we had resolved it earlier we could have easily nipped it in the bud. This also brings me onto another point; people often claim that the capture of Kony will not end the violence. In the Balkans we managed to end the genocide through the use of intimidation through air power, the simple act of showing that you are watching and willing to use force against anyone who behaves in such a manner. This is often an incredibly strong deterrent to anyone else doing it. So the leadership of the LRA is likely to collapse, with the capture of Kony.

Even if you don’t agree with this viewpoint and think the Invisible Children’s proposals are wrong we should not oppose an attempt to resolve this on-going humanitarian crisis. There are many other charities and causes within the Central African Region that you can support and promote that propose different focuses but all with an attempt to help resolve the humanitarian issues created by the existence of the LRA and Kony.

As I mentioned earlier, the group who oppose Invisible Children primarily on Facebook accuse their supporters of liberal smugness. I however see the smugness coming from those who oppose it as worse. This smugness comes from several factors. They use this idea that as they agree with Starkey they share in his intellectual wisdom (a parrot can do that but it takes true intellect to form your own opinion or justify why you agree with his beyond what he has said). They then claim as they have read one article or several rehashes of the same article or heard of them, they somehow have some deep understanding when again they are just parroting the other sides view point. Finally this smugness derives from an idea that they want to push for real change and make the politicians more accountable, the European Electoral Observation Mission to the 2006 elections said that the simple existence of the LRA threatened the ability for free and fair elections.

Now why do I find this smugness worse? They claim a moral superiority of appealing to not intervene in another country’s matters, but are often opposed to Guantanamo bay on Human Rights grounds similar to the basis of Invisible Children’s opposition to Kony. It is also people attempting to be superior by putting other people down. Of those opposing it very few offer an alternative way to improve this horrific humanitarian situation. So they are not only keyboard warriors but also are pretty selfish by just massaging their ego.

However while they may like to put down the Invisible Children campaign without realising it they have become part of its success. A large part of Invisible Children is that they want people to know, learn, and talk about this. By providing this debate rather than this video simply being a flash in the pan it has resulted in a huge interest in the situation in Uganda, and has brought it back into the mainstream media’s attention. This can surely only result in some resolution being attempted even if it is through other methods than Invisible Children’s proposal. As the founders’ main aim is an end to this crisis I am sure they would be happy for it to end by

No

As the Nigerian author Chimamanada Adichie made explicit in her 2009 TED lecture, there is a certain danger in believing a single story of Africa. Individuals and cultures cannot simply be expressed with a single narrative; they’re comprised of overlapping voices and stories. To be exposed to simply one of these views is not simply restrictive, but we risk critically misunderstanding the “authentic story”.

The Lord’s Resistance Army have and continue to cause atrocities that will wound people and their continent. These wounds, however, won’t last forever. They will heal and although the scars may be physical, social and psychological these atrocities cannot be allowed to define our image of Africa – to let this happens is to let people like Kony have a lasting effect on global understanding. This influence on history would be an atrocity on par with the killings and abductions: but instead of being contained to physical location, it becomes an unstable contagion that spreads and taints our worldview for years to come.

Through exploration of the continent’s cultural topography, we can understand this man, however horrific, is only a small picture in a huge, vibrant collage encompassing the sheer beauty of human achievement from the cradle of civilisation.

The past, of course, is never too far from our consideration. It is impossible to think about present Africa without labouring under the emotional baggage of the past. Decolonisation, in all its revolutionary grandeur, has strained the continent. The struggle for self-rule and identity has torn entire countries apart, with repercussions that are only just being felt. South Sudan for example only gained its independence from wider (now North) Sudan on 9th July 2011, after a long battle against foreign colonisers and native strife. This history should not however be dealt with as a burden, painfully held up by a modern Atlas, but as an access point to unifying experiences. Suffering may have been widespread and the price paid, in too many instances, was unnervingly high. Within the past of oppression and struggle there does however exist a seed of hope: that these experiences are contra to the desperate images of Africa in Kony2012 and very much embedded in the past. Most of the suffering has been overcome and out of the ashes has risen a stronger, independent Africa. Kony is the exception that proves the rule, not the paradigm.

Looking to the future, African is predicted to have the biggest economic growth of any continent in the next decade according to The Economist. The recent international conference in Somalia has laid the foundations for the creation of infrastructure and stability in the country. The Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first and only elected female head of state in Africa, winning the Noble Peace Prize has paved the way for other women to establish themselves in peaceful government. Outside of the political sphere, Africa will carry on achieving things out of its reach a decade ago. Chinua Achebe remains one of the most prominent African writers ever, and the future could easily see “African” slip away from “writer”. The Maker Faire Africa will continue to celebrate the technological advancements of African’s finding local resolutions to local problems. Regionalised art continues to express past struggles and will become a focal point of social cohesion, both exposing and negotiation with the past to find a resolution; a sense of future that seems unbound and distinctly unified.

Africa is not a place that can be contained or summarised in a 30 minute video. People should never stop trying to fight the corruption and evil that remain on the continent, so long as people remember that this malice is dwarfed by achievement – and that our view of Africa should not be determined by one campaign: one campaign that can’t possibly do justice to the hopes, dreams and beauty of one billion people.