Last Monday an American nonprofit organization that helps African children posted an online documentary about the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Somewhat ambitiously, Invisible Children hoped 500,000 people might view its footage before the end of the year. Joseph Kony – the focus of the film – is one of five senior LRA commanders sought by the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Court indicted him on 33 counts nearly seven years ago. He faces 12 counts of crimes against humanity (among them enslavement and sexual enslavement) and more than 20 others for intentionally targeting and mistreating civilians, forcibly conscripting child soldiers, and for rape and murder. When the ICC first issued its indictment it noted that the severity of his crimes and the fact that they been committed in several countries (Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan and South Sudan) made him a textbook example of the cases it intended to pursue.
By Friday, thanks to its ‘viral’ popularity on social media sites, more than 50 million people had watched the Invisible Children documentary. Joseph Kony’s infamy had spread to every corner of the internet. Almost as quickly, a critique of the video began to circulate, questioning the credentials of the group, the amount of donor money it actually gives to programmes inside Africa (one blogger noted that the group’s reports indicated that only a third of the “$8,676,614 [collected in 2011] went to direct services … with much of the rest going to staff salaries, travel and transport, and film production.” Others questioned the use of emotionally manipulative footage, the filmmaker’s patronizing tone towards Africans, his ‘saviour’ complex. A few well-informed critics raised hard questions about the group’s uncritical support of the Ugandan army – itself accused of serious crimes – and its search for Kony.
The documentary anticipated many of the criticisms it provoked. When Jedidiah Jenkins, the producer, outlines his campaign to secure Kony’s arrest, he emphasizes the importance of political will: “If the [US] government doesn’t believe that the people care about arresting Kony, the [US-led mission to effect his removal from the battlefield] will be cancelled. In order for the people to care, they have to know, and they will only know if Kony’s name is everywhere.” Later on, he says: “Our goal is to change the conversation of our culture and get people to ask Who is Joseph Kony?” But the most telling response to much of the criticism leveled at the project comes late in the documentary when Luis Moreno Ocampo, chief prosecutor at the ICC, says: “We are living in a new world, [a] Facebook world, in which 750 million people share ideas, not thinking in borders. It’s a global community, bigger than the US. Joseph Kony was committing crimes for twenty years and no one cared. We care.”
No campaign, however well-intentioned, can singlehandedly slice through the Gordian knot of legal and political complications which have kept Joseph Kony free for so long. Recognizing this, Invisible Children limited itself to “changing the conversation”, to making one of the world’s most egregious human rights abusers as well-known as some of its celebrities. This goal is unimpeachable. The oversimplifications that it adopts — such as mobilizing 20 ‘culture makers’ and 12 ‘policy makers’ who can bring about Kony’s capture — may grate on the nerves of the older generation, but it clearly speaks volumes to the world’s youth. Their engagement in the wider world ought to be welcomed, and constructively criticized, rather than simply dismissed.
Last November, Sen. Romeo Dallaire reminded an audience in Toronto that more than 250,000 child soldiers are currently used in 17 active conflicts in 31 countries. (More than 40 per cent of these children are females who are exploited in the most heinous fashion by people like Joseph Kony.) In 1994, while heading a UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda, Dallaire watched a genocide unfold because there was not enough political will to authorize military intervention. After retiring from military life, Dallaire has worked to improve the lot of child soldiers both in Africa and other parts of the world. His Child Soldiers Initiative aims to ‘decommission’ children as a weapon of war and to reintegrate them into their families and societies. Shortly after his appearance in Toronto, Gen. Dallaire visited the United States to help train US forces how best to capture Joseph Kony with minimal injury and loss of life to the child soldiers who guard him.
When Joseph Kony is captured and brought to justice, the long process of prosecuting his crimes and reconstructing the millions of lives he has damaged will fall to men like Romeo Dallaire and Luis Moreno Ocampo. Their missions will remain unchanged. But some credit should also be given to groups like Invisible Children, for recognizing that in an age of celebrity-driven culture some people ought to be infamous too, and for having the ingenuity to make them so.