A United States charity called Invisible Children released a half hour video called KONY 2012 which was posted on YouTube a week and a half ago. It has exploded on the internet. In the new internet language, it went ‘viral,’ meaning in regular language that it has spread like a virus. By the end of one week since its publication on or about March 7, it is estimated to have been seen one hundred million times. Joseph Kony is a Ugandan warlord who heads the Lord’s Liberation Army. It was founded about 25 years ago in a period of great uncertainty in Uganda, following the overthrow of Tito Okello by Yoweri Museveni in 1985. Okello had overthrown Milton Obote who had succeeded Idi Amin in whose overthrow Okello, a commanding officer in the Uganda National Liberation Army, played a leading role.
Okello was of the Acholi people of northern Uganda and so is Kony. The resentment of the Acholi people as a result of Okello’s overthrow led Kony to the establishment of the United Holy Salvation Army which eventually became the Lord’s Resistance Army. His ambition was to establish a theocracy based on Christian religious fundamentalism, mysticism and extremism, and on the possession by him of magical powers to stop bullets. Early popularity and military successes did not last and his army dwindled. He then embarked on a policy of kidnapping of children, murder, robbery and forcing the 100,000 or so kidnapped children into child soldiers and sex slaves, having first forced them first to kill their parents and neighbours.
Sudan had supported him for many years after about the mid 1990s because of differences with Uganda over the latter’s support of southern Sudanese rebels. But after the International Criminal Court indicted Kony and his associates in crime in 2006, Sudan withdrew its support. Since then Kony’s army has dwindled further and he is believed to be in remote areas in the Congo.
Kony is highly elusive and has mastered the ability to survive in the difficult terrain in which he is located. But even though he has long been driven out of northern Uganda and his depredations have been reduced, he still poses tremendous danger to children and adults alike, and there have been continuous reports of killings by his army. The U.S. Government, under the George W. Bush Presidency, deemed Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army as terrorists and commenced military support to Uganda to capture him. President Obama has sent one hundred military advisers to assist Uganda in the search for Kony and his lieutenants.
The stated objective of KONY 2012 is the capture of Kony in 2012. It seeks to do so by making the name of Kony and his deeds known worldwide, to give him such a high profile among law makers and prominent personalities, that the continuing threat which he poses can no longer be ignored by the world community. Invisible Children hopes that it can raise more funds to keep the campaign to raise awareness about Kony alive for as long as possible, until he is captured.
As is to be expected, there have been many critics. Some have come from Uganda and it relates to the lateness of the campaign, the belated arrival of ‘white liberals’ with questions as to where they have been all the time when one hundred thousand children were kidnapped, the shortage of aid funds and more. In the U.S. and other parts of the developed world, there have been criticisms of the charity, that it spends only 17 percent of what it collects on charitable work, that the video is of poor quality or inadequate for one or another reason. Many of the criticisms are now being answered by Invisible Children and many commentators have debunked much of what is being said about the video with subtle hints of jealousy on the part of the critics. The fact of the matter, they point out, is that the video is the most successful ever published, having been viewed by an astonishing 100 million people in one week.
The video has reached all corners of the developed world and has already inspired and mobilized large numbers of young people to join the campaign to raise funds for the capture and trial of Kony. About 100 million people, who did not know about Kony before, now know about him, and can bring their combined efforts to bear to pressurize their officials and governments. Five million U.S. dollars were raised in the first few days.
This experience demonstrates the growing power of the social media which is being increasingly mobilized in diverse parts of the world to aid movements of various kinds. It played a vital role in the Arab Spring, in the Iran Uprising, in various uprisings all over the world and now in mobilizing public opinion against an international criminal. The role of the social media is likely to continue to grow and to be used for more and more diverse objectives.
This event appears to have passed over Guyana even though it must have hit many developing countries. It may have been reported but has certainly not attracted much comment. While explosive developments in communication such as this, and the activities of international criminals such as Kony, the killers from Rwanda, those from Bosnia, Serbia and elsewhere, appear to be distant events, hardly impacting on our experience and hardly attracting popular attention; nevertheless we need to take notice, because sooner or later, the social media, which is slowly expanding in importance, will one day hit Guyana. (www.conversationtree.gy).