“Kony 2012” Is a Springboard for the US Military

The message that the conflict with the Lord's Resistance Army has only a military solution plays into the hands of both the Ugandan regime and the United States. The U.S. would like a permanent military base in Uganda.

In recent weeks the internet has exploded. “Kony 2012,” a film about the Ugandan rebel movement, The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), has almost certainly beaten all previous records. Millions of internet users have helped to spread the film via Facebook, and because it is so simple to embed, through blogs and homepages.

I have, as an anthropologist and researcher, followed the conflict between the LRA and Uganda’s government since 1997. I have also followed Invisible Children since they showed up around 2003. I have also followed developments in the peace talks between the LRA and Uganda’s government which started in 2006, but collapsed in 2008. Thereafter, the Ugandan war has more or less been exported from northern Uganda to Sudan, Congo and Central Africa. Today, the LRA is active in a part of Africa, where instability, political violence, plundering of raw material and unrest rather than peace and democracy is what drives development.

Since 2006, the LRA has not been active in northern Uganda. Its leaders are wanted by the International Criminal Courts in The Hague, on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. There is a full consensus that they are guilty and ought to face justice. However, the question that now should be asked is what happens when we focus so exclusively on one participant, one individual, that is to say Joseph Kony, the leader of the LRA? We must also ask ourselves what happens when influential lobbyists and activists so successfully serve a prepared message with a completely black and white world view, where simplifications are consciously and systematically employed. Which is the image of Africa that millions of people the world over are consuming, but which now is being increasingly questioned, not least by peace activists in Uganda? Perhaps Invisible Children is actually a symptom of something much larger, which also includes the media industry.

Matthew Green, who was previously on the ground and reported about the LRA, has afterwards reflected self-critically on his own role as a news journalist. Green describes how his employers, Reuters in London, demanded that he should revise his articles about the LRA so that Joseph Kony’s supposed madness and religious fundamentalism were always at the center. Sam Farmer, another journalist, manipulated a unique video interview with Kony so that the film reinforced the picture that Invisible Children are now selling so successfully.

When Jason Russell, one of Invisible Children’s leading figures, faced the growing criticism of “Kony 2012” in The New York Times (March *), his response was well prepared:

“No one wants a boring documentary on Africa,” he said. “Maybe we have to make it pop, and we have to make it cool. We view ourselves as the Pixar of human rights stories.”

In the interview, Russell reiterated what had formed the basis for their first film from 2003. When he started on his journey with a film camera in his baggage, he had no idea that he would wind up in a war zone in Africa. It was chance that took him and his two friends to war-torn northern Uganda, and it was this journey that made the three friends make a pledge, which is now spreading in the new film: They promised that they would do all they could to stop the LRA.

Now that the initial storm after the film, “Kony 2012,” has abated, Invisible Children continue to mobilize for the campaign that will culminate one day in April in thousands of cities, from San Diego to Uppsala. Therefore, I believe it is worthwhile to go back in time a little. In contrast to what the filmmakers still assert, they were fully aware what they were entering into when they first set out to northern Uganda. Before departure, they had met Ugandan exiles in the United States and had sought out information on the situation. Already the reality rewrite and the work on what would become one of the Internet’s most widespread films of all time had begun. The first film, “Invisible Children: Rough Cut” from 2003, framed a clear agenda; money would be collected so that schools could be built for former child soldiers in Uganda. During the years that followed the agenda was reformulated.

As far back as the first film, the filmmakers had created a very special version of the truth. Tragically enough, it is probably here one finds the key to Invisible Children’s massive success. It is a stereotypical picture of Africa that is sold. Any trick in the book is permitted. Since they couldn’t find any good film footage of the LRA, they instead took film clips from the wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia. Dramatic and dark depictions convey, in addition, an emphatic representation of the evil in darkest Africa. Several of the uniformed child soldiers who in fact appear in the “Rough Cut” film, I immediately recognized. I had seen the same film sequences in other documentaries, but then the child soldiers were in the troops which, under Yoweri Museveni’s command, occupied Uganda’s capital in 1986, and which Invisible Children now actively chooses to support.

The “Rough Cut” film is divided into chapters. One is called “The Mental State” and portrays how widespread and generic war trauma is in northern Uganda. When I had the opportunity to scrutinize the film together with a research colleague who was on a visit to Sweden from Uganda, we were quickly able to establish that the few individuals who illustrate “The Mental State” are all well-known characters in the city of Gulu, in northern Uganda, where the film was recorded. They were all, in one way or another, psychologically ill and tragically abandoned individuals who lived on garbage and anything else they could find on Gulu’s streets. The man who expresses himself in slurred English is obviously drunk. His words are more or less twaddle. My Ugandan friend feels offended that this is supposed to illustrate the general condition of his part of the country: that drunkenness and psychological illness should express his culture. However, it’s a well-known ploy, to allow an individual’s condition in some way be illustrative of a whole population’s supposed affliction, even a whole continent’s. Passive African victims who need the active help of Western countries in Invisible Children’s version of internet therapy, one mouse click away.

The picture that is conveyed is deeply colonial. In the colonialist’s world view, Africans were seen as primitive, most like children, in need of our salvation. In essence, nothing has changed much since colonial days. Africans are described even today as wholly steered by their ethnicity, and African culture in general as violent and primitive. The continent’s children become passive victims. All local initiatives to peace and provision, like bubbles in the shadow of the gloomy news reports, Invisible Children choose to ignore entirely. With this as a starting point, it doesn’t really matter if the armed child soldiers who figure in Invisible Children’s films about northern Uganda are from the southern parts of the nation or from an entirely different country and completely different conflict. Unfortunately, there are innumerable examples of how Invisible Children have, through the years, systematically cut and pasted facts to create a unilateral picture of the conflict in northern Uganda.

With time, Invisible Children’s direction changed. More focus was placed on their own film production and increased lobbying in the U.S., where the filmmakers travel about like rock stars. It is in the film production and the actual lobbying that large amounts of the donated money end up. In one of the organization’s films from 2011, there are hints of a new message. The CIA’s logo and American military helicopters show up in a film aesthetic that has an increasing action emphasis. The lobbying is intensified, and one of the chief aims is now the intervention of the U.S. army. The message is that only the U.S. Army can stop Joseph Kony and the LRA. For AFRICOM, the U.S.’s relatively new African military commando unit (they have one for every continent), the lobbying was more than timely. AFRICOM would welcome a permanent military base on the African continent, and Entebbe in Uganda would be more than strategic. Al-Qaida’s first significant international bomb attack was, of course, aimed at the American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and the Americans have long been openly expressed that the greatest threat to U.S. interests in east Africa is the regime in Khartoum. They also support Ugandan and Ethiopian troops which at present are fighting against al Shabab in Somalia.

The LRA and Joseph Kony, in the global war against terrorism, are a useful and entirely convenient springboard. Through the tendentious focus on Joseph Kony, now maybe the world’s most sought criminal, what seems to be the U.S.’s panacea to complex global problems is laid bare. If only the big bad villain is apprehended or killed the problem is solved. The corrupt political structures that allowed a man like Joseph Kony to continually lay waste to increasingly large areas of central Africa during all these years, few politicians and policy makers want to address.

It seems we don’t want to learn from the events in Iraq after Saddam Hussein was captured and executed. However, the fact is, Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, with U.S. military and political support, has successfully employed terror-like methods to secure power in a situation where political opposition in Uganda is maturing and growing with each passing day. In the shadow of the one-sided spotlights on Joseph Kony, the oppression of the opposition in Uganda has been able to grow without closer scrutiny. Ever since Museveni’s military coup in 1986, Uganda’s political opposition has been systematically persecuted. Opposition leaders have been accused on baseless grounds for terrorism and treason. In several parts of the country, it has become common for the opposition to be assaulted by army and security forces, not least during election campaigns, accused of collaborating with Joseph Kony and the LRA. “If you advocate multi-party politics,” a Ugandan friend said to me, “you immediately are accused of being a Kony.” In the shadow of the war against the LRA, hundreds of thousands of Ugandans have, at gunpoint, been displaced into massive internal refugee camps. In one period more than 1,000 people died every week in these camps. Sexual violence and persecution from the government’s army has been rife.

Invisible Children explain none of this. Rather, the organization actively avoids relating anything that risks compromising their black and white world view. In one trailer to the now so successful film, they are clear in their objectives for 2012. “Don’t study history, make history,” they exhort their activists. Now, even amid growing criticism, they censor the comments on their Facebook page; at the same time, they urge the movement’s activists not to trust researchers and academics.

I have, through my research, come into contact with several of the organization’s members. One young American told me why he eventually came to leave the movement. As a university student reading history, he found it strange and eventually untenable that the organization sought to thwart all initiatives to learn more about the conflict. It was evident that the organization’s leaders did not want to see the prepackaged message questioned. Within internal lobbying, the Ugandan government was described only in positive terms, something the student, schooled in critical thinking, found odd. It was apparent that Invisible Children saw themselves as a partner not only to the government of Uganda but also to Uganda’s army, which they have increasingly come to support.

The student I spoke to felt uncomfortable being a part of something that progressively came to function as a closed cult. At the same time, the persuasive magic in Invisible Children is built upon this uncommunicativeness. It is a story entirely without nuance, political analysis or deeper context. The leader of the LRA is described as evil incarnate. After several years of massive lobbying, this analysis has now become accepted by American military leadership. ”I have to tell you, six months ago, I didn't know anything about the Lord's Resistance Army,” said General Carter Ham, AFRICOM’s commander, in a video interview in October last yea,r which one of Invisible Children’s sister organizations has helped to spread. “You start to learn a little bit about this, and if you ever had any question if there was evil in this world, it's resident in the person of Joseph Kony and in that organization.”

Who could ever be against the fight against evil? However it is a dirty war that the activists are now engaged in. The International Criminal Court in The Hague has chosen to proceed only with investigations of the rebel side, despite the fact that organizations like Amnesty and Human Rights Watch, in a raft of reports, have attested to the government army’s systematic and widespread offences. Besides, in contrast to countries such as Sweden and Uganda, the U.S. has refused to subject itself to the authority of this court. In my own research, I have documented many abuses, by both the rebels and the government’s army, but it has been difficult for me to put across information about the government’s offences. My attempts have been misinterpreted several times as a defense of the rebels’s grotesque violence. Representatives for the courts in The Hague defend themselves by saying that the government’s abuses have not reached the selected threshold of violence they have set up, a level they simultaneously refuse to describe more specifically to us researchers. The situation is both ironic and deeply tragic, since in practice it is the LRA which sets the threshold for what we think we ought to accept. All the violence that happens in the silence, under this threshold, by parties other than the LRA, we close our eyes to. It is the stuff of fairy tales when we believe that, since we so clearly know who personifies evil in all of this, all others must by definition be good.

It is now important to dispel the fantasy and destroy the completely black-and-white world view that Invisible Children has successfully made their own. At the end of 2008, when hope finally ran out for the peace talks that, for two years, resulted in a relative peace in northern Uganda and South Sudan, the Ugandan army, with American military support, carried out a failed raid against the LRA’s camp in northeast Congo. American diplomats had forced through an agreement which allowed Ugandan troops into Congolese territory, despite Congolese opposition, as Uganda’s army in the ‘90s had invaded eastern Congo and systematically pillaged the country. Uganda’s parliament was shut out from the decision making process. The country’s parliamentarians were not even informed, and thus president Museveni violated the country’s constitution. When the attack came, Joseph Kony had already divided his troops into small, deadly and highly mobile units. Anyone with knowledge of the LRA could only concur when the South Sudanese vice president protested and said that it was like pushing a stick into a wasps nest and stirring it up.

Kony ordered one of his officers to lead an attack on the small town of Faradje in the Congo. During the Christmas weekend of 2008, at least 140 innocent Congolese were massacred in Faradje. At about that time, the International Criminal Court announced that it only intended to investigate crimes committed by rebels on Congolese territory. A year later, the rebel who led the massacre of Faradje, defected. Quietly, he was immediately given amnesty by the Ugandan government, under the condition that he joined the Ugandan military. In all likelihood, U.S. military advisers had a hand in these events. They know they have to bargain with those that they have officially labeled as evil personified if they are to take Kony. They need them. This is how an anonymous AFRICOM officer expressed the situation in an interview with The New York Times. ”These ex-LRA guys don’t have many skills, and it’s going to be hard for them to reintegrate. But one thing they are very good at, is hunting human beings in the woods.”

This is the development that Invisible Children in practice supports but of course do not reveal in the Pixar version of human rights that they now spread around the whole world. With their one-sided focus on Joseph Kony, they urge us to overlook the offenses of which I have given examples. It’s a dirty war that they are selling.

Finally, a “disclaimer”: this article doesn’t offer any short cuts or “action kits.” Instead I encourage everyone to challenge themselves and the Google that we have become increasingly dependent on. Find your own way to information. Be critical — knowledge, not ignorance is the only way. Besides my own book, "Living with Bad Surroundings" (Duke University Press, 2008), I would like to take the opportunity to recommend Chris Dolan’s "Social Torture" (Berghahn Books, 2009), and Adam Branch’s "Displacing Human Rights" (Oxford University Press, 2011). These three books are based on thorough empirical research in northern Uganda.