Kony 2012, the True Story

The creators of the short film presented to the West a softened version of Uganda’s terrible story, with “good guys” and “bad guys” and without too many horrors. And still, we should take off our hat to them.

Jason Russell, the creator of the “Kony 2012” film and campaign, and his friends Bobby Bailey and Laren Poole, in 2003 came across the story of a refuge in the town of Gulu, where hundreds of women and children, refugees of the war taking place in the north of Uganda since 1986, were staying. They documented it with an amateur camera, and it stands in the center of their first film, “Invisible Children,” which was released in 2005.

Notwithstanding its low technical quality, the film received hundreds of views on the Internet and thousands of screenings in Western universities. Meanwhile, “Invisible Children, Inc.” was established, an organization which succeeded raising certain awareness in the world to the mere existence of the conflict in the north of Uganda, awareness which became common knowledge thanks to the “Kony 2012” campaign.

In 2007, I visited northern Uganda. Following the story of a foreign volunteer, I arrived at the Atiak DP camp. I heard about the massacre that had taken place there from the camp’s inhabitants. Close to 250 people had been murdered, dozens injured and raped, and thousands of souls had been left scarred. During the massacre, the families of the murdered were forced to clap hands while their dear ones were shot in front of their eyes. This is only one of dozens of similar cases.

Initially, Joseph Kony became famous among the Acholi tribe as a medium communicating with the dead. In 1986, he established a private military called the “Lord’s Resistance Army.” Shortly after, the LRA began to harm its own tribe, the Acholi. It is hard to understand why, probably a power trip. During more than two decades his men were raiding villages and DP camps, burning houses, murdering and raping — the horrors are imperceptible, one Ugandan journalist told me about a woman who was forced to eat the flesh of her dead husband. The children were taken captive by the Lord’s Resistance Army plunderers. The boys were raised to be soldiers, the girls turned into slaves.

Asking to impose order in the north, the government of Uganda relocated about 1.5 million of the region’s inhabitants to DP camps — dense clusters of mud huts, without running water, sewage or electricity. The relocation caused the Acholi’s structure of life to collapse. Unemployment, alcoholism, pregnant girls and AIDS were all spread across the tribe’s members in the camps. An inhabitant told me about the contraceptive device common there — a nylon bag — sparing the cost of a condom. Although most of the camps were officially dismantled after the Lord’s Resistance Army fled the region in recent years, many continue to live within them.

“Kony 2012” is radically different from “Invisible Children.” First, it is highly professional and full of effects, thus drawing an audience of the kind that zaps away whenever they run into news from the black continent — and this should be cherished. Second, Russell made sure not to include many facts as a burden on the viewer. The film gives a simple representation of “bad guys” against “good guys,” passes over the poverty and distress that accompany the conflict and omits the contribution of the government of Uganda to the victims’ suffering.

The peace process, which was taking place until 2008, was shorty portrayed in the film as a tactical maneuver done by Kony and his men in order to rearm themselves. This is probably true, but still a partial picture. The film doesn’t mention the reintegration of thousands of Lord’s Resistance Army warriors into society. This was done as a part of an internationally important first attempt to reconcile “minor” war criminals with their victims, using traditional judicial methods. Third, the film contains but a small amount of horrific images and a lot of smiling people.

To conclude, despite its shivering theme, “Kony 2012” is light and even pleasant to the eyes. The film avoids dealing with some troubling questions: How did an insane organization like the Lord’s Resistance Army manage to arm thousands so easily? Why didn’t the conflict receive wide media coverage? Are there other conflicts, similar in cruelness and extent, which are unfamiliar to us? The answer to the last question is positive. Take, for example, the verdict given last week in The Hague about Thomas Lubanga. What do you know about it?

Instead, the film prefers to focus on Kony’s capture. Seemingly, there is nothing bad about it. However while catching the Lord’s Resistance Army’s leader might perhaps ease the pain, a significant war against the arms trade, for example, would be a substantial treatment of the disease whose metastases have already spread far from Uganda.

The failures of “Kony 2012” are not accidental. After years of searching, it seems that Russell found the key to the heart of the Western audience. This is why he “modestly” aimed at capturing Kony, and this is the reason he presented his viewers with a “padded” version of northern Uganda’s terrible story. But in spite of all this, the film is still a tremendous achievement. It brought the troubles of Africans into the homes of millions in the West, and for this we must take our hats off to Russell and his friends.