Author, Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair
GET UPDATES FROM Michael Deibert
The Problem With Invisible Children's "Kony 2012"
Posted: 03/ 7/2012 5:55 pm
Recently, a new video produced by the American NGO
Invisible Children focusing on Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has been making the rounds. Having just
returned
from the Acholi region of Northern Uganda myself, where the LRA was
born, I thought I might share some of my thoughts on the subject, for
what it's worth.
I think it is easy for Invisible Children and other self-aggrandizing
foreigners to make the entire story of the last 30 years of Northern
Uganda about Joseph Kony, but there is a history of the relationship
between the Acholi people from whom the LRA emerged and the central
government in Kampala that is a little more complicated than that.
Kony is a grotesque war criminal, to be sure, but the Ugandan
government currently in power also came to power through the use of
kadogo
(child soldiers) and fought alongside militias employing child soldiers
in the Democratic Republic of Congo, something that Invisible Children
seem wilfully ignorant of.
The conflict in Acholi -- the ancestral homeland of the ethnic group
who stretch across northern Uganda and southern Sudan -- has its roots
in Uganda's history of dictatorship and political turmoil. A large
number of soldiers serving in the government of dictator Milton Obote
(who ruled Uganda from 1966 to 1971 and then again from 1980 to 1985)
came from across northern Uganda, with the Acholis being particularly
well represented, even though Obote himself hailed from the Lango ethnic
group. When Obote was overthrown by his own military commanders, an
ethnic Acholi, General Tito Okello, became president for six chaotic
months until Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army took over.
Museveni became president, and has since remained so, via elections --
some legitimate, some deeply flawed.
Upon taking power, the Museveni government launched a brutal search
and destroy mission against former government soldiers throughout the
north, which swept up many ordinary Acholi in its wake. Some Acholi
began mobilizing to defend themselves, first under the banner of the
Uganda People's Democratic Army (largely made up of former soldiers) and
then the Holy Spirit Movement.
This movement,
directed by Alice Auma,
an Acholi who claimed to be acting on guidance from the spirit Lakwena,
brought a mystical belief in their own invincibility that the soldiers
of the Kampala-based government at first found terrifying: Holy Spirit
Movement devotees walked headlong into blazing gunfire singing songs and
holding stones they believed would turn into grenades. The movement
succeeded in reaching Jinja, just 80 km from the capital Kampala, before
being decimated by Museveni's forces.
Out of this slaughter was born the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), led
by Joseph Kony, a distant relative of Alice Auma. Kony added an
additional element of targeting civilian Acholi to his schismatic blend
of Christianity, frequently kidnapping children and adolescents to serve
in his rebel movement. The Museveni government responded by viewing all
Acholi as potential collaborators, rounding them up into camps
euphemistically called "
protected villages", where they were vulnerable to disease and social ills, and had few ways to carry on their traditional farming.
The LRA's policy of targeting civilians (though not the Museveni
government's draconian measures) eventually drew international
condemnation and in 2005 the International Criminal Court issued
arrest warrants
against Joseph Kony and several other seniors LRA commanders for crimes
against humanity and war crimes. Ironically, one of those commanders,
Dominic Ongwen, was himself kidnapped by the LRA while still a small
boy.
After peace talks between the LRA and the Ugandan government
collapsed in 2007, the group decamped from its bases in southern Sudan
to the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.
Following the end of negotiations, the Museveni government launched its
Peace Recovery and Development Plan (PRDP), an effort to stabilize northern Uganda after years of war. Since then, according to the United Nations,
98 percent of internally displaced persons have moved on from the camps that once sheltered hundreds of thousands of frightened people.
Despite criticisms from the Acholi that the government's program has
been insufficient, local initiatives and the work of some foreign
organizations have helped restore a sense of normality and gradual
progress to the region, with people returned to their homes and travel
between once off-limits parts of the region now facilitated with
relative ease.
Now a thousand miles from the cradle of their insurgency, the LRA
would appear to have little hope of returning to Uganda, though their
potential to wreak havoc on civilians remains little diminished. In
Congo's Haut-Uele province, between December 2009 and January 2010, the
LRA massacred 620 civilians and abducted more than 120 children.
In October 2011, U.S. President Barack Obama announced that he was
sending 100 Special Forces soldiers
to help the Ugandans hunt down Kony. By the end of the year, the
Ugandan army confirmed that the troops had moved along with the Ugandan
army to Obo in the Central African Republic and Nzara in South Sudan.
The problem with Invisible Children's whitewashing of the role of the
government of Uganda's president Yoweri Museveni in the violence of
Central Africa is that it gives Museveni and company a free pass, and
added ammunition with which to bludgeon virtually any domestic
opposition, such as Kizza Besigye and the
Forum for Democratic Change.
By blindly supporting Uganda's current government and its military
adventures beyond its borders, as Invisible Children suggests that
people do, Invisible Children is in fact guaranteeing that there will be
more violence, not less, in Central Africa.
I have seen the well-meaning foreigners do plenty of damage before,
so that is why people understanding the context and the history of the
region is important before they blunder blindly forward to "help" a
people they don't understand.
U.S. President Bill Clinton professed that he was "helping" in the
Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1990s and his help ended up with
over 6 million people losing their
lives.
The same mistake should not be repeated today.
TAKE THE TIME TO LEARN!!!
