Erstellt am: 12. 3. 2012 - 15:22 Uhr
What About Land Grabs and Nodding Disease?
Awareness is great, says Mark Kersten of the London School of Economics, and author of the blog Justice in Conflict, but not if it means sacrificing understanding of complex problems.
Mark is one of the 73 million people who have watched the viral video Kony 2012, a 30 minute documentary about the murderous warlord Joseph Kony made by a US-based campaigning group called Invisible Children, but he wasn’t one of the 1.3 million people who pressed the like button.
The film pulls unashamedly at the heart strings of a western audience. It features a scene where the son of the American director, Jason Russell, sums up what his father does for a living: "You stop the bad guys from being mean." But is that possible?
KONY 2012 from INVISIBLE CHILDREN on Vimeo.
"My worry is that it could leads to the wrong way of solving the problems," says Kersten. The film calls for US troops to remove the elusive Kony, but Kersten dismisses the idea that getting rid of one man - referred to in the film, as the "bad guy" - who hasn’t been seen in northern Uganda for the past six years, would be the panacea for the region, solving all its problems with a bullet or a pair of handcuffs.
That Joseph Kony is a "bad guy" is indisputable. He has haunted Uganda for much of the past 25 years and is thought to have been responsible for the kidnapping of 30,000 children. These kids have been used as child soldiers or sex slaves by the mysterious Lord`s Resistance Army. Some children, often drugged, were forced by the LRA to execute their own parents.
It is a horrific story, but an emotional call to arms is not the solution says Kersten.
Between 2006 and 2008, peace negotiations between the Ugandan government and the LRA, held in Juba in today`s South Sudan led in Kersten`s words to "an incredible reduction in violence" that has allowed northern Ugandans to rebuild their lives. That progress might be disturbed by renewed violence. "In the past ten years we have seen numerous military operations against the LRA, some with regional support and some with Western backing. These have all failed to dismantle the LRA or stop Joseph Kony but instead have led to retaliations aimed at civilians."
In fact, the film-makers have already got much of what they are calling for. Critics say the video, though moving, is politically out of date. In October last year, US President Barack Obama authorized the deployment of 100 US army advisers to help the Ugandan military track down Kony. They have reported no success and they are probably looking in the wrong places. By all accounts the LRA have largely moved to the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic (CAR) and South Sudan.
The militants' professed political philosophy is vague. It is apparently based on the Ten Commandments, but evidently with scant regard for the biblical ban on killing. The Ugandan journalist Angelo Opi-aiya Izama reports that Kony`s late deputy Vincent Otii described their fight as being essentially about "money and oil" in those porous border areas.
"The source of the problem is poor governance, the marginalization of certain groups of people, and poor infrastructure in parts of the CAR and DR Congo" says Kersten. "This creates a space for lawlessness in which rebels, and not only the LRA but other groups, too, can function, hide and continue to wage wars against the various states and their proxy forces."
In other words the LRA continues to exist because of severe structural problems. The idea that these problems would go away if US troops arrived and removed Kony is considered naive and even patronizing by many journalists in the region.
The film is very slick but critics complain that the makers are media experts not development experts. Blogging in the Guardian, John Vidal has unearthed some interesting facts about the cold business edge behind the Invisible Children group. "Their accounts suggest nearly 25% of its $8.8m income last year was spent on travel and film-making, with only around 30% going toward programmes on the ground," he writes. "The great majority of the money raised has been spent in the US. $1.7 million went on US employee salaries, $357,000 in film costs, $850,000 in film production costs, $244,000 in "professional services" - thought to be Washington lobbyists - and $1.07 million in travel expenses. Nearly $400,000 was spent on office rent in San Diego."
That said, it would be unfair to vilify the film-makers. Other NGOs have praised Invisible Children for its hands on engagement and Kersten does recognize that the video has put the issue of security in central Africa back up on the political agenda. Millions of people now know something about Uganda, and you don’t have to accept the film-makers conclusions to appreciate the spot-light they have shone on a neglected area.
Kersten welcomes the debate that it has unleashed, saying that "in this age of persuasion and social media everyone accepts that complex issues need to be simplified." But he adds that "in 30 minutes this video has crossed such a threshold of simplicity that it no longer approximates the situation on the ground."
Kersten says there hasn’t been an LRA attack in Uganda in the past 6 years and that the people there face different challenges. So if he could make a 30 minute video about northern Uganda, he´d like to tell a different story. He`d tell the world about the school programmes he visited last summer in northern Uganda that have had success rehabilitating former child soldiers. He`d tell the world about the crippling effects of poor education - the region around the northern town of Gulu has the worst standards of education in the whole of Uganda. He’d tell about the recent outbreak of a Nodding Disease, a mysterious illness currently without a cure, that has killed 200 children in rural Uganda and has debilitated hundreds more. He`d tell them about the violence and destitution caused by government land-grabbing and about the challenges of season-affecting climate change.
It would be a fascinating story. But without a gun and a bad guy, would 70 million people watch it?