Celebrities also became involved with features on the popular television show Veronica Mars and a music video by Fall Out Boy. Before delving into that, it is important to acknowledge the criticism which existed before I myself still have the black and red Invisible Children bracelet pictured below which I purchased at one such event at my high school. We were told they were made in Uganda and would directly benefit children there.
I viewed this presentation in and so before Kony , but I remember sitting in my high school auditorium watching video of child soldiers and feeling an urge to help children my age who I did not and would never know, and yet still felt a connection to somehow.
These efforts seemed noble in my high school brain but as I have learned more about humanitarianism and its pitfalls, I have come to understand and support many criticisms of the organization.
The organization was charged with using images of the children to sell merchandise and garner attention. They were also known for appealing to youth to radicalize them in a sense toward becoming humanitarians themselves. Between and program expenses were divided between US events and actual programs in Uganda but the US side had a much larger share which led to public scrutiny.
A group called Visible Children found that only 32 percent of aid went directly to helping Ugandans while the remainder paid for staff, travel, and production. Invisible Children shot back claiming they needed to spend this money on advocacy as it would ultimately pay off.
The organization was struggling financially and most of the money came from merchandise sales at these tour events. They acknowledge that they simplified things in the presentations but claim it was intentional so that more people would become interested.
Still, critics felt it was wrong of white Americans to step in and use such propaganda to fix a problem many Ugandans felt they could fix on their own. The Kony video was controversial and perhaps that is partly why, despite criticisms, it did see some success. It advocated for the posting of images and leaflets about this message all over to raise awareness. Much of the criticism of the film centered on its simplification of the conflict.
It is easier to sensationalize and create connections when a story is simple and relatable. Invisible Children was charged with creating the narrative they wanted about the LRA based on the population they wished to speak directly to. Announcements from the organization often contained boasts of drastic lowering of the number of displaced persons which many fact checking organizations found to be wholly untrue.
This simplification also places all blame for deaths and violence on the LRA, ignoring any role the Ugandan government may have played. Those impacted by the Ugandan crisis had not been consulted enough by Invisible Children and their agency had not been considered.
Like many other humanitarian organizations, Invisible Children assumed Africans could not help themselves. Cole cautioned that focusing an entire campaign on one individual—Joseph Kony—took away from so many other issues in existence. Rather the region could benefit from aid targeted at infrastructure, education, and health. Kate Cronin-Furman and Amanda Taub discuss this in a somewhat meta manner. The people criticizing the video claimed Invisible Children was not doing enough to help while they sat at home critiquing this organization who had at least traveled to Uganda and documented the plight.
Ethical advocates do not insist that others have no right to speak. Ugandan citizens had a largely negative response to Kony as well. Many gathered in a town park to watch Kony 2 after its release and the viewing led to citizens throwing stones at organizers in anger.
They cited offense at merchandise being sold off their plight and did not feel the film represented their truths. The pure fact that an online film was used when Ugandans themselves did not have internet access is yet another unfortunate angle. Critics felt the film oversimplified matters and ignored the fact that Joseph Kony was long since driven out of Uganda.
They were upset that he was receiving so much attention and called for a ban on the t-shirts in Uganda. Like Cole, they also felt the film focused too much on white saviors and made Africans look helpless. Others took a similar approach, villainizing the United States. The very idea of releasing a video and using rallies as a main source of income could be viewed as lazy and left much of the actual work up to Africans.
It was a risky strategy which in the end backfired as support for their media dwindled. Invisible Children had a hard choice to make and I commend them for making the right one — choosing to continue their life-saving operations in Central Africa.
I am eager to see the next chapter of the organization. They have helped create new law and policies to counter LRA violence. They work with many partners in central Africa to protect civilians from LRA violence and to help those abducted by the LRA to defect, heal their physical and psychic wounds, reintegrate back into civilian life and become agents for change.
They have truly made a difference, and I look forward to continuing to work with them as they make this transition over the next two years. Everything raised through December 31, will go toward the Finishing Fund, which will ensure a responsible transfer of program ownership into the hands of local partners.
Yet, other than that, the documentary has a number of fundamental problems. While the documentary intends to unmask the simplification of the Kony campaign, it unfortunately suffers itself from similar problems: it strongly simplifies the realities on the ground, presents dubious causal relations, and withholds essential information.
Let me present a number of examples. First, a major claim of the documentary is that Invisible Children swindled the funds raised through the Kony money, and that it never reached the affected people. A serious accusation, which the documentary proves through excerpts of an interview with former IC Uganda director, Jolly Okot. Context is needed here, which is not provided by the documentary makers. This decision was strongly contested by IC Uganda, who claimed that the profits of the Kony campaign should primarily go to them because the conflict and organization started with them.
Eventually, this led to a rupture in the organization, with the Ugandan branch no longer being a member of IC. Either the makers were not aware of the broader story, or they chose to leave that out, in both cases, the reliance on a non-contextualized or properly researched single source is problematic in any discipline or format—whether it is a documentary film, academic work or human rights report.
In doing so, the makers purposefully ignore an essential part of the story, which did not fit their narrative. While it has been shown that the US military were there because of internal US pressure rather than a concern for people in the affected areas, the documentary takes these critiques one step further: it basically argues that the US troops have never been hunting Kony, for the simple reason that they were in a completely different area.
This is another very strong claim, but is it also true? Yet again, this is a simplification, or even falsification, of reality.
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