WEB-EXCLUSIVE: The controversy around Kony2012: The college’s chapter of Invisible Children responds to critics

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By Rachel Luchmun

The Invisible Children campaign Kony2012 aims at bringing awareness about Joseph Kony, an African war criminal. As the video is gaining more and more popularity, numerous critics emerged against the effort.

According to the Kony2012 website, Kony abducts children to be soldiers in his army and women to be “wives” to his subordinates. Kony’s group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), originated in northern Uganda but moved to the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic and South Sudan.

A video documenting Kony’s crimes was available on YouTube on March 5. At the time of writing, the video had over 60 million views. The video has been widely shared over social networking sites Facebook and Twitter.

The surge in interest about Invisible Children’s Kony2012 video saw a wave of criticism about Invisible Children and about the initiative. Criticism included allegations that Invisible Children only sent a small proportion of its funds to Africa; that the video exaggerated facts about Kony; and that they were simplifying a complex issue, advocating dangerous solutions.

Invisible Children has put up an official response to all this criticism on their website.

Susie Sympson, adviser of the Invisible Children group on campus, said the criticism stemmed from ignorance of all the facts or a hidden agenda.

“A lot of people want to say that there is no problem, that we are exaggerating,” she said. “But there are no inaccuracies [in the video]. They’re asking everybody to share this, and maybe they stepped on the wrong people’s toes. Sometimes politics are just a smokescreen. There are more atrocities happening in Africa than in the Middle-East, but Africa does not have oil.”

Sympson also said that not doing anything about Kony was not an option.

“To ignore entire civilizations is ethnocentric,” she said. “[The situation in Uganda] is not as horrible as it was, but it is still bad. We are talking about a serious issue that no one talked about for 20 years.”

Contact Rachel Luchmun, managing editor, at rluchmun@jccc.edu.

OTHER RESOURCES:

Kony2012: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4MnpzG5Sqc

Response to critics of Kony2012: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQABpjCalJk&feature=youtu.be

Official Invisible Children response: http://www.invisiblechildren.com/critiques.html

List of critics: http://visiblechildren.tumblr.com/post/18954353409/not-alone

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