International Crisis Group
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A YouTube video gone viral has propelled Joseph Kony, leader of Uganda’s rebel Lord’s Resistance Army, back onto the agenda, entrenching his position at the top of the list of the world’s most wanted men.
But how long the current spike of interest will last is far from clear. Hits on the video appeared to have fallen sharply in recent days, while the charity has also found itself on the receiving end of a savage backlash.
Produced by U.S.-based group “ Invisible Children”, “Kony 2012” has scored more than 77 million hits in less than a week.
With others watching on other sites including the charity’s own, the true total may be higher still.
The message was blunt - and in the eyes of many overly simplistic. It argued that the world and the United States in particular should do more to capture a man indicted almost a decade ago by the International Criminal Court and who still tops their list of suspects at large, accused of multiple war crimes including kidnapping children to act as soldiers and sex slaves.
Such unexpected publicity, insiders say, usually leads to desk officers in foreign ministries and intelligence agencies finding phones ringing with insistent demands something be done.
“A campaign like this definitely energizes the political level and that in turn energizes the diplomatic machine,” says John Campbell, a former U.S. ambassador and now senior fellow for African affairs at the U.S.-based Council on Foreign Relations. “Democracies are really exceptionally responsive to the public … "Kony 2012” is bound to have an impact (but) what the practical results will be I think is too early to tell.“
Partly as a result of similar if lower-profile campaigns by civil society groups, the United States late last year sent just over 100 special forces and support personnel to Uganda and nearby countries to help find Kony. But analysts say their main priority has been training local troops rather than engaging in the manhunt themselves.
"GALVANIZING POLICYMAKERS”
“These things can galvanize policymakers,” says Nigel Inkster, a former deputy chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) now head of transnational threats and political risk at London’s International Institute for Strategic Studies.
“But unless the safety of nationals or direct interests are involved, there is unlikely to be much of a response over and above anything which might already be happening - such as capacity building for indigenous security forces.”
While Kony’s new-found name recognition might make his capture an appealing prospect in a US election year, a “Black Hawk Down”-style military debacle that cost American lives would be a political disaster for President Barack Obama.
Having been forced from Uganda by a concerted local offensive over several years, Kony and a few hundred followers are believed to have fled at various times to the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and now Central African Republic.
But more than a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq - including thousands of special forces raids - have left the U.S. military hardened and much more used to operating in challenging environments than in 1993, when a botched attempt to seize Somali militia leaders in Mogadishu left 18 Americans and perhaps as many as 2000 civilians dead.
Using ever more sophisticated surveillance and data-crunching technology, Western intelligence agencies have also become much more successful at tracking down high-profile targets.
However, with Kony and his followers now believed to be avoiding telephones and other electronic communications and simply using local runners as they move from village to village, pinning him down may be no easy task.
“The campaign aims to harden the U.S.’s engagement in the fight against the LRA,” said Ned Dalby, central Africa analyst for International Crisis Group. “But worries ahead of the election about U.S. servicemen being killed in Africa will likely prevent the American army going beyond its advise-and-assist role.”
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Alan Greenblatt
Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army have been terrorizing civilians in central Africa for more than 25 years. But their crimes have suddenly received prominence due to one of the most successful social media campaigns in history.
On Monday, a nonprofit group called Invisible Children uploaded a video onto the Internet that has already been viewed nearly 40 million times on YouTube. Many viewers are young people, and the topic is dominating discussion on social media sites such as Twitter and Reddit.
There’s no question the video has directed wider attention to a far-away matter like Kony and the LRA than any congressional debate or set of policy papers.
“It’s had a dramatic effect,” says Richard Downie, deputy director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. “We’ve been talking about him for a long time, without anything like this response.”
But Invisible Children has been criticized for oversimplifying the issues involved. Capturing Kony – which has been the goal of multiple governments for years – is going to take a lot more than sharing a video online or putting up posters and purchasing bracelets from the group, as the video suggests.
“Activism always involves sparking attention –- getting people to take up and notice this problem, as opposed to the six million other problems they could be mad about,” says Jeremi Suri, author ofLiberty’s Surest Guardian: American Nation-Building From the Founders to Obama.
But awareness and activism aren’t always enough to achieve the outcomes desired in a complex, real-world situation.
“This video is making a moral plea, but it doesn’t leave much space for the unintended consequences that might result from intervening,” Suri says.
‘Evil In This World’
The LRA was one of the armed rebel groups that emerged in northern Uganda following the rise to power in 1986 of Yoweri Museveni, who remains the country’s president.
The LRA has committed countless atrocities, hacking off limbs, noses, ears and lips from its victims in order to instill fear. More than 400,000 people were displaced or living as refugees last year as a result of the LRA’s activities, according to groups that have tracked the organization.Over the years, the LRA has metastasized from a group resisting the government to a force that seems to have little purpose outside its own survival. As the video points out, the group has killed and disfigured thousands of people and abducted thousands of children.
“If you ever had any question if there’s evil in this world, it’s resident in the person of Joseph Kony,” Gen. Carter F. Ham, head of U.S. Africa Command, said last year.
Getting Kony Was Already A Policy
The capture or killing of Kony is already official U.S. policy. Prodded by Invisible Children and other human rights groups, Congress in 2010 passed a law requiring the president to devise a strategy to eliminate the LRA.
Last October, President Obama detailed the administration’s plans for doing so, including the announcement that 100 U.S. troops would be deployed to Uganda to provide intelligence and logistical support.
There are still snags. The LRA now roams through densely-forested land along the borders of South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republican of the Congo.
The U.S. is trying to work with all those armies, but they have failed to come together in an organized or effective way, says Mark Schneider, a former Peace Corps director who is now with the International Crisis Group, which supports conflict-prevention efforts.