Kony 2012, Slacktivists Unite!

Rebel leader, Kony, has been terrorizing Uganda for 26 years, using his criminal gang to abduct young Ugandans and use them as child soldiers, and he is at the top of the International Criminal Court's most wanted list.

The #kony2012 campaign has been trending on Twitter this week and since Monday, March 5th 2012, their video has received close to 10 million views on YouTube since it was uploaded two days ago.

Having done a quick survey of the Uganda situation online, I have formed the following opinion: THESE MOVEMENT ORGANIZERS ARE GOING TO BE MAKING A LOT OF MONEY THIS YEAR!

The Occupy Wallstreet Movement is over. The world is ripe with problems. [Need stablished.] Online charities have exploded in popularity and the social-media audience is hungry. [Product to feed the need.]  The Internet is the new venue for fulfilling the American dream!  Finally the socially-frustrated 99%ers have been handed some compelling media to blog about now that they've returned from their hippie tents!

Let me state up front, I acknowledge the value of drawing attention to the issue via social media.  However, I have a number of reservations before jumping on the Kony bandwagon:

• I haven't learned enough about the situation.  I'm not questioning the facts depicted in the video.  I just want to know, what the political climate is currently? Are these kidnappings a symptom of a deeper root cause?  What exactly is the plan here?  Who's already involved? Etc.
• I resist supporting causes that I know little about. The organization behind Kony 2012 — Invisible Children Inc. — is an extremely shady nonprofit that has been called ”misleading,” “naive,” and “dangerous” by a Yale political science professor, and has been accused by Foreign Affairs of “manipulat[ing] facts for strategic purposes.” They have also been criticized by the Better Business Bureau for refusing to provide information necessary to determine if IC meets the Bureau’s standards.
• Additionally, IC has a low two-star rating in accountability from Charity Navigator because they won’t let their financials be independently audited. That’s not a good thing. In fact, it’s a very bad thing, and should make you immediately pause and reflect on where the money you’re sending them is going.
• By IC’s own admission, only 31% of all the funds they receive go toward actually helping anyone [pdf]. The rest go to line the pockets of the three people in charge of the organization, to pay for their travel expenses (over $1 million in the last year alone) and to fund their filmmaking business (also over a million) — which is quite an effective way to make more money, as clearly illustrated by the fact that so many can’t seem to stop forwarding their well-engineered emotional blackmail to everyone they’ve ever known.
• The group is in favour of direct military intervention, and their money supports the Ugandan government’s army and various other military forces. Here’s a photo of the founders of Invisible Children posing with weapons and personnel of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Both the Ugandan army and Sudan People’s Liberation Army are riddled with accusations of rape and looting, but Invisible Children defends them, arguing that the Ugandan army is “better equipped than that of any of the other affected countries”, although Kony is no longer active in Uganda and hasn’t been since 2006 by their own admission. These books each refer to the rape and sexual assault that are perennial issues with the UPDF, the military group Invisible Children is defending.
• Did I mention that I resist fads?  Especially pretentious ones that reduce solutions to complex socio-political issues to the click a button (see Charity Slacktivism). 

Let’s not get our lines crossed: The Lord’s Resistance Army is bad news. And Joseph Kony is a very bad man, and needs to be stopped. But propping up Uganda’s decades-old dictatorship and its military arm, which has been accused by the UN of committing unspeakable atrocities and itself facilitated the recruitment of child soldiers, is not the way to go about it.

The United States is already plenty involved in helping rout Kony and his band of psycho sycophants. Kony is on the run, having been pushed out of Uganda, and it’s likely he will soon be caught, if he isn’t already dead. But killing Kony won’t fix anything, just as killing Osama bin Laden didn’t end terrorism. The LRA might collapse, but, as Foreign Affairs points out, it is “a relatively small player in all of this — as much a symptom as a cause of the endemic violence.”

Myopically placing the blame for all of central Africa’s woes on Kony — even as a starting point — will only imperil many more people than are already in danger.

Sending money to a nonprofit that wants to muck things up by dousing the flames with fuel is not helping. Want to help? Really want to help? Send your money to nonprofits that are putting more than 31% toward rebuilding the region’s medical and educational infrastructure, so that former child soldiers have something worth coming home to.

Here are just a few of those charities. They all have a sparkling four-star rating from Charity Navigator, and, more importantly, no interest in airdropping American troops armed to the teeth into the middle of a multi-nation tribal war to help one madman catch another.

The bottom line is, research your causes thoroughly. Don’t just forward a random video to a stranger because a mass murderer makes a five-year-old “sad.” Learn a little bit about the complexities of the region’s ongoing strife before advocating for direct military intervention.

There is no black and white in the world. And going about solving important problems like there is just serves to make all those equally troubling shades of gray invisible.

Additional Resources

• Seattle's "Cover the Night" group has a Facebook page.
• Invisible Children's Facebook page and website.
• TED Talk: Natalie Warne and Invisible Children.
• War Child describes its work to assist child soldiers in Uganda.
• Foreign Affairs article on Obama administration police on Kony and LRA.
• Most of the text above was taken from pop-culture blogger, thedailywh.at