By: Geoffrey Yonil

I imagine that if you clicked on this link to read this article, then you probably already have some idea of what Kony 2012 is, presumably. If you don’t, then I’d advise you read about it on Invisible Children, Inc.’s website, since they could do a much better job at explaining the situation than I ever could. No, rather, I’m more interested in the spark of controversy that has been surrounding the issue ever since it took off earlier this year by a Youtube video (see below) directed by Jason Russell, one of the leaders of Invisible Children.

Invisible Children was started back in 2004 in response to the gross international atrocities and war crimes being committed within Central Africa, especially Uganda, by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), headed up by a few leaders, though one of the group’s most brutal commanders is Joseph Kony. Kony has reportedly kidnapped children and forced them to fight in the LRA, along with kidnapping young girls as sex slaves for both profit and personal reasons. He’s is undoubtedly a repugnant human being that deserves whatever punishment he receives.

In 2005, the International Criminal Court (ICC), located in The Hague, Netherlands, issued an arrest warrant for Kony’s multiple war crimes against humanity. Currently, Joseph Kony is one of the most wanted men in the world. Obviously, the problem is finding him. That’s where Invisible Children comes in.

Invisible Children, for some time now, has been going around high schools across the country, even in other countries, recruiting the help of teenagers to pressure the adults in their lives, like politicians and celebrities, to make the issue of child abductions by the LRA visible so that they can raise funds to build up the affected communities in Central Africa, as well as provide much needed relief and reform in hopes of stabilizing the infrastructure of Ugandan’s, and other African countries’, society. This includes building new schools, providing protective shelters, and generally trying to help.

But, like I said, there are some problems. Invisible Children has now for a couple of years been criticized for its lack of transparency, both in how it allocates donations given to the organization and whether or not their methods are helpful. To begin with the former, it is disheartening to think that Invisible Children, despite its great message of bringing hope to a war-torn area, would actually irresponsibly or selfishly use charitable donations for its leaders own profits. But given than three of the founders and CEOs of Invisible Children receive annual salaries that exceed $200,000, then it’s hard to conceive that they’re using every last bit of their donations for the right purposes.

Granted, even those that work for charities need some form of salary for their living expenses, but $200, 000 + seems oddly excessive considering that Central Africa is still very much desecrated. But, again, the lack of transparency on Invisible Children has also prevented people from knowing why exactly their founders receive such a large annual salary when most charities’ CEOs receive a small fraction of that. While their motives could be ulterior in some manner, it would probably be best to reserve indicting them purely because they make a lot of money until we know why they allocate themselves that money.

To the question of whether or not Invisible Children’s methods are either helping or worsening conditions in Central Africa: the jury is still out. Most people in the West simply don’t care about Africa. Much of the debate within African politics and the effect the West has had on Africa has gone generally ignored by not only policy makers but people in general.

If the LRA is to gain control of any section of Central Africa or beyond, then it would not be good. The LRA is a horrible extremist Christian group that uses distilled, manipulated scripture passages to garnish support while killing thousands of unnamed voices. The fact that they kidnap any number of children and use them for their own twisted purposes is disgusting. And while some have criticized Invisible Children for bolstering the amount of kidnappings, I can only sit back and wonder, “Why should that matter? Isn’t just one child kidnapping for the purpose of forcing him to become a soldier and kill disgusting as it is? Also, how are they supposed to keep track of all the numbers? The LRA’s actions have gone unnoticed in the past decades because no one really cared. I seriously doubt that anyone in the LRA or Uganda or anywhere else in Central Africa was keeping an exact count on how many kids they were kidnapping and forcing into a war they didn’t want to fight.”

It sounds a little petty and silly, and even cruel, to sit back in the luxury of our modernized amenities and debate whether or not there was an accounting error or someone inaccurately counting the amount of kids kidnapped and killed and raped and brutalized. That sounds absolutely fucking stupid. What does it say about our culture that we can readily get behind a war to protect our interests in keeping gas at $2 or less, yet resign ourselves to quarreling whether or not potentially saving thousands of people as their children’s future is destroyed?

Are there problems within Invisible Children’s methods? Absolutely. They’re raising funds to fight a war, or at least to get the American government and military to train Sudanese and Ugandan soldiers to fight so that they can either find or terminate the threat of Joseph Kony and the LRA. Of course there are going to be fundamental problems, especially considering that most of the people involved with Invisible Children have little to no military training or specialty. But to say that we shouldn’t do anything, to criticize the organization because of minute problems that aren’t entirely investigated seems like such a small problem when compared to the core of what is at stake.

I implore that you do your own research, that you find out about both sides, and then make a decision as to whether or not you support Invisible Children or not, rather than making blatant excuses of not dealing with the situation because it won’t be solved easily, or that because it will take time and effort, or that you don’t like that they CEOs of the organization are making more than you are.

Ultimately, though, the decisions we make in dealing with people like Joseph Kony, whatever they are, will eventually be the measure by which history will see our epoch. Will they see that we knew about Kony’s crimes against humanity and did nothing? Or will they see that when faced with a great, destructive evil, we actually did something—even if it was the wrong thing?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdldABYWHEY