The power of social media is immense. That fact was fully on display as
Facebook walls and in-boxes everywhere flooded with messages from a new
political campaign “Kony 2012.” Kony 2012 purports to be aimed at bringing to
justice Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, an armed rebel band
that roams the jungles of northern Uganda and northeastern Democratic Republic
of Congo.
Kony is without a doubt an odious figure. Since 1987, his LRA has roamed
across Uganda, the DRC, the Central African Republic and South Sudan.
Originally a part of a broader movement in Uganda focused on the rights of the
Acholi people, the LRA morphed into a band of armed child soldiers, manipulated
and drugged, rampaging wantonly across the landscape with seemingly no real
goals or ideology.
Principally, the LRA appears to be a vehicle for Kony’s own leadership
fantasies, which are hard to decipher and most likely rooted in some ethereal
alternative reality. It is indisputable that Kony and the LRA have had a
devastating effect on the regions they have inhabited, engaging in killings,
rapes and abductions that are deserving of condemnation.
Once these facts are taken into account, however, it must be said that the
aims of Kony 2012, whether sincere or not, have absolutely no chance of helping
the people of Uganda or the DRC to mitigate the ill effects of the LRA. Kony
2012 calls for military intervention from Western powers to capture Kony and
extradite him to the Hague to be tried for war crimes.
A little-known but not insignificant factor at play in the region is the discovery
of oil in Uganda in recent years. “One of the most spectacular recent finds has
been in Uganda. The reserves of the Albertine rift, which takes in the Ugandan
and Congolese shores of Lake Albert …, are said to need $10 billion for
development. All being well, Uganda will soon become a mid-sized producer,
alongside countries such as Mexico. Foreign investment in Uganda may nearly
double this year to $3 billion. The country expects to earn $2 billion a year
from oil by 2015.” (The Economist, May 31, 2010)
Could it be that a desire to get access to this bonanza is a significant
factor behind imperialist interests in intervening in the region’s conflicts?
To ask the question is to answer it.
Oil, of course, is not the whole story, as Uganda is a key U.S. ally in a
number of geostrategic endeavors. There
is much to be said on this topic, but there are three basic points progressive
activists and revolutionary militants in the United States should keep in mind
when considering the issues around the LRA.
1) Military intervention by the West has already been disastrous
The current Ugandan government has long been a friend of the West. In 1987,
the year after he came to power, President Yoweri Museveni implemented an
International Monetary Fund (IMF) austerity plan. Under Museveni, Uganda became
an important supporter of U.S.-backed military operations in the neighboring
countries of Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. In a
July 2011 meeting of AFRICOM, the Pentagon’s agency for coordinating military
operations in Africa, AFRICOM commander Gen. Carter Ham called Uganda, “a major
partner” in achieving U.S. objectives in the region. (NTV Uganda, July 25,
2011)
As it concerns the LRA, the United States in particular has been attempting
to build up Ugandan military forces. In 2008, the U.S. African Command brought
together the combined forces of the Ugandan, CAR and South Sudanese military in
“Operation Lightning Thunder” to deliver a death blow to the LRA. This
operation failed miserably, and in retaliation the LRA killed almost 1,000
people and abducted 700 people. Twenty thousand people were displaced in the
process. One further casualty was fledgling peace talks that drowned in blood.
Rather than an isolated incident, this was just the most recent in a long
line of failed attempts to destroy the LRA. The LRA operates in an area the
size of France, significant parts of which are covered by dense jungle and
seriously lacking in infrastructure. These offensives at best serve to drive
the LRA further into the hardest to penetrate areas, where they live to fight
another day. Small assassination squads and massive military forces have failed
over and over to capture or kill Kony or make a significant dent in the LRA’s
fighting ability. In fact, the only outcome of U.S.-supported offensives has
been significant further suffering in the LRA’s areas of influence, where the
innocent have been routinely victimized by the LRA’s retaliatory offensives.
Perversely, President Obama sent 100 troops to Uganda last fall to try
again. As always, this new and improved plan is supposed to bear fruit, but the
preponderance of evidence suggests that these strategies of dealing with the
LRA militarily are at best aspirational and at worst (and most likely) futile.
U.S. imperialist interests and humanitarian interests are mutually
exclusive. The Kony 2012 campaign perpetuates the myth that the U.S. military
can act as an agent for human rights, and will resonate with many truly
well-intentioned people who feel “we must do something.” This only facilitates U.S.
military intervention whose real goals are to ensure U.S. geostrategic
interests in the region at the expense of the Ugandan people.
2) Conflict is deeper than the LRA
As odious as the LRA may be, it is a limited part of a much broader regional
conflict that has been raging across East Africa for well over a decade, in
which millions of people have lost their lives and rape has become a weapon of
war on an unprecedented scale. DRC, South Sudan and Uganda in particular have
been racked by a series of regional conflicts fueled by the resource-extraction
mania demanded by the always-hungry, never tired imperialist capital
accumulation machine.
Over vast swaths of the countries mentioned above are a series of ethnic and
regional conflicts that are further compounded by the desire of elites in these
states to establish their rule over both resource-rich areas and havens of
their factional opponents.
This has created a vast array of militias of varying sizes and motivations
continually fighting and moving across the region as necessary for survival,
often using control over rudimentary mining operations to fund their
activities. Some of these groups also ally themselves with one government or
the other that provide funding and weapons and operate their own very brutal
operations. On top of that, Western powers looking to exploit the resources of
these regions ally themselves with these governments, arming and funding their
military activities.
The Ugandan army that Kony 2012 hopes will put an end to the abuses of the
LRA is itself a serial human rights abuser. In suppressing the Acholi revolt
that the LRA sprang from, the Ugandan army forced thousands of people in the
Acholi areas into concentration camps. There is also the brutal occupation
Ugandan forces carried out for years in eastern DRC, systematically looting
that country of a significant amount of its wealth. While hunting Kony in CAR,
the Ugandan army looted, operated prostitution rings, and raped and infected
girls with HIV. The Sudanese People’s Liberation Army, championed by Kony 2012,
also has its own sordid record of brutal behavior.
It is patently ridiculous to suggest that sending a group of raping looters
to solve human rights abuses will improve the situation for the peoples of
Uganda, South Sudan or the DRC.
3) Strengthening the Ugandan army has repercussions for Ugandan
progressives
Uganda is a country of deep divisions, and President Museveni has relied on
a mix of co-option, intimidation and military campaigns to keep the country
“unified” under the aegis of the National Resistance Movement. While a full
analysis of the NRM government is beyond the scope of this article, it is worth
noting that NRM often suppresses progressive activists, shows callous disregard
for the rights of oppositional ethnic groups, and acts as the governmental wing
of anti-gay lynch mobs.
Given this context, one cannot overlook the fact that better training,
communications and arms for the Ugandan military is likely simply to result in
more effective suppressive activity towards legitimate progressive and ethnic
movements.
Taking all of this into account, it is clear that Kony 2012 deserves no
support from the people of the world whom it seeks to rally under its banner.
In the name of fighting for “human rights,” Kony 2012 is championing a rogues
gallery of murdering, raping, corrupt governments and militaries that happily
ally themselves with imperialist powers that have killed hundreds of thousands
in Iraq and Afghanistan in just the last decade.
Scrutinizing Invisible Children
It is also imperative that progressives seek to understand the origins of
the Kony 2012 campaign, which has its roots in the organization Invisible
Children. IC has been criticized for spending only 32 percent of its funds on
direct services to children in Africa, with the remainder going to staff
salaries, travel and transport and film production.
IC supports direct military intervention. Both the Ugandan army and Sudan
People’s Liberation Army have been repeatedly accused of rape and looting, but
IC continues to defend 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.
The journal Foreign Affairs writes that IC “manipulates facts for strategic
purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders and emphasizing
the LRA’s use of innocent children as soldiers, and portraying Kony—a brutal
man, to be sure—as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil,” (referring
to a fictional character in Joseph Conrad’s novella “Heart of Darkness”).
Chris Blattman, a political scientist at Yale, has written on the topic of
IC’s programming: “There’s also something inherently misleading, naive, maybe
even dangerous, about the idea of rescuing children or saving of Africa. […] It
hints uncomfortably of the White Man’s Burden. Worse, sometimes it does more
than hint. The savior attitude is pervasive in advocacy, and it inevitably
shapes programming. Usually misconceived programming.”
Rather than lining up with a blood-soaked coalition, people of conscience
need to expose Kony 2012 and its deadly agenda, which is guaranteed to sink the
region even deeper into the morass of death. There are no simple answers. Any
solution to the suffering of the peoples of the region must be rooted in a
perspective that seriously addresses the legacy of colonialism and ongoing
neo-colonialism and the resulting underdevelopment, ethnic conflict and
political corruption.
