KONY2012

How many posts are you going to make about this? :noway:

How many posts are you going to make about this? :noway:

enough to get the world out there.

How about you go do some more research about it?

How many posts are you going to make about this? :noway:

enough to get the world out there.

How about you go do some more research about it?

How do you know i havent already?

http://visiblechildren.tumblr.com/

http://wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/18920717928/thedailywhat-on-kony-2012-i-honestly-wanted-to

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.

I only heard about it yesterday. Think its a great cause & I for one agree with the concept.

OP - you are sure to whip up a storm with this one, however, dont ever feel like you have to defend your beliefs afterall they belong to you & no-one else.

Good on you for raising the topic

This from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-deibert/joseph-kony-2012-children_b_1327417.html

Recently, a new video produced by the American NGO Invisible Children focusing on Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) has been making the rounds. Having just returned from the Acholi region of Northern Uganda myself, where the LRA was born, I thought I might share some of my thoughts on the subject, for what it's worth.

I think it is easy for Invisible Children and other self-aggrandizing foreigners to make the entire story of the last 30 years of Northern Uganda about Joseph Kony, but there is a history of the relationship between the Acholi people from whom the LRA emerged and the central government in Kampala that is a little more complicated than that.

Kony is a grotesque war criminal, to be sure, but the Ugandan government currently in power also came to power through the use of kadogo (child soldiers) and fought alongside militias employing child soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo, something that Invisible Children seem wilfully ignorant of.

The conflict in Acholi -- the ancestral homeland of the ethnic group who stretch across northern Uganda and southern Sudan -- has its roots in Uganda's history of dictatorship and political turmoil. A large number of soldiers serving in the government of dictator Milton Obote (who ruled Uganda from 1966 to 1971 and then again from 1980 to 1985) came from across northern Uganda, with the Acholis being particularly well represented, even though Obote himself hailed from the Lango ethnic group. When Obote was overthrown by his own military commanders, an ethnic Acholi, General Tito Okello, became president for six chaotic months until Yoweri Museveni's National Resistance Army took over. Museveni became president, and has since remained so, via elections -- some legitimate, some deeply flawed.

Upon taking power, the Museveni government launched a brutal search and destroy mission against former government soldiers throughout the north, which swept up many ordinary Acholi in its wake. Some Acholi began mobilizing to defend themselves, first under the banner of the Uganda People's Democratic Army (largely made up of former soldiers) and then the Holy Spirit Movement.

This movement, directed by Alice Auma, an Acholi who claimed to be acting on guidance from the spirit Lakwena, brought a mystical belief in their own invincibility that the soldiers of the Kampala-based government at first found terrifying: Holy Spirit Movement devotees walked headlong into blazing gunfire singing songs and holding stones they believed would turn into grenades. The movement succeeded in reaching Jinja, just 80 km from the capital Kampala, before being decimated by Museveni's forces.

Out of this slaughter was born the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), led by Joseph Kony, a distant relative of Alice Auma. Kony added an additional element of targeting civilian Acholi to his schismatic blend of Christianity, frequently kidnapping children and adolescents to serve in his rebel movement. The Museveni government responded by viewing all Acholi as potential collaborators, rounding them up into camps euphemistically called "protected villages", where they were vulnerable to disease and social ills, and had few ways to carry on their traditional farming.

The LRA's policy of targeting civilians (though not the Museveni government's draconian measures) eventually drew international condemnation and in 2005 the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Joseph Kony and several other seniors LRA commanders for crimes against humanity and war crimes. Ironically, one of those commanders, Dominic Ongwen, was himself kidnapped by the LRA while still a small boy.

After peace talks between the LRA and the Ugandan government collapsed in 2007, the group decamped from its bases in southern Sudan to the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.

Following the end of negotiations, the Museveni government launched its Peace Recovery and Development Plan (PRDP), an effort to stabilize northern Uganda after years of war. Since then, according to the United Nations, 98 percent of internally displaced persons have moved on from the camps that once sheltered hundreds of thousands of frightened people.

Despite criticisms from the Acholi that the government's program has been insufficient, local initiatives and the work of some foreign organizations have helped restore a sense of normality and gradual progress to the region, with people returned to their homes and travel between once off-limits parts of the region now facilitated with relative ease.

Now a thousand miles from the cradle of their insurgency, the LRA would appear to have little hope of returning to Uganda, though their potential to wreak havoc on civilians remains little diminished. In Congo's Haut-Uele province, between December 2009 and January 2010, the LRA massacred 620 civilians and abducted more than 120 children.

In October 2011, U.S. President Barack Obama announced that he was sending 100 Special Forces soldiers to help the Ugandans hunt down Kony. By the end of the year, the Ugandan army confirmed that the troops had moved along with the Ugandan army to Obo in the Central African Republic and Nzara in South Sudan.

The problem with Invisible Children's whitewashing of the role of the government of Uganda's president Yoweri Museveni in the violence of Central Africa is that it gives Museveni and company a free pass, and added ammunition with which to bludgeon virtually any domestic opposition, such as Kizza Besigye and the Forum for Democratic Change.

By blindly supporting Uganda's current government and its military adventures beyond its borders, as Invisible Children suggests that people do, Invisible Children is in fact guaranteeing that there will be more violence, not less, in Central Africa.

I have seen the well-meaning foreigners do plenty of damage before, so that is why people understanding the context and the history of the region is important before they blunder blindly forward to "help" a people they don't understand.

U.S. President Bill Clinton professed that he was "helping" in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 1990s and his help ended up with over 6 million people losing their lives.

The same mistake should not be repeated today.

America does this every time there is an election.
Makes up some bull**** about a bad person to occupy everyone.
Also BTW, Joseph Kony may be a guerrilla fighter, but his main
intention is to over throw the dictatorship of Uganda. Everything
that has been said by the western media is false. Do your god damn
research before you start crying and trying to 'spread' the word
about something that is completely untrue.

If you didn't know he is a freedom fighter trying to liberate uganda
because Yoweri Museveni has been in power since 1986. The voting
system is complete bull**** and he stays in power, people don't have rights
at all.

:flowerforyou:

Very interesting read Melissa, Thank you

Yeh once I realized I was being taken in by the social media I decided to remain my own person with my own mind and not waste 30 mins on a video just because people were telling me to....

Yeh once I realized I was being taken in by the social media I decided to remain my own person with my own mind and not waste 30 mins on a video just because people were telling me to....

:bigsmile:

http://visiblechildren.tumblr.com/

http://s3.amazonaws.com/www.invisiblechildren.com/critiques.html

Their response.

I haven't made up my mind but automatically believing the critique is just as flawed a plan as automatically believing the original. This is the response.

I do not automatically believe anything. I'm putting out information from both sides of the spectrum.

That was a general comment not aimed at you

I quoted so that people could read the articles together.

Bump

Soooooo true!!