Really great video. I have always thought that there are two kinds of “I don’t know”: the “I don’t know” when you’re uninformed or feeling rather apathetic and the “I don’t know” when you are informed and you do care but you don’t know because of those reasons and things you’ve learnt/noticed.
And because, y’know… the truth resists simplicity.
Meet Betty Bigombe.
Born into the Acholi tribe of Northern Uganda in 1957, Betty has spent the majority of her life fighting the injustices faced by the people of Uganda. Not only has she spent time in displacement camps talking to those who have been directly affected by Kony’s militia, she’s personally worked to build trust with Kony and arguably would’ve succeeded in bringing the rebels and government to peace 1990s, if not for last-minute interference by Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni.
After Museveni’s interference after the “Bigombe talks”, Bigombe moved to the United States and earned a Masters of Public Policy from the Harvard Institute for International Development (on top of her Bachelor’s degree from Makerere University in Uganda). She began working with the World Bank, first as a senior social scientist, then as a consultant to the World Bank’s Social Protection and Human Development department.
In 2004, after seeing the a news broadcast that displayed the devastation still happening in her homeland and being toted as the only person to come close to succeeding at bringing peace to Uganda, Bigombe left the United States and moved back to Uganda with hopes of once again making a difference.
Once in Uganda, Bigombe organized a series of peace talks between the rebel forces and the Ugandan government. Though she was backed by government support, she used much of her own money to facilitate the talks in hopes bringing peace to Uganda. Once the LRA started expanding into neighbouring countries, Bigombe invited them along to the talks as well. Peace was looking promising. After talks that Kony and other LRA commanders would be indicted by the International Criminal Court for their numerous crimes against humanity, Kony fought back and war broke out once again.
Bigombe has since moved back to the United States and works as a senior fellow for the U.S. Institute of Peace. She has founded two non-profit organizations since her return — one to raise awareness about the children of war, and another to fight corruption in world governments.
Women like Bigombe are who we should be listening to. Her and people like her should be at the forefront of this movement. We should raise up the decades of work she has already accomplished, rather than re-focus this fight on white North Americans and our desire to save the world.
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This was the formative NGO ad campaign for my friends and I. I wish we could sustain these reactions and the way we felt when we watched that, how capable we felt and above all, how aware and informed we sought to be about everything that was going on so that we could create change.
I really want to make a video about all of this but in case I don’t have the opportunity I’d like to highlight something from Hank’s post, which I reblogged earlier this morning:
However, my worry is that we will soon feel about the LRA the way we feel about Syria today. John’s video recounts tremendous crimes against humanity that continue in Syria right now, and yet the most common comment is “KONY 2012.” I would like to encourage us all to understand that international relations are not conducted on the time scale of the internet.
Pay attention pay attention pay attention. To the woman who set herself on fire in Tibet, to her cause, to Karzai’s support of the Ulema Council document that says it’s okay to beat women, to Netanyahu’s comparisons between Iran’s nuclear development programme and Auschwitz, to the drug wars all over the world, to Sarkozy’s comments on foreigners and immigrants, to what’s going on in Libya still, with East Libya, with the NTC. Pay attention and then sustain that attention.
Apologies for my stunned silence in the face of the Kony 2012 movement and the internet’s explosion of power. I’ve never felt like the whole internet has simultaneously pushed down the same keys at the same time. Not even the response to SOPA made me feel this level of solidarity.
The LRA has been around, being evil, and making the world suck more since I was in college, and that’s when I first tried to raise awareness for stopping them…more than ten years ago. Sometimes it feels like there are so many terrible things in the world, it’s impossible to figure out what to focus on. But the LRA is getting that focus now. And I hope we can maintain it.
Having seen the video that Invisible Children put together for this cause, I am floored. It is a masterpiece and the reaction to it has been exactly as strong as it should be…which is to say, EXTREMELY STRONG.
However, my worry is that we will soon feel about the LRA the way we feel about Syria today. John’s video recounts tremendous crimes against humanity that continue in Syria right now, and yet the mot common comment is “KONY 2012.” I would like to encourage us all to understand that international relations are not conducted on the time scale of the internet.
If we look back in three months and think “What happened with that Kony thing?” we will have failed. Honestly, it was hard for John not to feel that way about Syria as he scrolled through the video comments today. Like he put a lot of work into a video that no one cared about because it wasn’t the soup of the day.
Of course, it’s difficult to compare what the government of Syria does to what the LRA does, since the LRA is so deeply evil. And the message that Invisible Children is bringing to us is extremely powerful and we have to capitalize on that excitement in every way we can.
The 2012 deadline seems dangerously arbitrary, though, I’m sure, very motivational. I apologize for my tempered enthusiasm, I’ve wanted this guy (dead or alive) for over a decade, so I’m used to it not happening. But we’ve never had energy like this surrounding the cause before either. We must do whatever we can to make it happen, but this is a marathon, not a sprint.
Let’s run it together.
Let me first underscore that, like Hank, I have publicly and privately advocated for the destruction of the LRA for a long time, both in terms of what I talk about and in terms of where I give money. For the record, I have not donated directly to Invisible Children because organizations like Charity Navigator have raised important and so far as I know unanswered questions about IC’s work and their transparency (see this tumblr post for more links, although some of them are dubiously reported), but I greatly admire both their mission and the clarity with which they are able to articulate it.
Regardless, I think it is tremendously important to arrest Joseph Kony and end the terror he has brought to Uganda, Sudan, the DRC, and the CAR. It’s something we can all agree upon, which makes it easy to rally around, and at least at first glance, it lacks the complexity and ambiguity of, say, trying to figure out whether to intervene in Syria.
But in fact, the business of killing and/or capturing Kony and dismantling the LRA is not so simple. For one thing, a US-backed mission to destroy the LRA failed in 2009, leading to retaliatory mass murder. Furthermore, members of the American military are in Uganda right now working with the Ugandan armed forces to dismantle the LRA. Congress has also acted (albeit belatedly) to offer better intelligence to governments where the LRA is active. European governments have been similarly supportive.
In short, it’s unfair to say that Kony isn’t famous, at least to diplomats and governments. It’s just that—like other famous evil people—he is not an easy person to kill or capture. The truth resists simplicity, whether we’re talking about Uganda or Syria or Egypt or American Presidential nominating contests.
To dismantle the LRA, we need to maintain sustained pressure on political leaders here and abroad, which is the kind of work that as Hank points out requires continued focus and commitment.
Here’s to running these marathons together.
I have ridiculously smart friends.
