Joseph Kony in November 2006. AP Photo/Stuart Price
What would Joseph Kony make of it all? Running the Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group has never been easy. That the Ugandan warlord has survived for a quarter of a century is testimony to his acumen and canny ability to forecast – and not merely with the help of his spirit guides. But even he will not have foreseen that his nemesis might not be in the form of the Ugandan army, but a generation of “slactivists” – hipsters intent on using Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, plus some wristbands, to bring him to justice.
What has happened in the past week has been momentous. A tiny group of people have forced one of the world’s monsters into the spotlight by making a film that has gone viral about him and his crimes. They did not aspire to journalistic objectivity, but to create a clamour to bring Kony to justice. They have achieved more with their 30-minute video than battalions of diplomats, NGO workers and journalists have since the conflict began 26 years ago.
I met Kony in 2006 at the end of a six-month quest. I can say with some confidence he will be flabbergasted. For years he had been all but forgotten by the outside world, barring a blaze of publicity in 2005, when he was charged with 33 counts of war crimes by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. As of Monday, the video highlighting his atrocities had been viewed more than 74m times on YouTube.
Invisible Children; the activist group that made the film, has made almost the perfect viral campaign video. Its simple narrative of good and evil and the invitation to participate in nailing a thoroughly bad man is thrillingly seductive, in spite of the naysaying by experts who correctly point out that the conflict is more complicated than the video suggests.
Kony, I am confident, will have heard about the campaign: the rebels are not as isolated as their image suggests. They keep track of world affairs with radios, and are in contact with supporters via satellite phone. When I saw him in a clearing in eastern Congo in 2006, it was obvious Kony knew he had an image problem. “I am not a terrorist,” he said, his voice quavering. “I am a man, I am a human being, I am Joseph Kony.”
It is nevertheless astonishing that he is a talking point in living rooms across the world, and not just in the YouTube teenage heartland of the west. Ahmad Wali Sarhadi, a young journalist in southern Afghanistan who lives near the heart of the Taliban insurgency, was outraged by what he learnt of Kony online: “Ignorant and enemy of humanity”, he wrote on my Facebook page.
Kony is of course not finished. The very nature of the black-and-white narrative painted by Jason Russell, the film-maker, may have moved millions but it has also prompted a backlash. He has been accused of painting an out-of-date picture of the war in Uganda, which pretty much ended in 2005, and also of pandering to a postcolonial worldview casting the white man as Africa’s saviour.
These are flaws and important ones. Unfortunately for Invisible Children, a very visible photo of them posing with assault rifles and a rocket launcher while mingling with Sudanese rebels appeared online – a no-no for activists. The paternalistic tone of the film clashes with a more recent appreciation gaining ground in the west that Africa is now a continent of vibrant economies as much as internecine wars.
But, rightly in my view, this has not dissuaded the likes of P. Diddy and Rihanna from endorsing the campaign. A lampoon on the internet shows General David Petraeus, the CIA head, releasing the StopKony2012 video as a conspiracy to win more resources. But there are already reports from Washington that the campaign has given a new edge to requests by Africom, the Pentagon’s African command, for more surveillance equipment. If ever there were an argument for a swift US mission, surely it would be to capture Kony? Barack Obama, the US president, has already sent military advisers to help the Ugandans track him. Why not get the job done properly?
Kony may of course simply wait. If nothing else, he has shown extraordinary patience. Slactivism’s strength – it involves no more than clicking a button – is also its weakness. When it becomes clear that capturing Kony might be hard, will anyone stay interested beyond the hard core of true believers?
I hope so. The Arab spring taught us the power of Facebook activism: people got off the couch and on to the streets. More recently, in an early coup for slactivism, a group running online campaigns has steered the ferrying of aid in Syria and the rescue of wounded. This will inevitably be harder in central Africa but Invisible Children has sparked a global conversation on a forgotten evil. Whatever the cynics say, this can only be good – and should be just the beginning.
The writer is an FT correspondent and author of ‘Wizard of the Nile: the Hunt for Africa’s Most Wanted’
The Wizard of the Nile - Published by Portobello Books
The Wizard of the Nile is the first book to peel back the layers of mysticism and murky politics surrounding Kony, to shine a searching light onto this forgotten conflict, and to tell the gripping human story behind an inhumane war and a humanitarian crisis.
Born in 1975, Matthew Green studied African politics at university and has spent four years on the ground in East Africa as a reporter for Reuters. He is now the Pakistan & Afghanistan correspondent for the Financial Times.
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