Given how many things happen every day throughout the world, it becomes quite difficult to keep track of everything and prioritize one tragedy in favor of another. Every now and then, what some might call issues of the past resurface and get viral over the internet. It is the case of a recent campaign that brought Uganda’s war criminal Joseph Kony back in focus.
On Monday, nonprofit charity Invisible Children Inc. released a new campaign to draw attention over war criminal Joseph Kony and the actions of the rebel group Lord’s Resistance Army that he lead. For many people, the events that ravaged central Africa a few years ago are completely new and shocking. Perhaps that’s part why the campaign went viral all over the internet, from social networks to the popular YouTube.
The campaign’s main focus was a 30 minute film called Kony 2012, posted on YouTube and then shared all over the internet. It scored so far over 7 million views on YouTube and probably just as many shares over Facebook, Twitter and Google +.
As filmmaker Jason Russell states, it took nine years to make the 30 minute film. He told the Star: “We decided 2012 was the last year for Joseph Kony to continue his crimes against humanity”.
On its Facebook page, the Invisible Children nonprofit charity wrote the purpose of the campaign. They say it “uses film, creativity and social action to end the use of child soldiers in Joseph Kony’s rebel war and restore LRA – affected communities in Central Africa to peace and prosperity”.
The charity argues that the campaign “aims to make Joseph Kony famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice”.
Even the United States administration got official involved putting an end to the Lord’s Resistance Army. 100 troops were sent to Uganda in October 2011. Obama then said that the Lord’s Resistance Army has “murdered, raped and kidnapped tens of thousands of men, women and children in central Africa”. The troops were sent in to help stop their “atrocities across the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and South Sudan”.
