I have been following the online storm about the Joseph Kony video with interest and some despair. I think even if I hadn't read up on it beforehand, the general tone of white saviours of African problems in the video would have put me off, along with the fact that furriners, who actually speak quite clearly, are subtitled and the little American kid, who I actually found difficult to understand, is not. My former colleague JP appears twice in it, looking as messianic as ever (and I chose that adjective very carefully).

Two crucial statements in the video made me sit up because of their barefaced untruthfulness.

"The problem is, 99% of the planet doesn't know who he is. If they knew, Kony would have been stopped years ago."

Actually, I doubt that Kony's lack of celebrity is really that big an issue. Those of us who work in conflict resolution have known all about him for a very long time (which is why some are a bit miffed that the rest of the world has suddenly picked up on what for us is very old news). The reasons that he has not "been stopped" have more to do with the very real political and military problems of tracking down a man who has armed followers and doesn't want to be found in some of the most difficult terrain on the planet. Local and regional actors have been trying to stop Kony for years; one can postulate a long list of reasons for their failure, but the fact that 99% of the planet doesn't know about him must be fairly low on that list. Raising consciousness, and white people building schools, may be part of the answer, but much more important is listening to and empowering local actors.

"The Ugandan military has to find him"

Well, no. Actually that's not strong enough. Hell, no! It's pretty well known that Kony is wandering in the bush between South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) and the central African Republic, not Uganda. Invisible Children are effectively asking their supporters to lobby the US government to support the Ugandan government to invade Uganda's neighbours. Quite apart from the fact that the last Ugandan invasion of the DRC was not a howling success (you didn't hear about that? see my former colleague Gérard's book), I think that the ramifications of this apparently simple policy statement may perhaps not have been thought through.

(It's a bit alarming that the first Ugandan politician interviewed, Santo Okot Lapolo, turns up on Google as someone who is himself accused of multiple human rights abuses, a fact that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere.)

I desperately hope that Kony is captured or killed soon, but let's remember that he has already been militarily defeated and has only a handful of remaining followers; and rather bizarrely the US policy objective of the Stop Kony video is not for policy innovation but to continue the status quo of the rather small (100 'advisers'!)  US military deployment in Uganda. Once Kony is out of the picture, will the Facebook generation pat itself on the back and allow Africa's problems to slip out of sight again?

This entry is locked because I do work in this field, and I have myself worked with African soldiers and politicians who have attempted both to negotiate with and to defeat Kony (though I should add that this was not why I was working with them myself). These are wily and intelligent individuals who have survived appalling personal circumstances and are now trying to build a new state out of the rubble of decades of external meddling. I don't think that this video will make their jobs any easier at all.

More links:

http://kingsofwar.org.uk/2012/03/joseph-kony-and-crowdsourced-intervention/
http://kingsofwar.org.uk/2012/03/invisible-childrens-military-disconnect/
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/09/world/africa/online-joseph-kony-and-a-ugandan-conflict-soar-to-topic-no-1.html
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2012/03/08/unpacking-kony-2012/
http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2012/03/08/teju-cole-on-american-sentimentality-towards-africa/
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/solving-war-crimes-with-wristbands-the-arrogance-of-kony-2012/254193/
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-soft-bigotry-of-kony-2012/254194/
http://www.crikey.com.au/2012/03/09/kony-video-social-media-manipulation-analysis/
http://edition.cnn.com/2012/03/10/opinion/kony-2012-video/
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/polis/2012/03/09/why-i-think-the-kony-2012-campaign-is-wrong/
http://visiblechildren.tumblr.com/
http://boingboing.net/2012/03/08/african-voices-respond-to-hype.html
http://www.wrongingrights.com/2012/03/the-definitive-kony-2012-drinking-game.html