Uganda expert warns campaign to capture Joseph Kony not all it seems

Before last week, most people had never heard of Joseph Kony. But seemingly overnight tens of millions have spread a video worldwide from the group Invisible Children about the Ugandan despot blamed for the kidnap and murder of millions.

While efforts to stop Joseph Kony have suddenly become the top topic on Facebook and Twitter, some experts warn the effort and the organization behind it plays fast and loose with the facts and its finances.

“He has absolutely raped, murdered and abducted his way through every village he could for the last 25 years, so no doubt he’s a bad guy and the mission to try and get rid of him is worthwhile,” journalist Michael Wilkerson told 97.3 KIRO FM’s Ross and Burbank. The former resident of Uganda wrote extensively about Kony and questions about the campaign for the international publication Foreign Policy.

But Wilkerson says before millions jump on the bandwagon by clicking the Facebook “Like” button or making a donation, they should at least have a better understanding of what’s really going on.

Listen to Michael Wilkerson talk to Ross & Burbank

While the video compares Kony to Hitler and claims he has an army of 30,000 slave children slaughtering innocent people in Uganda, Wilkerson says Kony has not even been in Uganda for six years and his rebel group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is a tiny presence.

He wonders “how millions of well-meaning but misinformed people are going to help deal with the more complicated reality.”

“I have hundreds of Ugandan friends who have complained about this because it fits into the larger narrative of Westerners discovering an African problem for the first time, and then resolving that they will save it,” Wilkerson says. That “completely denies agency to all Ugandan efforts for the last 25 years to fight the LRA rebuild northern Uganda and rehabilitate those who are able to leave or escape the LRA.”

Wilkerson says (thankfully) the LRA does not have 30,000 mindless child soldiers, but instead reflects the total number of kids kidnapped by Kony’s forces in nearly 30 years.

Wilkerson tells Ross and Burbank Ugandans are more upset that a campaign targeting atrocities from a “bygone era” is generating such attention, while the world has ignored serious economic and medical issues in the impoverished African nation.

The Ph.D candidate at Oxford says there is also intense criticism about Invisible Children’s finances and intentions that people should at least investigate before donating to the organization.

“I think these oversimplifications not only can create factual problems that can lead to policy problems, but they delegitimize the very real efforts of people in Uganda and these other countries to make serious change on their own before a couple of Westerners discovered what was already happening.”

But co-host Luke Burbank says after seeing his daughter and scores of others become aware of and promoting the campaign to capture Kony, a few factual errors are a small price to pay for a much greater good.

“If it ends up leading to this guy being taken out, whether he’s in Somalia or some other country, it seems like a good thing,” Burbank says. “I think just raising the awareness is useful in some way, even if you can nitpick the facts.”

But co-host Dave Ross is more cautionary, warning the effort is more than justified “unless it sends the message that this is our responsibility because we’re the United States and we know better than anybody how to deal with Africa. I have a little first hand experience seeing how that works too…it doesn’t.”

Listen to Ross & Burbank’s interview with Michael Wilkerson