A video is currently experiencing a tremendous success over the Internet, revealing many dimensions of our modernity. An American NGO, “Invisible Children”, has posted on March 5, a film about thirty minutes, which denounces Joseph Kony, Ugandan warlord, leader of The Lord’s Resistance Army, founded in 1986, and whose aim was to overthrow President Museveni (still in power) and replace him with a dictatorship based on the Bible. Kony was the first to have been indicted in 2005 by the International Criminal Court for raping, killing and forcibly training children in his army, which they form four-fifths. The video shows, with a very effective technique, the dream life of a child in California by comparing it to that of Ugandan children who are victims of this monster. The head of the NGO explains that through his action, the U.S. government decided last October to send a hundred members of U.S. special forces to help the Ugandan army in the search for Kony; and he demands that everything be done so that the year 2012 does not end without his arrest and him sent to the Hague for trial.
This video (seen by over 70 million people in five days on YouTube, and which set a record for a humanitarian video), supported by countless American personalities, from Lady Gaga and Mark Zuckerberg, to Justin Bieber and George Bush, and forming part of the general discourse on the growing influence of new technologies on the solution of global problems.
Indeed, we can hope that this awareness bears fruit. We can also feel sorry that such a film was made by Americans, so far from the theatre of operations, and not by Europeans, of which Africa is the backyard (and particularly France, because the Lord’s Resistance Army is active today in the Central African Republic) and even better by Africans themselves.
However, if we look closer, we must be more cautious.
First, because this film makes reference to a dual naïveté, which is to believe that what happens in America is enough to change the world (the only politicians who are interviewed are obscure american parliamentarians) and that the viewing of a film by Internet users will be enough to stop an awful warlord who has defied the Ugandan army for 25 years.
Secondly, because the merit of the Internet is to create immediately a very thorough discussion on the essence of the film and the underlying motivations of the initiators of the project. Countless Ugandan NGOs have complained that the problem of Uganda is no longer Kony, but that of democracy (non-existent in Uganda), education, health, poverty, and that an international campaign should instead help find money for that rather than look for a warlord aged and forgotten, who announced in 2006 a cessation of attacks in Uganda, who has only a few hundred of followers, and that the Americans could have moreover, they say, stopped a long time ago if they really wanted to.
Others, in the United States (including the Facecrooks site) questioned the NGO which initiated the movie, Invisible Children, and showed that only one-third of the $ 8.7 million collected by this NGO in 2011 seems to have been redistributed, the balance of the funding appears to have funded the cost of the film.
Nevertheless. Let us not disguise our pleasure. The world is slowly becoming aware of its unity. And no more barbarism can take place today without us having the necessary evidence. This is the most important.