Why kony is fake

Throughout today several people have recommended that I speak with the Ugandan journalist Rosebell Kagumire. She's just posted this response to the Kony campaign hat tip LionelBadal on Twitter and you can read her blog here.

She says: "The war is much more complex than one man called Joseph Kony. During her time there she worked with Invisible Children and she gives a really nuanced views of their work.

To verify her relationship with Invisible Children, and her knowledge of the region, Liz sent me a copy of her thesis on "stakeholder perspective on how to holistically support children who have experienced conflict in Northern Uganda", which makes frequent references to her time with the organisation.

She said:. Invisible Children have had a huge impact on the area. They are well respected by other NGOs. I worked alongside them and they were very solutions focused. They didn't sit around talking for too long and checked with experts and that the local people wanted what they were doing. So many organisations stomp in, do what they do and leave. It was very needs driven. My impression over the past few years is that they've got very shiny and slick.

The media campaigning is a different type of work to on the ground project work they do. I think they need to decide whether they go down the route of media campaigns or do project work. The film is very sensationalist about the conflict in Uganda. But Uganda is in transition. They are in the aftermath of the war.

This film will have implications that we can't predict yet. It'll be children who are Kony's bodyguards. If they do get Kony there will be a wall of children to get through. How will they deal with that? I don't know whether those details are thought about. Any publicity is good publicity I suppose. But everything now seems to have very short term vision. In something which is the future of these children's lives you have to have a long term vision.

Anything else is reactionary and frankly selfish. Most of the people working for Invisible Children are media professionals not development professionals. That's important, but you need the expert input. It's hard, I'm caught in the middle; I do admire them. They are having a great impact in northern Uganda. They have some unique ways of working, a good mentoring scheme where they pair people who have come through the conflict with people who are coming out of it now.

But then I don't agree in the film itself. It was a little self-indulgent, emotive, that's how they do things and it has had a huge impact. Perhaps development needs refreshing as an industry and this is new blood and it's causing a stir that they are doing something different. In the north of Uganda women are still scared to go home, even though they are told it's OK.

In terms of psychological day to day living Kony is the bigger barrier to people getting on with their lives. But the Ugandan and Sudanese army don't have a great track record. They also have very aggressive tactics and they are not squeaky clean. Do post any specific questions you'd like them to answer below the line or tweet RDevro. He was speaking to me from New York, but spends half his time in Uganda. Teddy wrote this blog about the campaign.

Thanks to all those who suggested I make contact with him. He said:. What I'd really like is for organisations like this to have a little bit more respect for individuals like ourselves you have the capability to speak for ourselves.

By putting themselves as the heroes of our situation it debilitates our own ability to progress and develop our own capacity. Every time we take a step forward to rebrand ourselves, something comes along like this and uses us in their own game.

We are left as the pawns in the game. Without a better brand we cannot develop better international relations. We need to change the image of Africa as a basket case. The man [Kony] hasn't been in the country for over six years.

You know that the majority of the audience is a bunch of teens and ideological college students who just want to do good.

They don't understand the nuance of the situation. They will take it as the only story about that issue. If we don't stand up as members of the Africa diaspora, the educated elite of the continent, this story won't change. We recognise the situations, we know what they are, it's not everybody's responsibility to come and rescue us. We're not babies. We have to rise ourselves otherwise we'll always be the dependants. All ill roads are built on good intentions.

Meaning well doesn't give you the right to march into my house and tell me how to live. It does not offer you that right. Uganda is my country, my brothers, cousins and countrymen.

Because I have the privilege to be in the States and I have a forum which is listened to, it's my responsibility to stand up and say something. Just because you mean good doesn't give you the right to control my life. I don't care if you mean good.

Uganda needs to be respected as an equal participant in this, we need to be respected as equal citizens of his world. We need to understand that there is more to us than the failures of our past. Uganda is strong, vibrant, developing technology, industry, the resilient women are rising in civil groups, that's what I want to talk about.

Kony is nowhere near the top of the concerns for us Ugandans. If you go to Gulu, where the worst of his atrocities were committed, it's a different town. It's thriving, growing, people are trying to put their lives together.

Kony is a sore in our history. We are not defined by him or Idi Amin. Did I ask you to sell my story for an action kit to make uninformed college students feel good? He wore tattered trousers, muddy wellington boots, a grubby anorak and avoided eye contact.

The voice was soft. You have to make sure the skull is crushed and the brains come out. He was 17, still dressed in what passed for his Lord's Resistance Army uniform and still getting used to the idea he was no longer Ambush, his nom-de-guerre, but Patrick Ocaya. For five years he had served as a corporal in Joseph Kony's ranks, tasked with leading groups of year-olds in attacks on vehicles and, on occasion, clubbing prisoners to death.

Asked if he had felt sorry for those he abducted and killed Ocaya's eyes flicked from the azure sky to the red, baked earth of a ramshackle rehabilitation centre. He shrugged. They were my orders. It was June and I was reporting for the Guardian from Kitgum, a beleagured town of dirt roads and one-storey buildings in northern Uganda in the midst of a new LRA offensive.

Lots of comment about this picture of the founders of Invisible Children, including on the left Jason Russell who features in the film.

We've only just got the rights to use it. We wanted to talk to them and film them and get their perspective. And because Bobby, Laren and I are friends and had been doing this for 5 years, we thought it would be funny to bring back to our friends and family a joke photo. You know, "Haha - they have bazookas in their hands but they're actually fighting for peace. I always have.

Back in I wanted this war to end, like we all did, peacefully, through peace talks. But Kony was not interested in that; he kept killing. Obviously, this guy is up to no good.

He and his army are responsible for murders, rapes, kidnappings and the destruction of entire villages. The mini-documentary that emerged is emotion-laden and appeals to the kind hearts of donators. Russell begins the movie with video clips of his young son, suggesting that by stopping Kony, we can safely provide for the people we wish to protect.

Nothing in Jason Russell's life had prepared him for the sharp end of the internet. They thought it might be bipolar but my wife and my mom were like, 'That's just not you. He'd never experienced any form of mental illness. Or at least, he hadn't until the world wide web turned its hell dogs upon him.

Could anyone have withstood the pressure that Russell was under? When I ask him if he's processed what happened to him, and what effect it's had on his life, he says: "I don't know if I have processed it.

I still … there are days when I think, 'That was a total failure. That I let everybody down. And there are others when I think we did what we wanted to do. We set out to make Joseph Kony known. And now he is. So I can't… But the problem is that my breakdown put such a blanket of fear and distrust and shame over everything.

That's something I deal with every day. Or as Vice magazine reported it: "Those who live by slick viral videos can die by them too. If Russell had had a heart attack, a coronary brought on by extreme stress, it might well be a different story.

Heart-attack victims receive sympathy. People who rip their clothes off in the street don't, though attacking your own body is every bit as much of a symptom as chest pain. It's a measure of the stigma and acute misunderstanding that still afflicts sufferers of mental illness that his breakdown was, for many, some sort of vindication. They thought he was a douchebag. And this seemed to prove it. It's so obvious that I'm not OK. And I'm so naked. And it's just very, very public. The joke we always had, even before this happened, is that the internet is forever.

If you put your crotch on there, it's forever. And now this is out there forever and my kids are going to have to deal with it at high school. People are like, 'Didn't that film-maker take all the money and then go crazy naked in the street?

Russell didn't embezzle any money. Invisible Children has five years' worth of audited accounts and received four out of four stars for its financial health from Charity Navigator , a non-profit watchdog. It notes that some people "mistakenly" concluded from its data that it "did not complete an annual audit. That is not true. She estimated there were never less than 4, emails in her inbox. In any one second, our website had 37, unique users. And we were taking hundreds of thousands of dollars of orders in our shop for the Kony kits.

These were the "action kits" that viewers of the video were urged to buy to raise awareness of Kony. We had two people in our fulfilment department, and they could ramp up to maybe orders a day. And we literally had hundreds of thousands of them. The kit included a red T-shirt with the words Kony on it, but incredibly, "we maxed out," says Carver. What do you mean, I ask. There were no more to buy. The website had been stress-tested to cope with an Oprah appearance a year or so previously, but it crashed.

The phone system crashed. We had nine years' worth of it. We just couldn't get it to them. You can stress test a website. You can't stress test a person.

There's footage in a film Invisible Children released last autumn of Russell shortly before his breakdown. It's late at night. He's just got in from New York and he's visibly upset. My anxiety … my fear is that it's all in my head. I tried to relax and calm down. They said, 'Take two days off', so we [his family] went to Palm Springs. But we went to the pool and people recognised us and wanted to take photographs so we went and shut ourselves in the hotel room, closed all the windows and the doors, and just felt we were under attack.

And I thought it was talking directly to me. I thought it was all about me. The character is wearing a stripy top like the one [his son] Gavin is wearing in the film and I was like, 'That's so weird!

Back at home, Danica had realised something was very wrong and had surreptitiously started to research symptoms on the internet. That's where my brain was. I thought we'd analyse the books and we'd come up with the answer of what the world needs to do next. They run programs dropping leaflets from airplanes to encourage LRA soldiers to lay down their arms, and setup a high frequency radio network so that remote villages can report LRA activities and movements.

But Invisible Children still has its critics. Peter Pham, the director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council says he would love to see Kony captured or killed. So if one is really interested, altruistically, in the welfare of these people, one should probably ask Africans themselves what are the biggest threats to their security, their livelihoods and what they would like to see dealt with. But Keesey says Kony and his followers have committed too many heinous crimes to ignore.