With over one hundred million ‘views’ the Kony 2012 video has started a far-reaching debate on the aims and value of a production seen by many as an over-simplification of complex situation.

Produced by the NGO ‘Invisible children’, the video calls for military intervention to “stop Kony and disarm the LRA”.

Host Paddy O’Connell of BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House was on the hunt for controversy – which is exactly what he found.

Perhaps the most scathing comments on the video came from film-maker and journalist Callum Macrae.

“Low and behold the world has paid attention and I’m hating every minute of it… This is a dreadful, I’m afraid, campaign. But nonetheless very important and we need to discuss it.”

Macrae says the unwavering focus on Joseph Kony puts him ill at ease.

“We shouldn’t be lowering ourselves to the level of Kony or the people who see him as an African bogeyman, we should be looking at the issues that are raised by it.”

Mareike Schomerus, of LSE’s Justice and Security Research Programme agreed that focusing entirely on Kony is a dangerous simplification.

“If you go into LRA controlled areas and actually stay there it becomes clear that the situation is actually much more complex than elevating just one man to the position of superpower…

When I talk, especially to military men,… and I say to them ‘do you honestly really believe that that one man can be responsible for messing about… 5 national armies and 3 UN missions and the US army, and the French army and sometimes the Israeli army.”

Programmes Director for the charity War Child, Amanda Weisbaum also casts a critical eye on the content of the video.

“They did 30 minutes of filming and they didn’t really do any history surrounding it or any complexities surrounding it… but yes I would have loved the 100 million hits”

But how then do people kindle an interest for African issues? Asks Benjamin Chesterton of production company DuckRabbit.

“Do you think we all start with PHDs?… we have to start somewhere… a percentage of [these people that watched the video] will go away and find out more… and maybe do something more than sitting around debating it.”

Poet and musician of Ugandan descent, Musa Okwonga rejects this out of hand.

“It’s utterly patronising to say that children can’t handle complexity… people followed complex narratives involving multiple characters over seven books with Harry Potter”

The idea put forward by the video that military intervention is the only solution held no water for the panel.

“The lessons of history” says Macrae, “are that it’s always gone wrong; it’s always scatter gun and it’s always brought more havoc”

Watch the full event here:

Live Video streaming by Ustream

The recent KONY 2012 campaign video has been met with strong criticism, but nobody can question its effectiveness in reaching a mass audience. The film, created by Invisible Children and featuring director and founder of Invisible Children Jason Russell, is reportedly one of the fastest spreading viral videos ever, reaching over 100 million views in a week.

It has been criticised for presenting a complex situation as a simplified problem with a simple solution, for reinforcing the idea that Africans are helpless victims who need to be ‘saved’ by ‘the West’ and for misrepresenting reality. 

Despite its inaccuracies this campaign has created wider awareness about Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) than any news report or campaign that has come before it, so what can be learned? Join us for April’s First Wednesday as we debate whether the KONY 2012 campaign is a force for good or a worrying development in campaigning.

Hosted by Paddy O’Connell of BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House.

With:

Benjamin Chesterton, radio documentary and photofilm producer, co-founder of the production company duckrabbit and the website A Developing Story.

Amanda Weisbaum, Programmes Director at War Child, who work on the ground with communities affected by the LRA in Northern Uganda and Central African Republic.

Musa Okwonga, a football writer, poet and musician of Ugandan descent. He is author of A Cultured Left Foot which was nominated for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award and Will You Manage?. He is one half of The King’s Will, an electronica outfit that blends poetry, music, and animated videos.

Mareike Schomerus, Research Consortium Director of the Justice and Security Research Programme at LSE and author of many publications including Chasing the Kony story in The Lord’s Resistance Army: Myth and Reality.

Callum Macrae, a film-maker and journalist who has reported, filmed and directed many award-winning television documentaries for Channel 4, the BBC and Al Jazeera English among others. He first made a film about Kony and the LRA in 2003, and has written and made several films about the LRA since.

We’ll be discussing whether it’s the end for Joseph Kony and the Lord’s Resistance Army at the Frontline Club tonight, 16 April, at 7pm GMT/11am PST. As usual, if you can’t make it to the Club in person, we’ll be streaming the event live on the Frontline Club Events page and on the Frontline Club live channel. Here’s a little more on the background to the discussion:

"December 14 2008 saw a botched attempt to crush Uganda’s rebel Lords Resitance Army (LRA) by the militaries of Uganda, South Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo. The raid was designed to capture or kill the group’s elusive leader, Joseph Kony and destroy the LRA’s military capacity.

Since then an estimated 900 people have been brutally killed in LRA reprisals, hundreds of children have been abducted and over 130,000 people have fled their homes according to the UN.

Is this the last painful chapter in the LRA’s brutal twenty-year struggle? As the small groups are hunted down and dealt with by the armies of Uganda’s neighbouring counties or does this represent a new phase of LRA attacks against civilians in the region."

Taking part will be Patrick Smith, editor of Africa Confidential, Peter Eichstaedt, from the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, Barney Afako, a Ugandan lawyer at Juba peace talks, Joseph Ochieno, the UK representative for Uganda People’s Congress and Anneke van Woudenberg, senior researcher on the Democratic Republic of Congo at Human Rights Watch.

Fighters of the Lord’s Resistance Army, Uganda’s shadowy rebel cult, have forced more than 130,000 people from their homes in the Democratic Republic of Congo since Congolese soldiers joined Ugandan and Southern Sudanese forces in launching an all-out assault on guerilla hide-outs before Christmas. Hundreds of civilians have died at the hands of the LRA.

But just over two years ago, LRA negotiators were days from signing a peace deal with the Ugandan government to end Africa’s most brutal war – two decades of bloodshed horrific even by the skewed yardstick of the world’s most violent continent. Joseph Kony, the reclusive LRA leader, cried off sick with diarrhoea and never signed the deal.

The reason, according to one of his closest lieutenants who defected just over a year ago, was that he feared trial and execution by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Now his loyal footsoldiers – many of them snatched as children – are waging their brutal war once again.

Kony may be wrong about the risk of execution – the ICC doesn’t kill criminals – but his example is instructive in thinking about Darfur as the world waits for the Sudanese president, Omar al Bashir, to be indicted on war crimes charges. The decision of the ICC judges on whether to charge Bashir is expected in days or weeks with massive consequences for Darfur, Sudan and Africa in general.

With peace talks between the Sudanese government and rebels of the Justice and Equality Movement starting in Qatar today, why do anything to disrupt the faint chance of peace in Darfur? (A bit like arresting Martin McGuinness during talks that led to the Good Friday agreement, is how one western diplomat in Khartoum put it). Or is the whole thing a cynical plot by Khartoum to make the ICC judges think again.

Either way, criminalising a head of state can only raise temperatures in an already volatile country, putting peacekeeping operations at risk and forcing aid agencies on to a defensive footing. A shaky peace deal with the south, signed in 2005 ending more than 20 years of civil war, will weaken further under the pressure. And the Darfuri rebels could become sufficiently emboldened to have another crack at the capital, Khartoum.

Against that is the need to hold leaders to account for their actions. If war crimes have been committed in Darfur then the people responsible should be prosecuted.

This debate – framed as justice versus peace in the Darfur context – is nothing new. Humanitarian actors have to grapple with similar issues in every theatre of misery. Generally the aid agencies on the ground come down on the consequentialist, pragmatic side of the argument, and opt for a position that allows them to continue doling out sacks of food, medicine and water pumps. For them, questions of justice and rights and responsibilities come second to saving lives. (Although their language often uses terms such as "rights" and "responsibilities" they are actually used as a shorthand for consequentialist positions, where ends are more important than means. See rule utilitarianism, for example.)

The further you travel from Africa, the more rights-based theories of ethics take over. The issues look much more black and white from New York, London or the Hague. And there is no doubt that a proper, long-lasting peace can only come with a just settlement – and that might very well involved carting people such as Kony and Bashir off to the ICC. But it might very well also reduce the possibility of peace being reached at all. That, of course, doesn’t matter if you are a following a justice or rights-based deontological approach: Means overtake ends in importance. The right thing to do is the right thing to do, regardless of whether it actually achieves peace.

So much of this comes down to worldview. And the two approaches are ultimately incompatible. The debate over the role of the Save Darfur coalition is one such example of how the two sides are speaking different, untranslatable languages. Advocates of justice-based arguments are unlikely to be swayed by appeals to the negative consequences of taking Bashir to the ICC, for example. They have already decided that consequences are less important than justice.

At times these differences flare into outright hostility. For a summary of positions you can read Michael Kleinman, whose background is with aid agencies, and David Sullivan, of the Enough project.

Not only are the positions incompatible, the two sides cannot even talk to each other. At the very least they need a common ethical language so that the opposing worldviews can express their differences in terms that the opposition can understand. In practice many people use a mix of deontological and consequentialist ethics for their everyday lives (it’s wrong to lie, except in certain circumstances, such as to avoid hurting someone’s feelings, say) and the challenge is to find a similar framework for social ethics, that can accommodate both worldviews, allowing the two sides to express their differences in a common language.

So for me, this is not about picking sides, it’s about trying to reconcile the differences between people who should be on the same team. For now, the more time I spend in Africa, the more attractive I find the messy, contradictory, imperfect solutions that stop the fighting. They may not tackle the deep-seated injustices and may just be storing up problems for the future. They might not resolve the big issues, but it stops people dying. Just ask the 130,000 people displaced by the LRA.

This tension between advocacy and humanitarian organisations in Sudan will be one of the key themes in a book I am writing to be published by Reportage Press.

On 29 November, Kony failed again to appear at the Ri-Kwangba assembly point to sign the Final Peace Agreement (FPA). Since April, armed actions attributed (not always accurately) to the LRA resumed in Sudan’s Western Equatoria state and the Bas Uélé district of the Congo (DRC). The LRA menace has moved out of Uganda, but the north does not yet have the certainty of sustainable peace.

Maybe even more alarmingly, the ICG raises the spectre of the LRA taking up its old role as a spoiler in southern Sudan…

It is available again as a proxy if Khartoum wants to disrupt the 2009 national elections, Southern Sudan’s 2011 referendum or restart war on the Sudan People’s Liberation Army’s (SPLA) southern flank.

So how did we find ourselves in this position? Intelligence documents compiled by the UN’s peacekeeping mission in the DRC made it plain the LRA was cynically using the ceasefire to re-organise

“Simply put, Kony now has the ability to divide his forces into very simple groups and to reassemble them at will,” the report says. “When put together with his proven mastery of bush warfare, this gives him new potency within his area of operations.”

As I found out during my visit to Congo’s border with southern Sudan, LRA slaving parties were kidnapping children even as Kony talked peace and collected food, phones and cash from well-meaning charities and allies.
But what’s the alternative? Uganda’s miserable northern war has displaced millions and left thousands of children brutalised and damaged. A negotiated settlement seems the only way of ending it all. Surely Kony has to be given a chance to sign up to a deal. But at what point do his abuses constitute a breach of the ceasefire? And when do we give up on it.
Frankly, I have no idea any more. This war is too messy and Joseph Kony too elusive in too many ways to know the best way to handle him. It’s easy to say after the fact that we shouldn’t have given him so much wriggle room. But what else is there? Military solutions haven’t worked before. Will they work now?

Earlier this year photographer Kate Holt and I chartered a plane to fly from Dungu, in the Democratic Republic of Congo, to the tiny village of Doruma which was recovering from repeated attacks by the Lord’s Resistance Army. We found people living in fear of the next assault, as LRA raiding parties roamed the jungle looking for sex slaves, porters and fighters. We uncovered evidence that Joseph Kony was cynically using a halt in hostilities – called to allow peace talks – in order to rearm, recruit and reorganise. With food distributed by aid agencies and satphones delivered by the Ugandan diaspora, his fighting force was more efficient that ever. And one his key aides, a recent defector, told us that Kony would never sign up to peace.

FOR eight days Raymond Kpiolebeyo was marched at gunpoint through the steaming Congolese jungle, not knowing whether he would live or die. For six nights he slept with eight other prisoners pinned under a plastic sheet weighted down with bags and stones to prevent escape. Their sweat condensed on the sheeting inches above their faces before dripping back and turning their plastic prison into a stinking, choking sauna. He was a prisoner of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a cult-like band of brutal commanders and their brutalised child soldiers. “They told us that if one of use tried to escape we would all be shot,” said Raymond, a 28-year-old teacher from the town of Doruma, close to the border with South Sudan.

In the end the story was commissioned but never ran. So, I am offering a 2000wd feature, an unparalleled insight into the bizarre world of Joseph Kony, for sale. Please contact me by the using the comments section below…

Picture – Children in the village of Dungu, DRC, which is surrounded by LRA activity.