The Kony campaign: questions and answers

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This was published 12 years ago

The Kony campaign: questions and answers

Updated

Who is Jason Russell?

"If Oprah, Steven Spielberg and Bono had a baby, I would be that baby."

A campaign that's shot around the world ... Kony 2012.

A campaign that's shot around the world ... Kony 2012.

That is how Jason Russell, the film maker behind the viral film Kony 2012, responded when he was asked about his biggest heroes in an interview with US website PMc Magazine last year.

According to another profile on the Christian Broadcasting Network, he graduated from San Diego's El Cajon Valhalla High and the film school at the University of Southern California in 2002.

He travelled to Kenya on a church trip in 2000 and was "transformed".

What is Invisible Children?

According to the CBN profile, Russell and two other film students, Bobby Bailey and Laren Poole, bought a camera on eBay and went to Africa in 2003 , eventually making their way to Uganda where they found "the terrified children of the north".

Their resulting documentary released in 2005 was called Invisible Children, and the trio later formed an organisation of the same name.

Invisible Children's website states that their goals are to help fund and develop schools in Africa, as well as to educate American youth about what's going on in Africa.

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Invisible Children occupies a small office tower in San Diego, where its three founders were raised. With a staff of about 40 and about 100 unpaid interns, the group trains people for six-week stints at its headquarters to spread the word of LRA atrocities, the Associated Press reported.

Groups of five “roadies” fan out to college campuses and churches throughout the United States and Canada, sleeping at homes of strangers. One member of each group is from Africa and shares life experiences.

Tragedy struck in 2010 when an American member was among 74 people killed by explosions that tore through crowds watching the World Cup final in Uganda. Nate Henn was hit by shrapnel from one of the blasts.

Last year, the group began installing high frequency radios in Africa's remotest jungle to help track militia attacks in Congo, Central African Republic and South Sudan. People in areas without phones can report attacks on the radios to people who put them on a website called the LRA Crisis Tracker.

Keesey joined Invisible Children in 2005 after graduating from University of California, Los Angeles with a degree in applied mathematics, management and accounting.

“We thought it would be a short project, maybe a year or two, and now it's turned into eight or nine years,” he told AP. “The purpose of this campaign is that 2012 is the year this crazy violence can stop.”

* smh.com.au attempted to contact Invisible Children. Their phone line went to an answering service directing all media queries to an email address, due to a high level of interest. We have not yet received a response to our questions.

What are the practical goals of #Kony2012?

Jason Russell was asked on Channel Nine's Today whether Invisible Children's money went to the Ugandan government's military. He was also asked how the organisation planned to have Joseph Kony arrested without appearing to use the same methods as Kony himself.

Russell responded: "Here's the thing. We put a man on the moon many, many years ago. A man on the moon.

"So getting a warlord to stop abducting children, it is difficult, I'm not saying it's simple, but I am saying it is doable.

"So the thing is, our resources that we have - the department of defence and the intelligence we have - we can strategically make it happen with the Ugandan military forces that are on the ground.

"It is a collective effort, it is not just in isolation.

"We don't want America to be the world police. We don't like war, we want to end war, that's what we're doing.

"I'm a pacifist at heart. I love Gandhi, Dr Martin Luther King; those are my idols.

"And just in this specific case, it's going to take a strategic force of last resort to go in and capture Kony.

"And it really has to be strategic because he is surrounded by children and women who are innocent."

What's next for Invisible Children?

Invisible Children has called on its supporters to use social media to encourage people to get together across the world on April 20 to show their support for "Kony2012".

"This is the day when we will meet at sundown and blanket every street in every city until the sun comes up," the director of the Invisible Children video, Jason Russell, said in it.

"The rest of the world will go to bed Friday night and wake up to hundreds of thousands of posters demanding justice."

The organisation is also selling "Kony2012" merchandise, such as $US25 T-shirts, $10 bracelets and $30 "action kits".

But the president of the Africa Studies Centre at Flinders University, Tanya Lyons, told the ABC the tactics used by Invisible Children could be counter-productive.

"I think it's quite interesting the film producer was willing to exploit a young child in a good versus evil, very emotive, documentary, which is trying to tap into the western guilt for inaction.

"Kony would be loving this," she told the ABC, referring to the sale of the merchandise.

"If you had of been doing this with Osama bin Laden five or 10 years ago, you possibly would have been arrested. It's glorifying a murderer.

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"I think it'd be feeding into it and making him more powerful ... rather than making any difference to any type of international intervention that may or may not be underway."

smh.com.au with AP

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