Kaganga John and I were huddled around my computer in the food court of the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio+20. We were checking our emails to see if anyone had agreed to meet with us. I felt the brush of suit jackets as people rushed by us.
“We aren’t leaving this conference without a concrete step toward sustainable development for your village,” I told Kaganga, “even if that means we don’t sleep.”
On March 14, Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) filed a U.S. federal lawsuit against American Minister Scott Lively, using the Alien Torts Statute (A.T.S.). The ATS allows for non-citizens to launch US court actions for violations of international law. SMUG accuses Lively of collaborating with four named Ugandan co-conspirators (conservative evangelicals Martin Ssempa and Stephen Langa, Member of Parliament David Bahati, and the current Minister of Ethics and Integrity James Buturo) to create an enabling environment for persecution and violence against gays and lesbians in Uganda. Lively is also accused of directly contributing to the infamous 2009 “Kill the Gays” bill1 which never came to a vote. In February, however, Bahati reintroduced the legislation.
KONY 2012 only contributes to the normalization of military interventionism as the solution to all ills.
How should justice be meted out to Joseph Kony, not to mention Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni, also accused of war crimes by the International Court of justice?
Both Mike Daisey and Jason Russell are storytellers. But they’re not just storytellers. Like Mark Twain, who was infuriated by Belgian colonial policies in the Congo, Daisey and Russell want to provoke us into doing something. And they have carefully crafted their stories toward that end.
And now, virtually simultaneously, both Russell and Daisey are under fire for not adhering to the literal truth.
From Twitter trending to the front page of The New York Times to public statements by the White House and the Pentagon, the Kony 2012 campaign has shown the power of social media to affect U.S. public debate. But it has also demonstrated the dangers posed by oversimplification in an age when policy is made in the 24-hour news cycle. This has proven especially so on issues concerning Africa where, lacking historical context, over-simplistic media framing can quickly take root and lead to problematic policy “solutions.”
As well as stopping Kony, the U.S. must acknowledge the violence unleashed upon civilians during Operation Lightening Thunder, the previous U.S.-Ugandan military alliance.
The United States announced this past week that it is deploying a 100-man mission to assist the Ugandan government in tracking down the remnants of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a force whose bloody conflict with the Ugandan military has devastated northern Uganda and its environs since 1987. But why now, in 2011, is the U.S. government making this commitment to combat the LRA?
In 2006, Uganda confirmed the presence of enormous commercial petroleum reserves around Lake Albert along the country’s western border. Since then, geologists have proven at least 2 billion barrels. With only about 25 percent of the region explored, some reports indicate that there could be as much as three times that amount – enough to make Uganda a major player in the African oil industry. The oil is set to begin flowing later this year, or perhaps in early 2012, with production targeted at around 200,000 barrels per day.
The excessive violence with which Ugandan security forces have over the last month cracked down on initially peaceful opposition protests at soaring food and fuel prices, and which last weekovershadowed the inauguration of re-elected President Yoweri Museveni, is almost as puzzling as it is disturbing.