VIRAL VIDEO, VICIOUS WARLORD
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The New York Times
March 15, 2012 Thursday
Late Edition – Final
I’d like to thank the makers of the “Kony 2012” video for goading me
to write about Joseph Kony. With about 100 million views, it is now
one of the most viral videos of all time.
My starting point is a “bravo” for film-makers for galvanizing young
Americans to look up from their iPhones and seek to make a difference
for villagers in central Africa who continue to be murdered, raped and
mutilated by Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army. Just in the last two
months, the Lord’s Resistance Army has mounted 20 raids in Congo alone.
But nobody fights more wickedly than humanitarians, so there have
been a series of attacks on the video. Let me try to address some of
the criticisms.
Let Africans resolve their own problems. It’s neocolonialist for
Americans to think that they can solve Congolese problems, when they
can’t even solve their own. This is just one more example of “white
man’s burden” imperialism.
When a warlord continues to kill and torture across a swath of Congo
and Central African Republic, that’s not a white man’s burden. It’s
a human burden.
To me, it feels repugnant to suggest that compassion should stop at
a national boundary or color line. A common humanity binds us all,
whatever the color of our skin — or passport.
The issue is complicated, in ways that don’t come through in a
misleading video. For example, the video doesn’t make clear that Kony
is no longer a threat in Uganda.
The video doesn’t contain errors, but it does simplify things greatly
to hold attention. Complexity is, er, complicated: It has been a
leading excuse for inaction during atrocities — during the Armenian
genocide, during the Holocaust, during Rwanda, during the Bosnian
slaughter. Each episode truly was complicated, but, in retrospect,
we let nuance paralyze us.
It’s true that Kony’s forces are diminished and no longer a danger in
Uganda, but he remains a threat in Congo, Central African Republic
and South Sudan. Those are tough neighborhoods — I’ve been held at
gunpoint in Central African Republic and chased through the Congo
jungle by a warlord whose massacres I interrupted — that rarely get
attention and are little understood. Yes, the video glosses over
details, but it has left the American public more informed. Last
year, Rush Limbaugh defended the Lord’s Resistance Army because it
sounded godly.
American kids worrying about Kony accomplish nothing. The video
promotes feel-good gestures — wear a bracelet! — that enrich a
do-nothing aid organization but have no benefit in the jungles of
central Africa.
It’s true that indignation among Americans won’t by itself stop Kony.
Yet I’ve learned over the years that public attention can create an
environment in which solutions are more likely.
Public outrage over Serbian atrocities in the Balkans eventually
led the Clinton administration to protect Kosovo and hammer out
the Dayton peace accord. The Sudan civil war killed millions over
half-a-century on and off, until public outrage — largely among
evangelical Christians — led President George W. Bush to push
successfully for a peace agreement in 2005.
I asked Anthony Lake, now the executive director of Unicef who
was President Clinton’s national security adviser during the 1994
Rwandan genocide, whether a viral video about Rwanda would have made
a difference then. “The answer is yes,” he said. He suggested that
this kind of public attention would also have helped save more lives
in Darfur and in Congo’s warring east.
In 1999, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright paid a brief visit
to war-ravaged Sierra Leone and was photographed with a 3-year-old
girl whose right arm had been chopped off. The photograph, widely
circulated, helped galvanize outside powers to crush the militias.
Sierra Leone is now at peace, and that girl is studying in the
United States.
I asked Albright, who later led a task force on preventing genocide,
what she thinks of the Kony video.
“Shining a light makes a lot of difference,” she said, adding that
Kony’s prospects are probably less good now than before the video
came out.
The bottom line is: A young man devotes nine years of his life to fight
murder, rape and mutilation, he produces a video that goes viral and
galvanizes mostly young Americans to show concern for needy villagers
abroad — and he’s vilified?
I don’t know if this initiative will make a difference. But if I were
a Congolese villager, I would welcome these uncertain efforts over
the sneering scorn of do-nothing armchair cynics.
I’m delighted to announce the winner of my 2012 win-a-trip contest:
Jordan Schermerhorn, an engineering student at Rice University who
has never been outside the United States. One possibility for our
trip is Malawi, but suggestions are welcome. More information is on
my blog: nytimes.com/ontheground.