This is my first post. I'm excited that my first post is about all this Joseph Kony chaos that has played out over the past few weeks. As you may or may not know, I have been working since 9th grade to raise awareness about Joseph Kony, the war in Uganda, and mostly Schools for Schools, a division of Invisible Children. I want so badly for people to understand the war in Uganda. People need to be informed about every detail of this war, and what that Joseph Kony video is really about. So here are the top four misconceptions about the war in Uganda, and their explinations:
M I S C O N C E P T I O N O N E | by sending troops to uganda, we're going to start another iraq or afghanistan
T R U T H | the war in iraq had about 1000 times the number of initial troops sent, and the soldiers deployed to central africa are not there to be engaged in combat
Here's the most informative, non-biased article that I could find on the matter: CLICK HERE
First of all, Obama sent a very small number of troops to central africa, and that number will eventually grow to 100. When the war in Iraq started, the initial plans were to send 130,000 troops to Iraq (globalsecurity.org). Also, you have the understand that while these troops are combat equipped, they are not in Africa to be in direct combat with the Lord's Resistance Army. OF COURSE they're combat equipped. It would be a dumb move to send 100 ill-equipped, unprepared Americans over to one of the most volatile regions on the planet. It's only for their own security and self defense that they're combat equipped, so that they don't die (not to oversimplify anything, but it's pretty much as simple as that). President Obama said, "although the U.S. forces are combat-equipped, they will only be providing information, advice, and assistance to partner nation forces, and they will not themselves engage LRA forces unless necessary for self-defense".
M I S C O N C E P T I O N T W O| joseph kony is only in uganda
T R U T H | joseph kony's army is in parts of uganda, south sudan, the central african republic, and the democratic republic of congo
I try my hardest to use unbiased sources, but Invisible Children actually has a pretty good LRA tracker that they've invested TONS of money in. I feel like it's less biased because it's not used for propaganda purposes, it's an actual alert system used for citizens of the countries affected by the LRA. According to the most recent sightings, most LRA activity is happening on the border of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sudan (lracrisistracker.com).
M I S C O N C E P T I O N T H R E E | there's more important people we need to be looking for than joseph kony
T R U T H | joseph kony is the #1 war criminal on the international criminal courts most wanted list
That's right. Some of you might have seen that video posted by Invisible Children about the International Criminal Court. According to an article by Beth Rowan, "In 1998 the UN General Assembly voted to authorize a treaty that established a permanent international court to try those accused of war crimes, genocide, crimes of aggression, and crimes against humanity" (infoplease.com). This is what the ICC, or International Criminal Court is. At the very tippy top of their list is Joseph Kony. While there are a lot of bad people in the world, there's no way that we can stop all of them. Sadly, tragically, unfortunately, there's just no way. If we tried, we'd just end up arresting nobody, and we'd be worse off than when we began. So, we need to pick one person at a time to focus on, so we can begin to make progress. I believe that Joseph Kony is the person to pursue because not only has he fueled the Africa's Longest Running War in History, but he's also number one on the list. That just sounds like a good benchmark to me. We've gotta start somewhere, why not at the top?
M I S C O N C E P T I O N F O U R | invisible children is lying, oversimplifying, and keeping all of the money for themselves
T R U T H | invisible children may have oversimplified some things, but they are definitely not keeping all of the money for themselves
First off, here's what Jason Russell, co-founder of Invisible Children, had to say about the 'oversimplification' allegations, "It definitely oversimplifies the issue. This video is not the answer, it’s just the gateway into the conversation. And we made it quick and oversimplified on purpose...We are proud that it is simple. We like that. And we want you to keep investigating, we want you to read the history" (dawn.com). I guess this makes sense. If you tell people every little detail of the entire history of this conflict, it would take 1853ish hours, nobody would watch it, and it would make people's brains hurt. Looking at the situation with an open mind, I guess I can forgive them for oversimplifying things. Secondly, I would like to note that on Invisible Children's website, they have detailed financial reports from every year since 2006, including detailed summaries, tax documents, and more. It's incredibly illegal to fabricate this, so I'm pretty sure it's true. On this web page, Invisible Children states that only 16.24% of what they bring in goes to 'management and general', so salaries and the offices and stuff like that. This is an incredibly good statistic. I promise you, they're not taking your money.
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*Anything not directly cited is from the article that I mentioned at the very top of this post, which can also be found here
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