标题: Make Kony Famous [打印本页] 作者: tinaprayer 时间: 2012-3-8 17:40 标题: Make Kony Famous [attach]193434[/attach]
Tens of thousands of Australians have joined a global cause to make a mass-murdering African military leader "famous" so he can be brought to justice.
Joseph Kony is not famous yet, but an American film-maker has set out to change that with a new documentary that has been viewed more than ten million times in the last two weeks on the internet.
KONY 2012 alleges that Kony, the ruthless leader of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda, Africa, has abducted more than 30,000 children from their families, forcing young boys to murder their parents and become child soldiers and the girls to work as sex slaves.
Advertisement: Story continues below It's been happening for almost 30 years.
On Wednesday March 7, the video below, produced by the humanitarian group Invisible Children, began being passed around Australian internet users.
It is a remarkably emotive piece of film-making, but the social media campaign that has run in tandem with the film is what has "changed the rules".
Its aim is to raise global awareness of Kony - to make him famous - "not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice".
As the filmmaker Jason Russell explains, less than one per cent of the world knows who Kony is, however, if people knew what he had done, they would demand action.
"The dream would be for Kony to be captured, not killed, and brought to the International Criminal Court to face trial, says Russell, not surprising considering Kony is the most wanted man in the world according to the ICC.
"The world would know about his crimes and they would watch the trial play out on an international level, seeing a man face justice who got away with abducting children, raping little girls, and mutilating people's faces for 26 years," says Russell.
And this is the year to make it happen.
Thanks to the efforts of Russell and Invisible Children, the US government last year committed 100 military advisors to join the Ugandan army to help train and co-ordinate Kony's capture.
But that support could be withdrawn at any moment if public opinion does not keep decision-makers committed.
KONY 2012 may do the trick.
As of Wednesday night, #stopkony was one of the most tweeted topics globally.
Late Wednesday, Channel Seven's Weekend Sunrise program announced it would be departing from its usual format this Sunday for a special on #Kony2012, also asking its viewers to mass in Martin Place, Sydney, from 8:30am.
The Today Show jumped in on the action Thursday morning, interviewing the director Jason Russell.
Invisible Children's organisers have targeted April 20 as a day of global action, where supporters will paper their cities with "hundreds of thousands of posters demanding justice". More than 50,000 Australians have reportedly already signed up.
Of course, with publicity comes criticism, and many internet users are now questioning the transparency of Invisible Children's fundraising efforts, the amount of money it dedicates to its programs and where that money actually goes.
Others ask why Joseph Kony, when so many other dictators and murderers have run wild - particularly in Africa - for decades?
Foreign Affairs magazine alleges that advocacy groups such as Invisible Children, Human Rights Watch and World Vision "have manipulated facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders and emphasizing the LRA's use of innocent children as soldiers, and portraying Kony - a brutal man, to be sure - as uniquely awful, a Kurtz-like embodiment of evil.
"They rarely refer to the Ugandan atrocities or those of Sudan's People's Liberation Army, such as attacks against civilians or looting of civilian homes and businesses, or the complicated regional politics fueling the conflict."
Britain's Guardian newspaper reports that "critics point out the campaign calls on the public to pressurise the US to continue working with the Ugandan military, an organisation that has its own record of abuses".
"The Ugandan army continues to commit politically motivated abuses in Uganda," Maria Burnett, senior researcher with Human Rights Watch, Africa Division, told the Guardian.
"We have documented numerous cases in which they've been involved in torture and arbitrary arrests, as well as a score of killings of unarmed protesters and bystanders during political demonstrations in the past three years," she is quoted as saying.
So it's not neat ... Africa never is, nor is its politics.
In his 2011 geopolitical bestseller The Next Decade, foreign policy provocateur, George Freidman, outlines the cases for American involvement in practically every region in the world but calls Africa - "a place to leave alone".
In other words it has nothing we need, so let's ignore it.
Invisible Children and KONY 2012 have pushed against that conventional wisdom; they have started a conversation. The quality of that conversation is up to you.作者: tinaprayer 时间: 2012-3-8 18:25
INVISIBLE CHILDREN KONY ACTION 2012
" JOSEPH KONY " 相信大家對於這號人物...陌生...他是何許人???
"他" 在過去26年間, 總供诱拐以及劫持30000名兒童和青少年, 强迫他們做些不人道的恐怖活動和训练. 例如: