Laura Seay on Invisible Children and the LRA
Friday, March 3rd, 2017[ by Charles Cameron — for your convenience, Laura Seay’s tweet-streak updating us on the LRA, reformatted as prose — though by no means prosaic ]
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Five years after its “Kony 2012” video broke the internet, Invisible Children is waging covert war against the LRA. http://atfp.co/2ljVz6A
This isn’t the full extent of the crazy, naive things IC, Bridgeway, & Laren Poole have undertaken in the last few years. There’s more. And the “more” is capital-I Insane.
I’ve been researching the anti-LRA efforts as part of my book project on how advocacy movements affect US policy in Africa. The US has spent over $1 billion on the anti-LRA mission since 2011. The LRA is now tiny, ~150-250. Whether Kony is still alive is unknown. Innocent people still suffer as a result of the LRA’s much-decreased activity. No doubt about that. But is this the best way to spend $1 billion? Especially given how many other armed groups in the region do far more harm to civilians?Could the skills of the 100 US Army Special Operations Forces posted to the CAR mission to “advise” the UPDF be put to better use elsewhere?
These are not easy questions & there aren’t easy answers to them. And there’s the issue that 5 1/2 years in, we still haven’t caught Kony or eradicated the LRA. At what point do we cut our losses & give up? The folks who are still working on these efforts have been passionately & deeply engaged on the LRA crisis for 10-15 years. They got what they wanted: global attention, abundant funding, a military mission (in which they are deeply involved). And it hasn’t worked. But some dangerous precedents have been set, particularly re the role of private charitable foundations funding a foreign military.
No matter how good their intentions, foundations aren’t accountable to anyone. Nor can foundations control how the UPDF will use training & equipment they provided in the future or in other situations. It’s a risky game. And it won’t be the foundations who suffer the consequences if things go wrong down the line. AFRICOM also can’t control what the UPDF will do with the skills they’ve developed while working alongside US Army Africa. Ideally, the UPDF leaves the mission with more professional soldiers with strong capacity & ethics. But again, we can’t control that. It’s messy with no clear “right” answer.
I think the anti-LRA movement will be remembered as a cautionary case about the role of advocacy movements in shifting US policy. Advocacy movements shouldn’t get all that they want. Their wishes need to be tempered by expert & local opinion. And US charitable foundations should not be allowed to fund foreign military activity. Period.
