Uganda: "Invisible Children," Joseph Kony's Army, and How It Ends.
Above, an earlier a rough cut of the film Invisible Children. The movie appears to be an ongoing work in progress, and as much an advocacy movement as much as it is a work of filmmaking. Richard Metzger writes,
The film: Invisible ChildrenThis is one of the most fucked up things I have ever heard of: A Ugandan warlord by the name of Joseph Kony kidnaps children from their parents who are powerless to do anything about it. He is feared as if he has voodoo powers and any kids trying to escape from his army have their tongues cut out or are killed.
The young guys who organized the "How it Ends" event made the film. I saw it on Rick Sanchez's CNN show last month at the gym and it is WEIRD and disturbing. I ran home and looked it up.
The interesting thing about their movie (much of it online at their site) is that they were these these young guys from San Diego who made skateboarding videos and were best friends. They had the idea to go to Africa to have an adventure and shoot it for a movie. What they found was Joseph Kony's child army. The story had not been really been told before that. They brought it back with them and started a movement. They've been on Oprah and Larry King. They're heroes, full stop.
It's riveting scary, stuff. A nightmare. A human rights disaster of the worst kind.
The event in DC: How it Ends
And: Night of the Rescue.
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I'm glad this is getting media attention on a huge scale. But the LRA have been at this for over 40 years and its still happening. I'm all for getting this publicly acknowledged but these kids, this country, deserve a whole lot of action as well.
And strangely I'm tinfoil hat enough to not want to type any more living where I do....
And not to belittle the issue (because the author in question certainly isn't), all of this is central to the current UNKNOWN SOLDIER comic series being published by DC/Vertigo. I won't pretend to be an expert, but to my eyes, the team working on the book are trying to handle the land and its struggles in a sophisticated fashion, and its certainly worth a look. I believe only single issues are available at the moment, but I'd expect a trade collection shortly.
http://www.unknownsoldiercomic.com/ hasn't been updated in a bit, but might be a good place to start.
See, this is what Oprah should be doing, rather than pandering to Jenny McCarthy.
Saving lives rather than helping to endanger them…
Bobby's a bit fabulous...
Another film along similar lines is:
http://www.ugandarising.com/
Thanks for featuring this. Invisible Children is a great cause, something that I and my friends have been raising funds towards for several years. It's literally a terrible walking nightmare - true terror.
Notacat @3:
Absolutely... why do celebrities work so hard to come up with lameass causes based on junk science, when stuff like this is going on every day? Sometimes I hate our privileged lives in the western world, only for the kind of vapid useless people it creates....
One of his young warriors will shoot and kill him. Kids with guns...
I can't think of a death painful enough for the monstrous loons who run these militia outfits.
Child soldiers is just the beginning of it; what the poor drugged-up waifs are forced to do to civilians is unspeakable.
Sadly, child soldiers are a terrific military innovation: they're cheap, dependable enough, abundant, and completely expendable. Moralizing about the problem isn't going to help much with the grave systemic problems that make such horrors possible.
Not to detract from the cause in any way, but here's my favorite, trivial detail about the LRA: Back in the late 80s when former LRA leader Alice Lakwena was arrested entering Kenya illegally, the East African (newspaper) reported that a man calling himself James Bond was among the small group arrested with her.
There's also a documentary made by two German guys: http://www.lost-children.de/en/home.htm
One of them is from my hometown and I've been to a public screening with some politicians and aid-workers. After the movie there was a long and terrible silence, before a short debate in a very low tone started.
The film covers the situation of ex-children-soldiers in a catholic aid-institution.
The directors started to help this aid project with a fund and are working a lot in schools to raise German kids for the issue.
its really touch my heart
Plus, if you're fighting against them, you have to shoot at CHILDREN!
Well, I rather doubt that's a big issue for moral or sentimental reasons, at least for your average combatant in an African land-tribal-resource war. Survival is survival. But children are smaller and offer less of a target than an adult would: another advantage.
Sadly, like the car-bomb or any other radically simple asymmetrical-combat weapon, it's child soldiers FTW.
I don't know if it's the liter of coffee I just drank... but I'm literally shaking... I knew very little about this issue, and it always seemed so abstract and crazy, now I realize it IS even MORE abstract and crazy than I thought it was.
Thank you very much for pulling my attention to this documentary that helped me to better understand the problem.
Well.......I was 2 minutes into this vid and starting to get sucked in and all of a sudden some annoying guy who wants to be a star shouts, "bobby its blinking red" wtf is that about ? i wanted to watch about uganda and the kids.... off to look at something else now
The plight of these child-soldiers and general abuse in Uganda and elsewhere is real and deserves attention. On the other hand, that the filmmakers had to adopt a "Survivor" style to convey that message takes away from the message of those kids.
Just a little too, "dude, we're in a bar, and like, you know, I wanna make a globetrotting film, but like a globetrotting film with a purpose." Lucky they struck on a real purpose, is it quite so lucky for the kids?
I took the bus from Nairobi to Kampala two weeks ago, and sat next to a well dressed and spoken Ugandan, and the conversation eventually came to the LRA and Joseph Kony.
What he said shocked me. "I don't think Joseph Kony is real. Even if he was, he was killed a long time ago. Yoweri Museveni keeps his story alive just as an excuse to hold onto political power".
In Kampala, I was talking with a good friend of mine, and he expressed similar thoughts.
I think Kony is real. I have seen the brutality he has inflicted upon thousands first hand during my travels to northern Uganda and Congo. I have had lunch with some of his former child soldiers, now living in Nairobi. He is a monster, and I pray for his death. Justice must be served.
I'd like to alert you to a new book about Joseph Kony and his army titled, "First Kill Your Family: Child Soldiers of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army," available at your local bookstore or Amazon.com.
You ought to do a piece on the Hell's Angel preacher who is going in and rescuing these kids. He's about the only person from the U.S. willing to go in and get these kids out. I've met him and he's the real thing.
http://www.machinegunpreacher.org/