| FTA: > Here’s the thing. The LRA is an incredibly complex issue. By simplifying down to a case of “Goodies versus Baddies” the Invisible Children campaign risks undermining the very real progress that is being made against the LRA. Also released on Tuesday, in a report completely ignored by social media, a spokesman for the UN High Commission for Refugees said that a recent spate of LRA attacks were “the last gasp of a dying organisation that's still trying to make a statement,” adding that there were only about 200 LRA fighters left. Progress is being made. There’s even a chance that Kony will be caught or killed by the end of 2012 – but this will have nothing to do with a YouTube video, however slick it is. I don't think that the statement "African politics has failed to solve a pretty awful issue for 25 years" is really accurate or fair. And that's one of the problems with this video -- it propagates this idea that Africans need Western powers to solve their problems for them. And I guess I'd ask this: How does the attention of people in North America and Europe "force something to happen"? Force what to happen? Force Western military intervention? Give Ugandans more motivation to take out the LRA? And, of course "Africa" isn't really the right word, anyways. It's an entire continent, after all, and the people in Uganda or South Sudan aren't the same as the people in, say, South Africa, or Botswana, or Somalia, etc., nor are the political/economic/social contexts necessarily the same. |