The Story Behind Kony 2012

“Where you live should not determine whether you live.”

These are the words of Jason Russell and the statement behind the movement he helped to create, Kony 2012.

‘Kony’ refers to the most wanted man in the world according to the International Criminal Court and the man behind the abduction of more than 30,000 children.

Joseph Kony is the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group based in northern Uganda. It has since expanded into southern Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic.

For 30 years now, Joseph Kony and the LRA have been abducting children to force them into combat. The boys are turned into child soldiers, while the girls are made into sex slaves.

Sources speculate that the Lord’s Resistance Army has accumulated as many as 3,000 soldiers, and most of them are children. The children are given guns and other weapons to be used for raiding villages and schools, where more children will be recruited. In the process, the children are forced to torture and kill their parents, their neighbors, their teachers, and anyone who would not be of any use to the LRA.

In light of the atrocities he’s committed, it’s hard to believe that Kony’s actions have gone under the radar for 3 decades; 99% of the world does not know who Joseph Kony is. And Jason Russell is going to change that.

With the help of the Invisible Children organization, filmmaker Jason Russell started Kony 2012, a half-hour documentary that details the LRA’s innumerable human rights violations. The documentary was released by the Invisible Children organization 2 days ago and since then, the video has had 10 million hits.

The purpose behind the video and the campaign is to increase awareness of the crises in the various countries affected by the LRA and make Kony as famous as celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Mark Zuckerberg.

The message of Kony 2012: “If the world knows who Joseph Kony is, it will unite to stop him.”

To spread the word in the fastest way possible, Kony 2012 has recruited a number of influential celebrities to the fold in order to branch itself out and reach more people. Additionally, it will be making use of the ubiquitous presence of social media. Using their Twitters, ‘big names’ like Justin Bieber, Diddy, Rihanna, Ellen Degeneres, and even Bill Gates are going to be able to send the campaign’s message to millions of fans around the world.

A major part of the campaign takes place on the night of April 20, when a series of rallies will commence across the globe in an effort to “paint the town red” with the appropriately-red campaign posters.

Last year, the Invisible Children group lobbied for the U.S. government to get involved, and they succeeded; the government placed a small number of troops in Africa to help the Ugandan army get the tools and technology they needed to forward the hunt for Kony.

There are many critics of the campaign, however. Though the intentions of the campaign are undoubtedly honorable, the actions (or lack thereof) of the campaign have been questioned. Kony 2012 and the Invisible Children have been criticized of spending their finances in filmmaking and rallying rather than taking real action and providing aid for those afflicted by the conflicts.

To support Kony 2012, the Invisible Children is selling an ‘action kit’, t-shirts, and posters on this website.