Kony 2012 Viral Campaign to hunt down Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony

A human rights campaign has gone viral on the web, touching off millions of YouTube hits, trending throughout the world on Twitter and inviting thousands to join the movement on Facebook.

Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 campaign “aims to make Joseph Kony famous, not to celebrate him, but to raise support for his arrest and set a precedent for international justice.”

Filmmaker Jason Russell released a 30-minute documentary on YouTube Tuesday about Kony, a Ugandan warlord who has been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.

The film begins with the story of Jacob, a Ugandan boy who describes the death of his brother and fears of being abducted by Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army.

“We worry, when the rebels arrest us again then they will kill us,” Jacob says to the camera.

“We are also going to do everything that we can to stop them. Do you hear my words?” Russell says to the boy.

Kony has been fighting against the Ugandan government since 1986.

In May 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama signed the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act that committed the United States to help bring down Kony and his rebel army.

“The Lord’s Resistance Army preys on civilians — killing, raping, and mutilating the people of central Africa; stealing and brutalizing their children; and displacing hundreds of thousands of people.

“Its leadership, indicted by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity, has no agenda and no purpose other than its own survival. It fills its ranks of fighters with the young boys and girls it abducts.

“By any measure, its actions are an affront to human dignity,” Obama wrote at the time.

The U.S. sent troops to hunt Kony down last fall, although the leader remains at large.

Despite the social media phenomenon that is sweeping across the web, the documentary hasn’t made much of an impact in Uganda yet.

“Very few people have seen it here,” said Jeff Anguyo in Kampala. “It’s not really news here, we know what Kony’s been doing for decades.

“He has been causing problems in Uganda for almost 20 years and what he’s done is horrible. A whole generation of kids got destroyed because they did not go to school and were used as soldiers. And now many have grown up to become men and fight beside him.”

Anguyo is hopeful that the worldwide attention from the film will help capture Kony, but it may not change anything in northern Uganda, which has been largely free of his army the past few years.

“If he was caught, it would be cause for a celebration in Uganda, but that would only be the start of change,” Anguyo said.

Despite the story of Jacob, Russell is the film’s main protagonist, narrating throughout and interviewing his own son to prove a point that no one knows about Kony, although he is the top-ranked war criminal on the International Criminal Court’s list and is known throughout Africa and among the world’s leaders.

“This is the problem, nobody knows who he is. He’s not famous. He’s invisible,” Russell says to his son, Gavin. “Here is how we make him visible, we are going to make Joseph Kony a household name, not to celebrate him but to bring his crimes to the light.”

The campaign is targeting “20 culture makers and 12 policy makers,” such as Oprah Winfrey, Mark Zuckerberg and Hillary Rodham Clinton to use their celebrity power to effect change.

While the campaign is resonating in the west, it has polarized the African community.

“We are opposed to Jason Russell’s film about Kony,” said Kemi Omololu-Olunloyo, a community advocate in Toronto who comes from Nigeria. “This should be about child soldiers and not just in Uganda — it’s a problem across the world, even kids killing kids in Canada.

“And there’s something off about the monetization of this.”

Invisible Children is accepting donations and selling Kony paraphernalia such as red bracelets for $10. The website says the donations and purchases will go to their effort to end the violence by Kony’s army in Central Africa and to rehabilitate child soldiers.

The movement also hopes to “Cover the Night” in cities around the world on April 20 in an old-school campaign to plaster places such as Toronto with posters, stickers and banners. The poster on the Facebook page shows Kony alongside Osama bin Laden and Adolf Hitler.