Kony 2012 hit the world by storm. The film has had 80 million hits on YouTube and is plastered all over Facebook and Twitter. Joseph Kony, the number one criminal indicted by the International Criminal Court, is now a household name. People are already slapping up posters of his face all over cities, wearing bracelets with his name on and writing petitions for his immediate arrest.
The world of social media is huge but arguably still shallow. If you zoom out from that bubble and into a dusty town in northern Uganda you will find a place racked with poverty, where the majority of people do not have internet and televisions and are excluded from the discussion.
The irony was not lost on Victor Ochen, a victim of the conflict that ravaged his country for more than 20 years. He grew up in the refugee camps that were created by the Ugandan government while Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) plundered the area abducting children, massacring civilians and destroying homes. Along with millions of other war victims, he was without healthcare and education for most of his childhood.
In 2005, he set up the African Youth Initiative Network (AYINET), an organization that seeks to rebuild communities and empower young people so that they may have a more hopeful future. He has been implementing projects that allow war victims life after conflict and has campaigned for international recognition of their plight.
This week Ochen decided to take the Kony 2012 film to the young people he works with, using a projector and a makeshift screen in a field in the north Ugandan town of Lira. I spoke to him about his motivations and the response the film received…
Read the full article on New Internationalist HERE:
