Tuesday November 8th, 2011 was a day that deeply disturbed me. It was the second time in my high school career that the organization Invisible Children came to present their cause.
Invisible Children was founded by 3 guys that decided that they wanted to go to Africa on a film-making adventure. When they got there, they couldn’t believe what they saw. They saw thousands of kids going from their village into a city where they would all sleep in abandoned buildings, in order to protect themselves from a rebel army called the Lord’s Resistance Army, or the LRA. This was been the result of the LRA going in and kidnapping children from their village and forcing them to fight as child soldiers. According to the estimates of the Invisible children the LRA army is mainly child soldiers, about 90%. This is the result of dwindling amounts of people that support the LRA’s cause.
The LRA was first the Holy Spirit movement but was then changed to the Lord’s Resistance Army after the leader, Joseph Kony came to power. Because of their horrible acts on humanity the LRA was declared a terrorist group in 2001. Then in 2003 when the three young filmmakers made their way into Northern Uganda is where the Invisible Children first got rolling. During their stay in Africa the guys made a rough cut of what everyday life was like in Northern Uganda. They met every memorable people during their stay. When they got back to the states they edited the video and made it into a D.V.D. for people to buy and they hoped would get more people aware of the Africa’s longest war.
Joseph Kony first started out with a strong army and was trying to over throw the Ugandan president. When the presidents army was started to either capture them or threaten them until they went against Kony. As more people started to leave out of fear, he started to abduct innocent children. In this past year there was 146 civilians killed with 523 abductions. This adds to the total count of 963 deaths and 1,810 abductions. The child soldiers aren’t Kony’s only victims. After the LRA goes into a village they abduct the children and kill most of their families. They are forced as young children, as young as 9, if not younger to fight as child soldiers. If they didn’t want to fight, tough, they were either killed or they were eventually broken into doing the unmentionable acts. Kony figured that if you get them while their young you can eventually get them to do whatever he says and that they would be purely loyal only to him. After a while the D.V.D. gained popularity and more and more people got wind of what was happening in the war. I personally first heard of Invisible Children through a music video of a band that I, at that time currently loved, but I was younger and it didn’t really faze me what it was about until some representatives from Invisible Children came to my school.
They gained so much popularity that they eventually got President Obama to send over 100 advisory troops to capture Joseph Kony. He is currently the most wanted war criminal wanted by the International Criminal Court.
This cause is a very important to me. The first time they came I cried my eyes out when they had a person that has lived through it and that has lost family and friends to the hands of Joseph Kony and the LRA. We need to come together and put a stop to all of Joseph Kony’s destruction.
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