This Article is From Mar 08, 2012

Who is Joseph Kony? Why a video on a Ugandan warlord has gone viral

New Delhi:

4.3 million hits on YouTube and counting... It is a campaign against a Ugandan warlord - Joseph Kony - that has gone viral.

In less than two days after filmmaker Jason Russell released the 30-minute documentary on YouTube, the "Kony 2012" campaign is trending worldwide on Twitter and is on the front page of Reddit.

The poster on the Facebook page shows Kony alongside Osama bin Laden and Adolf Hitler. The Twitter campaign has seen the hashtags #stopkony and #kony2012 being tweeted by celebrities line Rihanna.

The campaign, produced by the Invisible Children movement, seeks to make Joseph Kony one of the most infamous people in the world. On iots website, the campaign says, "If the world knows who Joseph Kony is, it will unite to stop him. It starts here."

The campaign intends to urge United States and other countries to intensify their efforts to nab Joseph Knoy, the leader of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), who has wreaked havoc over four Central African nations for more than two decades.

The US elite troops set up a base in Obo in December and have been coordinating their efforts with local government forces and Ugandan soldiers.Besides Obo, the US forces also have a forward base in South Sudan.

The rebels currently number several hundred, a fraction of their strength at their peak but still include a core of hardened fighters infamous for mutilating civilians and abducting children for soldiers and sex-slaves. Tens of thousands of people have been killed since Kony took up arms in the late 1980s, initially against the Ugandan government.

The International Criminal Court has a warrant against Kony, one of the Africa's most wanted men.

Driven out of Uganda, the guerrillas have since scattered across a vast region of the Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo and South Sudan, recruiting fighters from those nations over the years. The LRA emerged from the frustrations of Uganda's marginalised Acholi ethnic group against the government, but its leaders have since dropped their national political agenda for the narrow objective of pillage and plunder.

The Invisible Children movement's campaign founders hope that the buzz on social media will take this outside the continent and make the world sit up and take notice. But can the internet and a viral video bring an international criminal to justice?
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