Mepham High joins ‘Kony 2012’ movement

A worldwide campaign to raise awareness about Ugandan rebel Joseph Kony has officially hit Mepham High School.

The movement, called “Kony 2012,” was ignited by a 30-minute film of the same title created by Jason Russell, a co-founder of the nonprofit organization Invisible Children, which has worked since 2004 to shine a spotlight on Kony’s ruthless use of child soldiers in his rebellion against the Ugandan government. The video was posted on YouTube in early March, and in one week, received more than 83 million views.

In 1987, Kony formed the Lord’s Resistance Army in an all-out guerrilla war against the Ugandan government. The paramilitary group mainly comprises children who are kidnapped at an early age and brainwashed to fight.

The video, opening with the statement, “Nothing is more powerful than an idea,” was created as an experiment to test the power and influence of social networking. With 845 million users on Facebook across the globe, the video explains, there are more people registered on the social-networking site than there were people on the planet 200 years ago.

Russell, who narrates the video, explains Kony’s activities to his young son, Gavin, and also details his relationship with a Ugandan boy named Jacob, whose brother was killed by the Lord’s Resistance Army. Since its formation, the LRA has abducted and brainwashed more than 30,000 African children, according to the video.

In 2001, the U.S. declared the LRA a terrorist organization. In 2005, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Kony, but he has since eluded capture. The primary goal of “Kony 2012,” said Russell, is to have Kony arrested by the end of 2012. But, as Russell said in the video, “Here’s the biggest problem: Nobody knows who he is.”

Enter Mepham junior Jessie Almont. Two weeks ago, Almont, 17, watched Invisible Children’s video, and was immediately affected by it. “I have a younger brother, so when I saw it, it touched me,” she said.

Almont said that she was unaware of Kony or the conflict in central Africa until she watched the video. “He said that if something like this were to happen to somebody [in the U.S.], it would be all over the news. But these things are happening [in Africa], so nobody’s covering it.”