Five years after its viral video broke the internet, Invisible Children is on the front line of a covert war against the Lord’s Resistance Army.
DUNGU, Democratic Republic of the Congo — The sun was disappearing behind hills thick with kapok trees when the Lord’s Resistance Army attacked a village near Masombo, just south of the South Sudanese border. Men and boys fled into the bush, afraid that the notorious dreadlocked gunmen might abduct them and force them to fight.The rebels, who once battled the Ugandan government but now mostly eek out a living by raiding villages in central Africa, herded the women into a thatched hut before ransacking their homes of food, clothes, and money. Then they melted back into the jungle.
Masombo is among the most isolated and remote places on Earth. A clutch of mud-thatch huts three hours by motorbike from the nearest Congolese town, it lacks cellular coverage and even the most rudimentary government services. Yet a detailed account of the assault last August — down to a tally of the peanuts and corn the LRA fighters had stolen — would arrive in the email inboxes of American military officers by dinnertime two days later.
It has been nearly five years since the San Diego-based NGO Invisible Children uploaded “Kony 2012” onto YouTube and watched it rack up more than 120 million views in a single week. The 30-minute viral video sought to make the LRA’s leader, Joseph Kony, and his crimes “famous” among young Americans. It was swiftly condemned for oversimplifying the conflict, and critics denounced the group’s co-founder, Jason Russell, as suffering from “white savior complex.” He had a public mental breakdown 10 days later, and his organization soon faded from view.
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