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Kony 2012 reaches Edinburgh Students organise event in response to viral campaign
Katie Cunningham
Alice Cahill KONY 2012, the campaign aiming to raise awareness of Ugandan guerilla group leader Joseph Kony, has prompted Edinburgh students to take part in ‘Cover the Night’, an event which will see participants spend the night of 20 April distributing Kony 2012 fliers and posters in cities around the world. Invisible Children, the group who are organising the campaign, released a half hour film on the alleged crimes of Kony’s 'Lord’s Resistance Army’ last Monday, urging people to help raise the campaign's profile. The film’s director, Jason Russell, said that 'Cover the Night' will be an important step in the campaign. He said, “[20 April] is the day when we will meet at sundown and blanket every street in every city until the sun comes up. “The rest of the world will go to bed Friday night and wake up to hundreds
of thousands of posters demanding justice.” The film has already been viewed over 70 million times on YouTube. Kony is currently ranked number one on the International Criminal Court’s most wanted list, standing accused of overseeing the kidnapping of countless African children, brainwashing the boys into fighting for him and turning the girls into sex slaves. His soldiers are believed to have slaughtered tens of thousands of people. London School of Economics Professor Tim Allen has studied the Lord’s Resistance Army extensively. Regarding Kony 2012 he said, “I think it has been fantastic how Invisible Children has been able to access that kind of younger population of potential activists.” However, critics of the campaign have suggested that the problem has been oversimplified and that the wider political context needs to be taken into account.
Allen continued, “Even if Kony is removed tomorrow the problems are not going to go away. “This is a part of the world in which hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people have been killed since the late 1990s in ongoing wars, and the Lord’s Resistance Army and Joseph Kony himself are responsible for very, very few of those deaths.” Arthur Larok, Action Aid’s Director in Uganda, explained that their current priority is “rebuilding and securing lives for children” and that, “International campaigning that doesn’t support this agenda is not so useful at this point.” Others have argued that the focus on Kony will divert millions of pounds of donations away from charities addressing issues in Africa such as malnutrition, access to clean water and the spread of AIDS, each of which has taken far more lives than Joseph Kony. Invisible Children has also come under fire for what appears to be its
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KONY 2012: A closer look at the campaign>> Comment P7 support for the Ugandan government and the Ugandan army, both of which have been accused of committing rape and looting. Invisible Children responded by saying, “We do not defend any of the human rights abuses perpetrated…yet the only feasible way to stop Kony and protect the civilians he targets is to coordinate efforts with regional governments.” Invisible Children itself has also been criticised for the way it spends its donations. Last year, the organisation spent over $8.6m, only 32 per cent of which went to direct services in Uganda. Just 48 hours after uploading the film, which calls for donations, the group had made $5m. Responding to some of the criticisms, the Kony 2012 director has said, “This video is not the answer, it’s just the gateway into the conversation. “We want you to keep investigating, we want you to read the history.”
ALMOST HALF of England’s leading universities want to increase their applications from state school pupils rather than those who were educated privately. Universities including Cambridge, Durham, Exeter, University College London (UCL) and Warwick, want to implement long-term plans to increase their numbers by 2016. Some, including UCL, want to raise their admissions by around ten per cent, while others additionally want to prevent students from independent schools from accessing scholarship programmes. New Offa head Professor Les Ebdon referred to action which would be taken against universities not meeting targets as “nuclear” and that it would include steep fines. Any institutions seeking to price their courses over £6,000 will have to create an Offa access plan; an outline of the targets and systems they are establishing to attract diverse students. This includes targeting schools in poorer catchment areas, implementing summer classes and starting community outreach programmes. However, there are already fears among independent school heads that it may be an attempt at “socially engineering” universities and that the change will encourage student applications to be downgraded “just because of the kind of school they come from.” The Master of Magdalen College School in Oxford, Tim Hands, spoke against the change, stating that this was an attempt to “politically manipulate” results. He said, “It’s no secret that top universities…don’t see why tertiary education should be forced to compensate for problems which government incompetence over secondary education has created in the first place.” There are also concerns that the new system will ignore private school bursary students while assuming that all students from state schools are disadvantaged. Wendy Piatt, Director General of the Russell Group, stated that the decision to target higher education facilities was a mistake. Continued on page three »