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futurejournalismproject:

Young Women in Chechnya

Via Boston.com:

Photojournalist Diana Markosian spent the last year and half covering Russia’s volatile North Caucasus region. This year she started a personal project entitled “Goodbye My Chechnya” documenting the lives of young Chechen women as they come of age in the aftermath of war. She writes, “For young women in Chechnya the most innocent acts could mean breaking the law. A Chechen girl caught smoking is cause for arrest; while rumors of a couple engaging in pre-martial relations can result in her killing. The few girls who dare to rebel become targets in the eyes of Chechen authorities. After nearly two decades of vicious war and 70 years of Soviet rule, during which religious participation was banned, modern-day Chechnya is going through Islamic revival. The Chechen government is building mosques in every village, prayer rooms in public schools, and enforcing a stricter Islamic dress code for both men and women. This photo essay chronicles the lives of young Muslim girls who witnessed the horrors of two wars and are now coming of age in a republic that is rapidly redefining itself as a Muslim state.”

Image: Kazbek Mutsaev, 29, fires celebratory gun shots as part of an age-old wedding tradition in Chechnya, by Diana Markosian. Via Boston.com, Young Women in Chechnya.

doctorswithoutborders:

DRC: Civilians and Aid Workers Victims of Renewed Fighting in the Kivus

Civilians and aid workers are increasingly the targets of violence in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where armed conflicts and large troop movements have recently intensified, and where security risks have made it increasingly difficult to continue to provide medical care, said the international medical humanitarian organization MSF on Wednesday.

National and international stabilization forces in DRC have never been more important, but MSF questions their effectiveness given the worsening situation.

“The situation is not stabilizing in Kivu,” said MSF program manager Dr. Marcela Allheimen. “It is deteriorating again, and has been deteriorating over the last several months. We are noticing renewed violence, but what is most alarming is the commonplace nature of violence on civilian populations and aid actors.”

Read the whole MSF press release.

Photo: DRC 2011 © Ben Milpas
Children at the Mweso hospital, where MSF is continuing to work despite the threat of continuing violence

vicemag:

Is Syria the New Bosnia?

poptech:

#UgandaSpeaks: Al-Jazeera uses Ushahidi to Amplify Local Voices in Response to #Kony2012

By Patrick Meier, Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi (PopTech 2010)

Invisible Children’s #Kony2012 campaign has set off a massive firestorm of criticism with the debate likely to continue raging for many more weeks and months. In the meantime, our colleagues at Al-Jazeera have repurposed our previous #SomaliaSpeaks project to amplify Ugandan voices responding to the Kony campaign: #UgandaSpeaks.

Other than GlobalVoices, this Al-Jazeera initiative is one of the very few seeking to amplify local reactions to the Kony campaign. Over 70 local voices have been shared and mapped on Al-Jazeera’s Ushahidi platform in the first few hours since the launch. The majority of reactions submitted thus far are critical of the campaign but a few are positive.

Read more…

united-nations:

The Office of the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict answers questions about UN work to address LRA operations. We hope this conversation will encourage people to learn all of the facts about the hundreds of thousands of children affected by conflict around the world.

How does the LRA recruit children and what is their role?

Where is the LRA operating?

What are the aspirations of the LRA?

What are other violations are committed against children by the LRA?

What has the United Nations done to address the violations committed against children by the LRA?

Why is a military action against the LRA risky?

What can I do for the children affected by the LRA?

Report of the UN Secretary-General on the Lord’s Resistance Army-affected areas (November 2011, S/2011/693)

UNICEF has been working for decades to protect children from violence/abuse. But there’s still much to be done.

UNICEF: Video on The Paris Principles: agreement to end the use of children in war

UNICEF: More on child soliders

International Criminal Court on the Situation in Uganda

Find out if your country has signed the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in armed conflict.

Statement from Special Representative Ms. Radhika Coomaraswamy:

I am pleased to see such a lively discussion on an issue that is often under-reported. If people want to help, they can support programs for children—-who have escaped the LRA—-to rebuild their lives and their communities throughout Central Africa. Any military action against LRA should pay heed to the fact that Kony’s army is largely comprised of children.

hitrecordjoe:

Points worth considering re: the Kony debate…

rtnt:

RTNT On The Problems With KONY 2012

The deluge of social media attention that has been given to the simplistic KONY 2012 campaign and the surrounding haze of misinformation has reaffirmed our purpose at Read This, Not That. Joseph Kony is a warlord and a monster - this much cannot be denied. The present controversy swirls not around Kony himself, but rather around the substance of the campaign, and the intentions of the organization behind it: Invisible Children.

Conversations are raging across the web between supporters and detractors - conversations that suffer, in many instances, from a lack of understanding about the current state of Uganda and of Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (details of which are notably lacking from the film.)

There has been much resistance to criticism of the campaign, resistance founded in knee-jerk reactions meant to defend the perceived good intentions of Invisible Children. The appearance of a noble cause to mask questionable action is not anomalous in our world. As such, it is our responsibility to be skeptical, especially when engaged with propagandistic media that aims to affect us emotionally and prompt a very specific reaction: in this case, to give money to Invisible Children.

Our effort here is to offer articles that inform the debate surrounding KONY 2012 and to encourage everyone to embrace critical conversation, even when that gaze is directed at what appear to be good intentions. Things are rarely as simple as they are made out to be, and we can be sure that the state of Uganda and the LRA is not as simple as the KONY 2012 campaign makes it seem.

Michael Wilkerson, writing for Foreign Policy, asks what the video is meant to accomplish:

So the goal is to make sure that President Obama doesn’t withdraw the advisors he deployed until Kony is captured or killed. That seems noble enough, except that there has been no mention by the government of withdrawing those forces — at least any I can find. Does anyone else have any evidence about this urgent threat of cancellation? One that justifies such a massive production campaign and surely lucrative donation drive?

TMS Ruge, writing for Project Diaspora, pleads with us to respect the agency of Ugandans:

This IC campaign is a perfect example of how fund-sucking NGO’s survive…They are, in actuality, selling themselves as the issue, as the subject, as the panacea for everything that ails me as the agency-devoid African. All I have to do is show up in my broken English, look pathetic and wanting. You, my dear social media savvy click-activist, will shed a tear, exhaust Facebook’s like button, mobilize your cadre of equally ill-uninformed netizens to throw money at the problem.

Ugandan Journalist Angelo Izama, writing at This Is Africa, finds KONY 2012’s portrayal of Uganda outdated:

To call the campaign a misrepresentation is an understatement. While it draws attention to the fact that Kony, indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court in 2005, is still on the loose, it’s portrayal of his alleged crimes in Northern Uganda are from a bygone era.

Musa Okwanga, writing for The Independent, discusses the complexities the video left out:

What the narrator also failed to do was mention to his son that when a bad guy like Kony is running riot for years on end, raping and slashing and seizing and shooting, then there is most likely another host of bad guys out there letting him get on with it.  He probably should have told him that, too.

Guy Gunartne, writing for Codoc, questions the wisdom of Invisible Children’s preferred policy of military intervention:

The LRA is reported to be 90% made up of abducted children – military defeat would mean engaging in combat and targeting of the very victims of this war; these children are the LRA.

The author of Visible Children examines the armies on the other side of the war:

Both the Ugandan army and Sudan People’s Liberation Army are riddled with accusations of rape and looting, but Invisible Children defends them, arguing that the Ugandan army is “better equipped than that of any of the other affected countries”, although Kony is no longer active in Uganda and hasn’t been since 2006 by their own admission.

Glenna Gordon, who took the photograph above, takes issue with the filmmakers’ self-aggrandizement in this interview for The Washington Post:

People who have lived there for years, bona fide aid workers who have studied foreign policy and other relevant fields like public health, who are really there because they are trying to solve problems — they see Invisible Children as trying to promote themselves and a version of the narrative. 

Eric Ritskes, writing at Wanderings, reminds us that it is not about us:

It falls into the trap, the belief that the problem is ignorance and the answer is education. When we tell more people about Kony and the LRA, something WILL happen. It’s not true…More education does not change the systems and structures of oppression, those that need Africa to be the place of suffering and war and saving…We need to learn: It’s not about us.

Patrick Wegner, writing at Justice in Conflict, offers some final thoughts:

To conclude, the Kony 2012 campaign is a reminder why we should see advocacy campaigns to interfere in conflicts with some scepticism, no matter how good the cause…. It also challenges us to think of ways how to design advocacy campaigns that mobilise many people without dumbing down the problem and its purported solution.

We put in a lot of work reading, reviewing, compiling, and excerpting these pieces for you, and hope you will consider them in this debate.

 - The RTNT Team

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