Young Citizens to Congress: End Africa’s Longest-Running War

Press release,
By Lisa Dougan,Invisible Children, Inc.

SAN DIEGO – Nov. 17, 2009 | On November 18, hundreds of young people from across the nation will converge on their congressional representatives’ offices with one goal: to call for support of the LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act. 

The event, tagged the “Hometown Shakedown” by organizers, will effectively pressure members of Congress to throw their names behind an international effort to stop a rash of child abductions and killings in central Africa orchestrated by one man.

The man is Joseph Kony, and his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has cast a blanket of fear across east Africa for more than 23 years. As many as 30,000 children have been abducted by the rebel group to serve as soldiers and sex slaves, and in the past year alone LRA fighters have killed over 1,200 people and displaced hundreds of thousands more, making it one of the deadliest conflicts in the world.
 
Even so, says nonprofit Invisible Children’s founder Jason Russell, no US President has ever gone on record to address the problem, and no US Administration has ever put together a comprehensive plan to stop the rebel violence. It is this silence from Washington that Invisible Children, along with advocacy group Resolve Uganda, strives to break by orchestrating the November 18 event. 

John Prendergast of the Enough Project and former director of African Affairs at the National Security Council credits a young generation of activists with constructing and leading the movement of those who oppose child soldier recruitment in LRA-affected areas.  “Politicians will ignore this movement at their own peril,” Prendergast says.

In the case that politicians do listen and pass the bill, the landmark bipartisan legislation will require the Obama Administration to develop a strategy to stop LRA violence. To be effective, such a strategy should include multilateral efforts to apprehend Joseph Kony, rescue the child soldiers he holds captive, and support the war-affected communities as they rebuild their lives and lay a foundation for lasting peace.

The Hometown Shakedown was fashioned after a June 2009 event that drew nearly 2,000 young activists to Washington, D.C., directly resulting in dozens of new co-sponsors to the bill. Still, pressure is urgently needed to influence key members of Congress, leading up to a vote early next week in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where the bill currently sits.

Supporters of the cause in the Boston area will be meeting with a staffer from Senator Kerry’s district office to discuss this neglected humanitarian emergency and to voice their support of the LRA Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, lead prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC) – and whose 2005 indictment of Kony was the first of its kind – has been a substantial supporter of Invisible Children and its ability to inspire youth to use their power to resolve the conflict.
 
“When I went to Washington [in June], I saw exactly that this is my dream,” said Moreno-Ocampo. “There were hundreds of young people from all over the US thinking about and working for children in Uganda.”

For more information, visit www.invisiblechildren.com

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