Saren Oliver, Bit Kernodle and the rest of the Invisible Children team are on a mission: to spread the word about Uganda’s child soldiers and their solution to the problem across Canada.
 
They are on a cross-country tour speaking at schools, churches and community centres about the issue, and their bill in the United States congress calling for the arrest and detainment of Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony.
 
The LRA is a guerilla military group responsible for the abduction of Ugandan children.
 
Oliver and Kernodle stopped at Carleton Oct. 19 to screen the charity’s newest documentary on the issue, The Rescue, and participated in a panel with Carleton professors Chris Brown and Daniel Osabu-Kle.
 
During the discussion, one person in the audience was especially moved to share their own view of the crisis.
 
First-year political science and human rights student William Anqok Reech said he had been one of more than 27,000 “lost boys” of Sudan who were displaced or orphaned during the second Sudanese Civil War.
 
He said he had travelled to Uganda before coming to Canada in 2000. He said he’d witnessed first hand the atrocities the LRA committed, including the burning of schools built by aid workers. He gave the grim assessment that there can be no progress in Uganda until there is peace.
 
Oliver said they brought the documentary to Canada because they want the effort to apprehend Kony to be an international one.
 
“We have a bill in the U.S. congress asking that President [Barack] Obama start a multinational effort to apprehend Kony. We’re here to drum up support across North America,” Oliver said.
 
Their charity, Invisible Children, started after three young filmmakers on a backpacking trip across Africa stumbled across the conflict in Uganda and the use of child soldiers. It was then they decided to document the tragedy in their first documentary called Invisible Children.
 
They followed this documentary by forming a charity and building schools in the area, and making a second documentary on what is now Africa’s longest-running war.
 
While there have been many efforts to make peace with Kony and the LRA, none have been successful.
Brown said the reason Kony hasn’t surrendered is because he hasn’t yet been given terms of amnesty that he can agree to.
 
On Oct. 6, 2005, the International Criminal Court announced it had a warrant out for Kony’s arrest.
 
Osabu-Kle argued this might be part of the reason Kony has not surrendered, saying it might be better off to bribe Kony.