Oklahoma residents, including several OU students, slept outside Sen. Tom Coburn’s office building in Oklahoma City demanding he change his stance and support the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act.
Coburn, R-Oklahoma, changed his official statement and announced his support for this legislation March 9, after protesters slept in the street for 11 days.
People protested, showed their determination for a single, well-defined goal and worked for exactly that. Unfortunately, if this bill was to pass and President Barack Obama was to sign this legislation, no significant change would occur.
The bill is aimed at stopping the LRA under the leadership of Joseph Kony. This army has been on a murderous campaign of child abductions through southern Sudan before moving to Uganda and, more recently, into the northeastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Central African Republic.
The LRA became well known in the United States largely due to the documentary “Invisible Children,” which showed its effects on a community in Uganda.
However, this bill’s methods are questionable. The bill claims to use “political, economic, military and intelligence” resources to rout the LRA and rebuild the destruction caused by the militant group. But this bill doesn’t appropriate adequate resources to the cause; the greatest expense is $40 million to the Air Force and no other branches of the military.
Consider the options for regional support: southern Sudan, which is occupied with the genocidal northern Sudan; Democratic Republic of the Congo with its near dozen ongoing civil wars (or regional disputes); Central African Republic which is 178th out of 179 on the UN’s Human Development Index and Burundi with its scant 40,000 standing army, which is currently occupied preventing the Hutu-Tutsi conflicts from escalating. It would be morally reprehensible to demand these nations realign these noble priorities.
That leaves Rwanda and Uganda, two nations already working together without Obama stepping in. Rwanda recently agreed to share information with the Democratic Republic of the Congo and has stepped up its border guards in response to the potential threat of the LRA. With the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s permission, Uganda has crossed the border and attacked the LRA denying them sanctuary. There is little we could do beyond advocate status quo, which makes this legislation little more than a cheap attempt to take credit for something that is already happening.
One thing this bill does that isn’t already happening is give Obama $10 million to aid civilians harmed by the LRA, but it doesn’t say how. The bill’s authors — Sens. Russ Feingold, D-Wisconsin, and Sam Brownback, R-Kansas — obviously can’t figure it out; if they could they would have indicated methods in the bill. So they’re dumping it on Obama.
But what’s even more upsetting is they only allocated $10 million to help more than 2 million Ugandans, tens of thousands Central African Republic citizens and more than 160 thousand Democratic Republic of the Congo civilians displaced by this conflict, to rehabilitate 66,000 child soldiers and the families of those killed. Offering less than $5 a person is nice, but it’s little more than pretending to solve the problem.
This bill designates an additional $10 million to create a body to study the history of the conflict, study the conflict itself and attempt to gain as much knowledge as possible.
It would be wrongheaded to fault the protesters for not understanding this impotent legislation. But protesting in favor of legislation you don’t understand — or legislation that won’t do anything to solve the problem — is a mistake. If a bill is to be supported or opposed, make sure it’s going to effect actual change. Don’t just support a senator’s legislation because it’s on a topic you care about. Make sure it does something rather than glad-hand your support.
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borenismyhomie 2 years, 1 month ago
This is kind of tacky?