LRA - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

• The 2006 James Bond film Casino Royale features the Lord's Resistance Army, which is being financed by Le Chiffre via Quantum. Later in the film, when Le Chiffre fails to pay the LRA, one of its lieutenants, Steven Obanno, arrives to threaten and intimidate him, giving him a deadline by which to win it in a high-stakes poker game, before being dispatched by Bond in a fight to the death thereafter.
• The 2006 documentary film Invisible Children centres around a group of Ugandan children who walk several miles every night to places of refuge in order to avoid abduction by the LRA.
• The 2007 documentary film War/Dance chronicled three months in the lives of three Acholi child refugees living in an IDP camp in northern Uganda.
• The music video for the 2007 Fall Out Boy single I'm Like a Lawyer with the Way I'm Always Trying to Get You Off (Me & You) is set in northern Uganda and focuses on the lives of two children who fall in love and work hard to be able to go to school. The boy is taken by the LRA, but manages to escape and return home.
• Sharon E. McKay's 2008 novel War Brothers is a young adult novel set in Uganda about children forced into the LRA.
• The 2010 documentary film Children of War follows the journey of a group of former LRA child soldiers as they undergo a process of trauma therapy and emotional healing while in a rehabilitation center.
• The 2011 feature film Machine Gun Preacher is the story of Sam Childers, a biker preacher engaged in a struggle in collaboration with the SPLA against the raids of the LRA in South Sudan.
• The 2012 book The Night Wanderers by Polish journalist Wojciech Jagielski chronicles the story of Joseph Kony and the child warriors in the Lord’s Resistance Army. Jagielski focuses on the plight of the children who are trying to reintegrate themselves back into society after their coerced roles as guerrilla fighters in the Lord's Resistance Army.
• On 5 March 2012, Invisible Children, Inc. released the controversial Kony 2012 in an attempt to garner attention in the United States to have Kony arrested by December.
• On 14 October 2011, political commentator Rush Limbaugh questioned the U.S. move against the LRA, declaring that the "Lord's Resistance Army are Christians. They are fighting the Muslims in Sudan. And Obama has sent troops, United States troops to remove them from the battlefield, which means kill them...So that’s a new war, a hundred troops to wipe out Christians in Sudan, Uganda..." Later in the show, after a break, Limbaugh apparently equivocated: "Is that right? The Lord's Resistance Army is being accused of really bad stuff? Child kidnapping, torture, murder, that kind of stuff? Well, we just found out about this today. We're gonna do, of course, our due diligence research on it. But nevertheless we got a hundred troops being sent over there to fight these guys -- and they claim to be Christians."

In October 2011 broadcaster Al Jazeera English broadcast 'Mato Oput' (Bitter Root) a documentary following 2 LRA Senior Commanders who kidnapped as children are now living back within the communities they had created havoc within. The film follows Sunday Otto and Richard Odong as they seek forgiveness and reparation for their crimes from their Acholi King and elders. Directed and Produced by Australian filmmaker Kerry Negara. http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/witness/2011/10/20111012152024670219.html