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by Staff Writers Washington (AFP) March 9, 2012 A former child soldier at the heart of a viral campaign to bring accused Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony to justice said Friday he backed the video and urged people to watch it. "It's a hard movie," Jacob Acaye told ABC News about the 30-minute video that has garnered nearly 58 million viewers since Monday. "It brought back some memories... I still don't know when will it end. The more time is ticking, the more people are dying. The more people are still suffering. The more people (are) being abducted." The hashtag "#stopkony," about the fugitive head of the Lord's Resistance Army rebel group, has also surged on Twitter. The White House has praised the campaign, while a string of celebrities have weighed in by tweeting links to the emotional video, "Kony2012," and promoting the initiative by California-based non-profit group Invisible Children. In the film, Acaye -- appearing as a 13-year-old boy -- said he wants to die even though he's not with the LRA so that he could be reunited with his slain brother. At the age of 11, he was among 41 youths taken from a Ugandan village by Kony. "No one is taking care of us," he says in the video. "We are not going to school." Now 21, Acaye is studying to become a lawyer at Uganda's Makerere University, a wish he had described in the video. At the time the film was shot, "I was like really, really invisible -- like real meaning of invisible children," he said. "We are like the children who are not seen. Children who are not even knowing that they are suffering." Acaye expressed support for the video, saying it was helping make people aware of Kony and his crimes. "If they know and they have seen and they could learn that Kony is still being the same in that movie, they can think about what to do," he said. "And they can think about what they can do." Born in 1988 from the frustrations against the government of Uganda's marginalized Acholi ethnic group, the LRA has since dropped its national political agenda for the narrow objective of pillage and plunder. Kony, whose movement draws on messianic beliefs and a smattering of Christian motifs, is wanted by the International Criminal Court. The rebels currently number several hundred, a fraction of their strength at their peak but still include a core of hardened fighters infamous for mutilating civilians and abducting children to act as soldiers and sex-slaves.
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