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Published: April 5th 2009
It is difficult to comprehend that thirty-five thousand chidren have been abducted in the past 20 years in Northern Uganda. The United Nations has described Northern Uganda as the most dangerous place in the wrold for children to live and one of the worlds most unattended emergencies. Amazing, isnt it thát we know so little about this horrendous situation. The children have been abducted by the Lords Resistance Army, LRA who have been at war with the Ugandan Army for the last 2 decades. Joseph Kony is the leader of the LRA and a witchdoctor who uses demonic tactics to ensure that these children remain in his power. Abducted children are forced to participate in the killing of other children - or to be killed themsevles. The children are trained to raid villages for food, destory property, rape and slaughter civilains and abduct other children. Children also witness their parents being killed, and undergo horrible iniation rituals.
Another blogger(DJChurch, Canada) has provided a succint and informative history of the LRA which i have taken the liberty of copying, in case you are interested.
After the overthrow of Tito Okello by the NRM forces led by Yoweri Moseveni in 1986, Uganda was thrown into chaos. Okello had been an ethnic Acholi from northern Uganda, and the Acholi dominated military had been harsh in their treatment of the insurgency and the areas associated with it. After the rebellion, many from this region began to fear (and at times with good reason), a backlash against the north and the Acholi people. A number of groups were formed to resist this new government in Kampala. The most successful, making it all the way to Jinja before being defeated, was the Holy Spirit Movement headed by Alice Lakwena. Lakwena (the name of her advising spirit - a dead Italian army officer) anointed her troops with shea butter, telling them it would cause bullets to bounce off them. This group did remarkably well against the new government, coming within 60 miles of Kampala before the army decisively showed that shea butter was not match against artillery and machine guns.
After the demise of the Holy Spirit Movement, any number of groups attempted to step into the void of northern resistance. One group and leader soon dominated - the Lord's Resistance Army (the LRA) and Joseph Kony. Kony, a relative of Alice Lakwena, claimed to have inherited the same spiritual gifts as Lakwena including the guiding voices that motivated the other. He promised to resist the south-dominated government, and to purify the Alcholi people. His guiding principles were a strange blend of spiritualism, a fundamentalist version of Christianity (especially a bizarre interpretation of the 10 Commandments), traditional Alcholi beliefs, and increasingly Islam.
The LRA soon established a reputation for brutality, with most of their attacks targeting civilian, not military targets. The LRA has generally not been an army that recruits. Instead they have kidnapped thousands of civilians, almost exclusively Alcholi and most frequently children, pressing them into service as servants, wives, and soldiers. The experiences of these children are staggeringly brutal and cruel. Beatings, killings, and other forms of torture are commonplace. Some have been forced to kill other abductees as object lessons, sometime using only their teeth or clubs. Reports of children having to watch, or even kill, their own families have been reported, in some instances, the children being forced to eat the boiled flesh of their own parents. These stories are horrible and heart rending. I encourage you to read more to educate yourself. I have a Danish friend, Theo, who has been interviewing former child soldiers and abductees in northern Uganda. Follow this link to read the story of one child soldier "Norman" - http://filmforchange.vox.com/library/post/monkey-adventures. html. Sadly, this is one of thousands of similar stories. I also encourage you to read "Scars of Death", a report on child abductees' stories by Human Rights Watch written in 1997. It can be found at http://www.hrw.org/reports97/uganda/.
Despite the targeting of civilians and the terrible atrocities wrought by the LRA, there has been a reluctance to resist the LRA or cooperate with the Ugandan government by many Alcholi in the north. Many Alcholi see a massacre of LRA by government forces to be a massacre of victims, as most of their soldiers are (or were) children abducted from villages and towns in the north. The moral complexity of this is agonizing, as it is clear that many of these victimized children are the ones now doing much of the atrocities the LRA are accused of committing. There is still a strong resentment towards the Kampala government of Museveni as well, which is seen as very anti-Alcholi, and is yet another complication in resisting the LRA. The LRA, for their part, has been very good at avoiding being drawn into direct confrontations with the brunt of Uganda's forces. Kony and his forces have migrated between Southern Sudan (where they have reportedly been supported by the government of Khartoum because they engaged in conflict with the Southern Sudanese rebel group the SPLA), northern Ugandan, the Congo, and even some reports of being in the Central African Republic.
As a result of this conflict, now approaching 20 years, hundreds of thousands of people have fled their villages and towns in fear of their lives. For years now, these people have been living in IDP camps (Internally Displaced People). These camps can have tens of thousands of inhabitants, living in crowded, dirty, desperately poor circumstances. While initially set up for increased security, there have been hundreds of reports of LRA attacks, crime, even incidents where it is claimed the UDF, the ones charged with protecting the inhabitants, have been the perpetrators. Food is scarce, with much of the population of these camps relying on meagre government handouts and assistance from the World Food Programme. It is painfully clear that without the assistance of the World Food Programme, there would be massive malnutrition and deaths. The WFP announced this past winter that it was running out of money and unless it received an injection from outside sources, it would have to cut back on already dangerously low levels of calories per person.
Djchurch, canada
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Jill
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Thanks sister
Hi Lis Got on to your blog to make sure I could view it before you left. Thanks for the info, its amazing that there is so little written and known about what goes on in Northern Uganda, particularly in Australia, where I think there are not many Ugandan refugees. I read about Empower as well. Have you and Fiona both done the training already?