Ugandan Child Soldiers
There are many people who think that the use of children as soldiers is very wrong. Most would agree with this group, that capturing and using innocent children is cruel, inhuman, and not right. There are those, who are few in number that would disagree, and are utilizing the children, taking them and putting them in their army to be used as a part of their forces. One major location that this is happening is in northern Uganda, just south of Sudan, and east of Kenya. The force that is capturing and desensitizing many young children into killing others is called “The Lord’s Resistance Army.” They are named this because they think that they are doing God’s will in killing the so called “evil corruption” of the Ugandan government. They believe that it is their right, that in any way possible, to rid the country of this evil.
The Lord’s Resistance Army (L.R.A.) came about when the former president, Yoweri Museveni, came to power in 1986. The L.R.A. is located in the north and central-east parts of the country. “It is led by Joseph Kony., a charismatic and malignant dictator who has no ideology other than periodic fuzzy statements about ruling the country by the Ten Commandments.” Like stated before, they run off of the belief that they are going to rule the country by God’s will and the Ten Commandments. They will kill innocent people because they think that they are not following God’s will. They have been now to loot villages and burn them to the ground, locking those in the house and burning the house. They have also been known to shoot buses, pillage health clinics and take the medicine, kill all the nurses and patients, and raid high schools, killing or abducting all those in the school.
One place where the taking over by these rebel forces has become a big problem is in a place called Adjumani, Uganda. . It is in North West Uganda, ten miles east of the Nile River, and twenty five miles south of the border of Sudan. One place in the town called the Redeemer Orphanage has been attacked more than one time and has become a problem. The problem is that there has been only one sighting that the children were actually being taken away. This sighting was in June of 2003. The army snuck through the tall grasses around the building. They first woke Father Zachary. Father was shot and beaten and then forced at gun point to walk to the orphanage and open it up. One of the nuns sleeping with the children, heard the noise and came to the door pleading for the children, but the abductors forced her back, and then went into orphanage. The men gathered together the children, ranging from the ages of seven and eighteen; nine of them being girls. The L.R.A. forces arranged the children in a single file line and had them walk out the building. After this happened, one of the nuns called “a local contingent of the Ugandan army, placed there by the government for the town’s protection. They arrived hours later.” This is one main problem with the protection against the L.R.A. The protections made by the Ugandan government do not respond quickly enough for anything to happen. When people are forced at gunpoint, they cannot fight back because they do not have a gun or cannot call for help. By the time they do call for help, it is too late and the children have already been taken away.
The number of children that the L.R.A. has abducted is now up to around 20,000, this does not include those killed by the abductions or the abductees. Many say that the number of people killed is just over 30,000, but many believe that it is more. The boys are made to kill, while the girls are given to the commanders and leaders as sex slaves. Once the boys are abducted, they are immediately given guns and are forced to kill people, or be killed themselves. Most are forced to plunge their own villages and kill their relatives because then they will have no place to return too. After about three months of this lifestyle, they lose their old way of life and lose track of their own personal life. Most children after these few months do not even remember their own real name, but only the names given them by the leaders of the L.R.A. They do not know any lifestyle except brutality.
About one tenth of all children escape from the army because they are either too scared to run away or have no reason to run away. Those who do escape usually have no place to go and either found dead or recaptured by the Lord’s Resistance Army. Many of the girls are found with sexually transmitted diseases and die because of them. Only about one in ten children are actually found by people and are rescued and only about one fifth of those that are found can reconvert to their old way of living, being civil and not killing everyone like before they were captured.
A serious problem that was not allowing the Ugandan Army to stop the L.R.A. early on was that the Sudan government was supplying the L.R.A. with weapons. The Sudan government was doing this to ensure the safety of their own people. The L.R.A. had threatened to attack those in Sudan if they did not supply them with weapons. The Uganda government did not support Sudan and saw them as a one with the L.R.A. Many believe that if the Sudan government had not supplied them with so much weaponry and ammunition that the L.R.A. could have been put down already or at least it would have not grown to the size it is now.
In May of last year, a conference held that involved many abducted children that had escaped. Some of the children told stories including one fourteen year old girl who was nine months pregnant. She said that “she is ready to forgive the rebels who killed her parents and abducted her brother.” She also encouraged children to run away and take advantage of the free education that the government is providing. Another speaker was Irene Lakot, who was pregnant when she was abducted and escaped, who urged the L.R.A. to take the peace talks between them and the Ugandan government seriously and to end this absurd rebellion. The biggest know group in these peace talks is the UNICEF which is the United Nations Children’s Fund, which has supported the Ugandan government with weapons and money to help control and put down the rebels. In 2005 they reported that more than one fifth of children in the northern region of Uganda have lost at least one of the parents, if not both.
The L.R.A. has once again traveled back up into the mountains after being forced out in 2002 and earlier before in the 1990s. The Uganda government in 2002 said “It will take its elite forces several weeks or more to get the child-fighters down from the hills. But this time, it is determined to finish the job. Even those rebels who have fled north of the” red line”, beyond which Uganda’s troops may not go, must be captured or killed.” In 2002 the forces did manage to remove the presence of the L.R.A. in the mountains, but only for a short time of three years because they reclaimed the hills in 2005 and are still roaming there today.
Here are some good sites about this topic
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1226297,00.html
http://www.un.org/events/tenstories_2006/story.asp?storyID=100
This is a good movie on youtube that is really shows itself with the images it uses
http://youtube.com/watch?v=3VqJfl9PI-0
questions about anything??? email me at: rtb.1991@yahoo.com