Childsoldiers

Uganda, once called the ‘Pearl of Africa’, is situated in the geographical heart of Africa. The country borders on Kenya, Sudan, Congo and Rwanda. It has 24 million inhabitants. About one third of the population is Catholic, one third is Protestant and one third is Muslim.

In 1962, Uganda was declared independent of Great-Britain. Since then, the country has known bloody terror and wars under Milton Obote and Idi Amin. Especially the illiterate Amin, who had his opponents murdered and performed rituals on their bodies, gave Uganda a bad reputation. The number of victims of Amin’s nine-year reign of terror is estimated at 300,000.

But Idi Amin’s departure in 1979 did not mean the end of violence. His successor, Milton Obote, who had to deal with armed resistance, reacted with massive purges, during which an estimated 500,000 people lost their lives. Uganda only knew stability when Yoweri Museveni took power in 1986.

President Museveni, who was re-elected for five years in 2001, assured the reconstruction of the country, an economic growth of 7 percent a year, free primary education and a good system of basic health service. Museveni’s most remarkable accomplishments are his successful campaign against AIDS, his plea for women’s liberation and his radical system of decentralization. Uganda became one of the first countries to enjoy the debt cancellation by the Worldbank and the IMF. It is also one of the only countries in Africa where poverty is systematically being reduced.

But there is also critisism on Museveni’s policy. The generally spread corruption, his military intervention in Congo and his attempts to be elected for a third term by means of a constitutional amendment, were heavily criticized domestically and abroad. The donors are not satisfied with Museveni’s attacks on unfair worldtrade and protectionism in the West.

But especially the long-lasting war in Northern Uganda is a slur on Museveni’s presidency.Rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army, consisting of commanders from Amin’s en Obote’s regime, have been putting up a fight for seventeen years now. The illiterate rebel leader Joseph Kony, a religious zealot who stands midway between a sect leader and a guerrilla fighter, wants to overthrow Museveni’s government and lead the country according to the Biblical Ten Commandments.

With this in mind, he kills civilians, particularly of his own Acholi-tribe, whom he suspects of sympathizing with the government, and he abducts thousands of children, who have to make his army big and strong. Kony is supported by neighbouring country Sudan. This way, they can get back at Museveni, who supports the Christian rebels of Southern Sudan in their war against the Muslim-fundamentalist government.
More than one hundred thousand people have already been killed in the war in Northern Uganda. Over one and a half million civilians are on the run and live in refugee camps.

During the past years, more than thirty thousand children, aged 5 and over, were abducted from their houses and schools by armed rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army. The abductions often go hand in hand with cruelties. Children that are crying for their parents, have to watch how their father or mother is beaten to death or burnt alive. Some are forced to kill their own parents.

The abducted children are tied together with ropes and forced to carry heavy loads on their heads – bags of sugar, cases of soda or ammunition. They have to walk for hours and days at an inhuman pace. Children that cannot keep up or have swollen feet, are beaten to death while they’re on the road: the rebels do not have permanent camps in Uganda, so they cannot imprison the children anywhere. Letting them live would mean that the children can pass on information to the government army.

Children trying to escape are butchered in front of the other children. They are stabbed to death with knives, kicked or beaten to death with sticks, machetes, axes, rakes or stones. A few children are selected to execute these murders. This ritual is performed to turn the abducted children into accessories and to put them off. ‘This destiny awaits every one of you who tries to escape’, the commanders warn.

Most children end up in one of the LRA camps in Sudan, where they are trained to be soldiers. They learn how to march, to take apart and reassemble guns, to shoot and they are taught combat techniques. Children that escape the rebel army testify that they also learned how to lay mines and how to handle arms with which they could take down air planes and blow up tanks. Even the youngest ones know the names of very sophisticated and heavy weapons: SMG, LMG, RPG, B10, SAM and SPG9. The ‘intelligent’ children get additional training in espionage, communication and gathering information by the Sudanese government army in Juba.

After that, the children are sent to battle. They have to fight the Ugandan government army. In the past, they were also used by the Sudanese government to fight the rebels in Southern Sudan, the SPLA. The children are positioned in the frontline. They are not allowed to take cover and are ordered to keep on shooting. The ones that take cover or run away from battle, risk a bullet from their own commander. The children believe that rubbing oils and talismans will protect them from bullets. In every fight children are killed.

In addition to fighting, the children also have to ransack villages, steal food and abduct other children. People that resist or are suspected of sympathizing with the government, are brutally killed. They are beheaded, burnt alive or mutilated by cutting off lips, ears or legs. The abducted children have to take part in these mass murders, sometimes on their own fellow-villagers. Some of our sponsored children told us they had to rub their bodies with the brains of their victim or sit on the body and eat their food with the victim’s blood on their hands. The purpose is to bind the children to the rebel army for good by making them believe they would never be able to go back home, where the revenge of the population and the government army awaits them.

The LRA children are exposed to the worst possible deprivations. They are permanently starving and thirsty. Mortality because of malnutrition and dehydration is high, particularly in Sudan. Many survived by drinking their own urine or by eating leaves, roots and insects, which gave them diarrhoea. Others died of cholera, which struck the camps regularly, and malaria.

Thirty percent of the abducted children are girls. From the age of twelve, they are given to the commanders as wives, or rather sex slaves. They are systematically raped with the intention of making them pregnant. Over two thousand children were born in the Lord’s Resistance Army. Kony considers them to be the only, pure ‘Acholi’ and the new generation of child soldiers. His ultimate goal is to make his children’s army so large and strong that, one day, it will be able to overthrow the government.