Our organisation has also been launching sensitization campaigns in Uganda and actively fights the use and abuse of child soldiers. It actively campaigns for for the release of all abducted children in northern Uganda.
For the last couple of months, we have been training hundreds of teachers in the districts of Gulu, Lira and Apac: teachers now realize how to handle these traumatized children. Thus, we try to stimulate schools to accept these former child soldiers.
We sensitise the population in northern Uganda concerning the fate of the abducted children and plead for understanding and reconciliation. These children are too often stigmatised, ostracized and even threatened. The boys are called ‘rebels’, the girls ‘one of Kony's wives’. In villages and refugee camps, where the climate is hostile towards returning children, our social workers go and talk to the village or camp leaders and organise meetings with the inhabitants.
Via the radio, the general public is alerted to the fact that these children were abducted and forced to commit atrocities. Three nights a week we have a radio programme called "karibu". During the programme our children witness about their abduction and the abuse they suffered in the rebel army. At regular intervals a jingle is broadcast on the radio. It is in English and in the local language Luo. It goes as follows:
All children are equal
All people who were abducted remain our relatives and friends. Whether they return alive or dead, they are part of us.
They did not request to be abducted and neither did they want to remain in the bush.
Probably we would have been abducted too if we had been with them on that day.
So, please, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, let us receive them and live with them without fear or favour. They are the ones who lived with us and we missed them a lot.
During the actual radio programme, the children call on their friends and commanders in the rebel army to surrender and to accept the government's amnesty law. As a consequence, more than sixty LRA commanders have returned since May 2004, with at least five hundred abducted children.
Finally, some of our volunteers give lectures on the topic of childsoldiers in schools, parishes and service – clubs in Belgium and the Netherlands. They devote themselves to the application of the Child Soldiers Protocol and plead for the end of the abductions in northern Uganda and the release of all abducted children.
Our NGO submitted three resolutions before the European Parliament. All of our resolutions were unanimously approved. Some of our volunteers visited Sudan, which lends support to Joseph Kony, and insisted on collaborating on the release and repatriation of the abducted children during a personal meeting with president Bashir.
In conclusion, our NGO brought a few former child soldiers to Belgium. In November 2001, Christine Akello visited the European Parliament and talked to members of the Belgian government. In March 2002, the seriously injured Patrick Odong was taken to Belgium and operated there. As a result of a documentary by Belgian journalist, Goedele Liekens, Betty Ejang, who was a sex slave of Joseph Kony, travelled to Belgium in January 2005.