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.