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.