 The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) , led by Joseph Kony, operated in the north from bases in southern Sudan . The LRA committed numerous abuses and atrocities, including the abduction, rape, maiming, and killing of civilians, including children. In addition to destabilising northern Uganda from bases in Sudan , the LRA congregated in the Bunia area in eastern Congo . They linked up with the Army for the Liberation of Rwanda (ALIR) and other rebel groups battling with forces from the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD)
The Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) , led by Joseph Kony, operated in the north from bases in southern Sudan . The LRA committed numerous abuses and atrocities, including the abduction, rape, maiming, and killing of civilians, including children. In addition to destabilising northern Uganda from bases in Sudan , the LRA congregated in the Bunia area in eastern Congo . They linked up with the Army for the Liberation of Rwanda (ALIR) and other rebel groups battling with forces from the Rally for Congolese Democracy (RCD)
With an armed rebellion threatening to undermine Uganda's progress to economic development, child soldiers emerge as central figures amid deadly violence and growing humanitarian emergency.
The bustling capital city of Kampala, located in the south, exemplifies Uganda's transformation from a country plagued by economic decay to prosperity. With a revitalized GDP growth of more than 8% over the past three years, Uganda comes across as a compelling story of hope for other African nations. However, an armed insurgency in northern and eastern Uganda has created one of Africa's largest displaced populations.
The 18-year old rebellion of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) against the government has forced over 1.6 million Ugandans - half of them children - to flee to squalid and overcrowded camps in order to escape wanton attacks and killings. The number of internally displaced persons has almost tripled since 2002. Attacks on soft civilian targets continue, carried out by child soldiers much younger than their victims.
The most disturbing aspect of this humanitarian crisis is the fact that this is a war fought by children on children - minors make up almost 90% of the LRA's soldiers. Some recruits are as young as eight and are inducted through raids on villages. They are brutalized and forced to commit atrocities on fellow abductees and even siblings. Those who attempt to escape are killed. For those living in a state of constant fear, violence becomes a way of life and the psychological trauma is incalculable. Fearing abduction, streams of children, often with mothers in tow, leave their homes every night and walk for hours from surrounding villages to reach the relative safety of major towns, only to trek their way home in the first light. Some 40,000 “night commuters” sleep under verandas, in schools, hospital courtyards or bus parking places to evade the snare of the LRA.
Since the rebellion began in the 1980s, some 30,000 children have been abducted to work as child soldiers and porters, or to serve as “wives” of rebels and bear their children. These numbers have soared, with 10,000 children abducted in the past 18 months alone.
Despite the gravity of the humanitarian situation, less than 10% of the $130 million requested by the humanitarian community for 2004 has been received. In some areas, malnutrition rates as high as 30% have been recorded among children. Fear of rebel attacks badly hit the planting season for 2004, threatening to aggravate the already severe food shortages in the coming months. Health facilities barely function as stocks run out and health workers flee to escape LRA attacks.
Even as a peace process makes significant progress in neighbouring Sudan, the peace in Uganda is made tenuous by these developments. The “success story” that Uganda represents in the minds of the world's economic policy makers presents a jarring contrast with the tragedy of conflict in the north and east that shows no signs of abating.
 KAMPALA, Uganda, 16 February 2005 - Many former child soldiers in Uganda who have been freed from the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) have been drawn again into armed conflict – this time with the national army.
"UNICEF urges all authorities involved to screen out children in its own ranks of military, as well as local militia. It is their responsibility to reject all underage recruits. This is a message that should be clearly communicated, from the highest level in the command structure and the highest level of government, to all involved in the mobilization of the recruits,” says UNICEF Communication Officer Chulho Hyun.
For the past 19 years, the Ugandan government has been fighting the rebel group known as Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a militia group that has commonly been abducting children during night time raids, and forcing them into combat and sexual servitude. UNICEF estimates that roughly 20,000 children have been abducted during the 19 year conflict, and as many as 12,000 children have been abducted since 2002.
“The association of children with fighting forces is in direct violation of international humanitarian laws, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and its Optional Protocol, which Uganda has ratified. Recruitment of children under age 18 into the military is specifically banned by the convention,” explains Mr. Hyun.
Many of the former child soldiers have no other job skills and working for the army is often seen as a lesser of two evils.
UNICEF believes those who were abducted into the LRA have already suffered enough and need comprehensive rehabilitation. “Any affiliation with the military will lead to additional suffering to the children,” says Mr. Hyun.
The former child soldiers need a chance to be reintegrated into the society. They need to find their families, return to school and have a normal life, which could take quite a long time. “We are advocating for a period of disconnect between the end of captivity, and a time when the individual can make an informed decision on a future course of action. Whether he or she will be with the military or not, that period of disconnect has to be maximized as much as possible,” says Mr. Hyun.
UNICEF says the recruitment of children under 18 may not be a systematic issue right now, but the agency is very much concerned about receiving continuous reports of child recruitment. “We certainly see this issue Requiring continued monitoring and advocacy,” says Mr. Hyun.
 'We are so tired with this war' says a 13-year-old
escapee, former fighter, and night commuter of
the 19-year during civil war.
Children of war in Uganda
13-year-old Patrick has seen more atrocities than
most adults will in a lifetime. He was forced to
kill his own mother and fight for Joseph Kony's
rebel army. He has since escaped and is now
one of the 'night commuters,' hoping to stay alive
to see each morning.
Dateline NBC
Child soldiers, sex slaves, and cannibalism at
gunpoint: the horrors of Uganda's north.
War, cannibalism, sex slavery and massacres were supposed to have been consigned to Uganda 's past. The country has been touted as one of Africa's success stories, combating Aids and bringing relative prosperity to Kampala . But away from the capital, a horrific civil war is claiming the lives of tens of thousands of children, the United Nations warned yesterday.
" Northern Uganda [is] the biggest neglected humanitarian crisis in the world," said Jan Egelund, the UN's under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs. "The situation is a moral outrage."
Few people outside Uganda know that in the north the government is fighting a fanatical and murderous cult - the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) - whose fighting force is made up in large part of abducted children. Up to 95 per cent of the population in these areas have been forced from their homes by the war. Nearly two million Ugandans, out of a population of 24.7 million, now live in refugee camps for fear of being attacked and killed in their villages.
Children have told how they had been forced by the rebels at gunpoint to abduct and murder other children and to drink their blood. A former commander of the rebel group explained that he had forced villagers to chop up, cook and eat their neighbours before he killed them, too.
The LRA is led by the self-proclaimed prophet Joseph Kony, who says he wants Uganda to live by the laws of the Ten Commandments. He and most of his fighters are from northern Uganda 's Acholi tribe, as are most of their victims. Mr Kony says he is guided by spirits who tell him what to do and whom to kill. The UN says he may have abducted more than 20,000 children, 90 per cent of LRA fighters.
In the camps, virtually everyone has a story to tell. Pamela Aber, 18, was abducted by the rebels in February and kept prisoner for five months before she escaped. Her job was to cook and gather firewood, while acting as a sex slave to the commander. This is the fate of most of the young women and girls abducted by the rebels, many of whom have children by their captors. Soon after being kidnapped, she had had to take part in the murder of a 14-year-old girl called Adok, who had been caught trying to escape. The other new captives in the group, 10 of them, were told "to bite that girl to death".
"We started biting her but she did not die. When we were biting her she was pleading to the rebels saying they should forgive her and that she would not escape again. She was bleeding all over but still she did not die. Then we were told to pinch her and she did not die. Later we were all told to beat her with a log, one after the other, until she died."
When asked what she felt when she was doing this, she said: "I was frightened, but we were told that if we did not kill they would kill us. So you had to pretend to be brave."
Richard Abonga, 12, had spent his time with them carrying heavy loads of stolen food. When another boy, aged 11, complained that he was tired, the rebels told him to put down his load and the other children were told to gather around him: "They started chopping off his feet with a hoe. One rebel, one foot each, and then his hands and then his eyelids were cut off with razor blades and then his arms tied behind his back. He was still conscious. Then they hung him up on a tree, hanging head down and we were told to box his head until he was dead."
Captain Vincent Okello Pakorom was 16 when he was captured by the LRA in 1991. He rose to become one of Mr Kony's bodyguards and described the leader as an "ordinary human being" but one who "had the power": the ability to foresee the future.
The cult leader seems friendly, he said, until the spirits begin to talk through him. When they speak, somebody in his entourage writes down what he says. "The most cruel spirit," Pakorom said, "is "Who Are You" - the Congolese spirit who "commands killings and massacres."
Ever since Uganda gained independence in 1962, its politics have been brutal. In more than 40 years, there has never been a peaceful transfer of power. During 1971 and 1979 it was ruled by the former British colonial sergeant Idi Amin who slaughtered tens of thousands.
Why has the rebellion gone on so long? Many Acholi believe that President Museveni underestimated the rebels. Others claim he is not unhappy to have a continuing low-level insurgency, because it keeps the Acholi occupied, hence they are not able to meddle in Kampala politics.
On condition of anonymity, many people gave a different explanation for the war. Aid workers said that too many people had too great a financial stake in the war to want it over quickly. The conflict is also tied to the crisis in Darfur across the border in Sudan . Khartoum has supported the LRA for its own reasons as Uganda has for years been backing the rebel SPLA in southern Sudan . The Sudanese government has armed the LRA, using it to fight the SPLA.
Dr Lawrence Ojom has been the director of St Joseph 's Hospital in Kitgum for 15 years and insists there is no end in sight. "This is the worst. It has never been this bad." Every evening St Joseph 's Hospital gives shelter to "night commuters", some of the 45,000 children who, because of their fear of abduction, stream into Gulu, Kitgum, and other towns every evening to sleep in the safety of the hospitals. Many agree that not only is military action required, so are the food and medicine that would save lives. For 2004, the UN has appealed for $112m (£61m) in aid, mostly for the World Food Programme for Northern Uganda .
When on April 10 1875, the explorer Henry Stanley translated the Ten Commandments to Mtesa, the King of Waganda, he could not possibly foresee that about one hundred years later, a brutal and ruthless rebel leader of the Lord's Resistence Army ( LRA), called Joseph Kony considering himself to be the resurrected Jesus, would impose these very Ten Commandments on millions of people in the North of Uganda. Kony's rule may have drafted as many at 32,000 children into his rebel army, dehumanizing them by forcing at gun point, the killing, chopping cooking and eating of their parents.
Jacob
Hope for Uganda 's Child Soldiers?
As he marched for days through the bush without food or water, armed with an AK-47 to loot and to kill, Bosco Ojok dared not dream of going home. Just 14 when he was abducted near his northern Ugandan house by the Lord's Resistance Army, he never said a word to anyone about escaping from the rebels' world-renowned campaign of terror, which included cutting off the lips, ears and noses of civilians as they fought the government. If anyone heard, the frightened teen knew, it would mean his swift execution.
But unlike so many of the Ugandan children abducted near their homes and schools — tens of thousands of them in total during the nearly 20 years of conflict that still wracks this small east African country — Ojok made a stunning escape. In 2000, four years after he was stolen away, he dove underwater as his unit crossed a fast-flowing river, which carried him to safety. "When I came back," he says now, "there was only welcome," first by government soldiers, then by aid workers from the American Christian organization World Vision, then finally by his mother and grandmother. When Ojok returned, however, he found both of his brothers had been abducted just months earlier.
Northern Uganda 's struggle has killed tens of thousands, and 1.5 million people still live, as Ojok does today, in squalid, packed camps for civilians displaced by the conflict. But now that negotiations between the LRA and Uganda are underway in nearby southern Sudan , those millions are waiting on word that Uganda 's child soldiers and displaced civilians can finally go home. Despite shaky relations all around and the death Saturday of LRA's third-in-command Raska Lukwiya in a government attack, the talks are widely seen as the country's best chance at peace in decades.
In a rare press conference earlier this month, the LRA's elusive leader Joseph Kony — who claims to communicate with spirits and says he wants to rule Uganda based on the Ten Commandments — has denied any wrongdoing. But the LRA has been pushed to sue for peace nonetheless, in part by mounting international pressure. Five of the LRA's top brass, including Kony and Lukwiya, were indicted last year by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Loss of support from former Sudanese allies and a long Ugandan military campaign have also pushed most LRA fighters into the neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo . "They don't have the capacity to recruit," says Walter Ochora, Uganda 's Resident District Commissioner in Gulu, the epicenter of the conflict. "They're surrendering on a daily basis." Child abductions and other attacks are way down from their peak in 2002. Farmers in Uganda 's army-defended camps tentatively return to cultivate their land by day. And the north's main town of Gulu is once again bustling with commerce and nightlife.
The LRA's long, bloody campaign is the legacy of the assumption of power two decades ago by President Yoweri Museveni, a southerner who helped end the string of bloody reigns by northerners such as Milton Obote and Idi Amin. Former soldiers who returned north and felt out of favor soon formed a rebel groups with Christian roots but decidedly anti-Christian tactics.
Uganda has hinted it will offer amnesty to Kony and other rebel leaders as a bargaining chip — just as it has allowed surrendering fighters to return home freely in the past. But cleaning up after the gruesome conflict will be difficult. The line between victim and attacker has been badly blurred: Most of the LRA fighting forces were once abductees themselves, children like Ojok Bosco, who were then forced to visit terror on their own families and villages.
For them, returning to civilian life is hard, says Philip Ludara, Gulu's distrtict coordinator for the Concerned Parents' Association, a local organization with records on nearly 20,000 of Uganda 's abducted children. "You're trained how to torture. You're trained how to kill. It's all you know," he says. "Fitting into the community is a big challenge."
The challenges are also many for the displaced people waiting to return to their land. Even after security is assured, they will need to repair damage caused by years of neglect. Razed homes, schools, and hospitals need to be rebuilt, and landmines must be removed. But peace talks, at least, offer optimism that the thousands of children still missing might escape their brutal lives in the bush — without risking execution or drowning. "It's a chance to go home, alive," says Ludara. "For the parents, it's a chance to see their children. And for the people in the camps it's a chance to go home, leave this prison
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