Black Ugandese Children on the Run From Arab Ugandese Rebel

[Daanyeer]

Uganda Children on the Run From Rebel Army

Source: Houston Chronicle
December 23, 2005 Author: RODRIQUE NGOWI Associated Press Writer


..."This is really a war against children,"


GULU, Uganda — They are called "the night commuters" _ hundreds of children who hike through the heat and dust, clutching mats and blankets as they pour into this northern Ugandan town for a night's sleep and protection from a rebel army that has given a whole new meaning to the term child abuse.

Every evening they leave their refugee camps and family mud huts to bed down on verandahs or in shelters set up by Gulu's aid agencies. The alternative is to risk being kidnapped and forced into military servitude by an outfit that calls itself the Lord's Resistance Army and has been waging Africa's longest-running civil war.

At one of the shelters, 16-year-old Jimmy sits on a woven mat and describes being abducted and then deprived of food and sleep for weeks.

It turns out that this is a generational catastrophe _ Jimmy's kidnappers were once kidnap victims themselves, kids as young as 13 who were trying to enlist him into a conflict in which at least 25,000 children have been abducted, by U.N. estimate.

This is a war on the future, turning boys into soldiers and girls into sex slaves in a conflict that has forced more than 1.5 million people to flee their homes. At its peak, some 4,500 children would walk into one of the main shelters in Gulu each night. Now, with government troops scoring some successes, the number is down to about 1,100.

"This is really a war against children," Ken Noah Davis, head of the U.N. World Food Program in Uganda, told The Associated Press.

Jimmy's father died of malaria in 2000. His mother is 80 miles away, so he lives with his 70-year-old grandmother near the sprawling, crowded camps outside Gulu, about 220 miles north of the capital, Kampala.

But only by day. Come sunset, he turns into a night commuter, walking into Gulu, where government troops offer a better degree of protection.

The Lord's Resistance Army, which has been waging the 19-year war, is a shadowy cult-like bunch led by Joseph Kony, whom the U.S. State Department describes as "erratic and vicious." Little is known of his doctrines.

"There are very few conflicts where a few people have had such a huge impact on so many _ with the fact that you have got 1.5 million people still in camps and yet you have only got a few hundred LRA," Davis said.

Jimmy, whom aid workers allowed to be identified only by his first name, is a tall and slender youth who anxiously twisted his fingers as he spoke.

He said he was kidnapped two years ago, when he was 14, in a rebel attack on an isolated village outside Gulu.

He said he was assigned to a group of 70 rebel fighters led by a lieutenant.

"The oldest fighter was 18, the youngest was 13. But there were younger children who were born into the group from abducted girls and were growing into fighters," he said.

He said he himself was never involved in any fighting.

About two months later, on a day he was sent to fetch water from a stream, he ran away. He said the fighter assigned to watch him was too lazy to watch him carefully.

Such torments are nothing new in Uganda. The older generation survived the mass-murdering dictatorship of Idi Amin in the 1970s. Today the country is ruled by Yoweri Museveni, who has gained an international reputation for firm governance and innovative approaches to combating AIDS.

But he is accused of failing to combat corruption and of mishandling the transition to democracy after 19 years of single-party rule under his watch.

The Lord's Resistance Army grew out of remnants of a northern insurgency in the 1980s and is led by Kony, a man believed to have been a former Roman Catholic catechist, or instructor. The group has little contact with the outside world and its political demands and religious content are so vague that mediators in northern Uganda have failed, despite years of efforts, to arrange any semblance of peace talks.

Meanwhile, families are being destroyed, not only by the northern war but by poverty and AIDS, leaving no grown-ups to care for the children, said Fran Miller of the international medical aid agency Doctors Without Borders.

Poor parents force young girls into early marriage to reduce the number of mouths they have to feed. Even children who escape the rebels' clutches face abuse in their alcoholism-ridden communities.

Adolescent girls are particularly vulnerable. Some sleep with older men just for the security they cannot get from their parents, said Beatrice Lajara, who works at a children's shelter in Gulu.

"There is a lot of depression and anxiety among children," Miller said. "This is a generation that is growing up without the emotional support, love and care of the family."

Jimmy said some of the kidnapped children he met, and who have become fighters, believe they have nothing to gain from peace because they had no family or home to return to.

"I heard one say he would remain a fighter because he wanted to abduct children, just like it happened to him, and torture them as payback for all that he went through when he, too, was abducted."

[Rightwing]

Neggers never go far.




http://www.un.int/drcongo/war/torture_b ... ldiers.htm




LE JUSTICIER

[Xplosive]

Acuudubilaah.

Didnt know the Congolese practice FGM. lol..