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Uganda - Lord's Resistance Army

Reporter: Jonathan Holmes

LEAD STORY
SERIES 7 For a Broader Perspective of Uganda Click Here
EPISODE 27

Synopsis:
From Uganda, a country which has had more than it's fair share of madmen and bloodshed, comes a new gang of butchers - the Lord's Resistance Army. The North of Uganda has been devastated by this rebel army of fanatics whose blend of Christianity and black magic is used to deadly effect. Their standard recruiting technique involves kidnapping children, after torturing and executing their parents, and then training them to become killers. Thousands of children have been turned into soldiers or sex slaves. The LRA hopes to gain control over all of Uganda and then implement a government ruled by the Ten Commandments. For the moment their commandments are rather more hellish - one of their most recent and bizarre edicts has been against the riding of bicycles - anyone caught doing so has both of their feet cut off on the spot.

One boy tried to escape, but he was caught. They made him eat a mouthful of red pepper, and five people were beating him. His hands were tied, and then they made us, the other new captives, kill him with a stick. I felt sick. I knew this boy from before. We were from the same village. I refused to kill him and they told me they would shoot me. They pointed a gun at me, so I had to do it. The boy was asking me, "Why are you doing this?" I said I had no choice. After we killed him, they made us smear his blood on our arms. I felt dizzy. There was another dead body nearby, and I could smell the body. I felt so sick. They said we had to do this so we would not fear death and so we would not try to escape.

I feel so bad about the things that I did . . . . It disturbs me so much--that I inflicted death on other people . . . . When I go home I must do some traditional rites because I have killed. I must perform these rites and cleanse myself. I still dream about the boy from my village who I killed. I see him in my dreams, and he is talking to me and saying I killed him for nothing, and I am crying.

- Susan, sixteen

I was good at shooting. I went for several battles in Sudan. The soldiers on the other side would be squatting, but we would stand in a straight line. The commanders were behind us. They would tell us to run straight into gunfire. The commanders would stay behind and would beat those of us who would not run forward. You would just run forward shooting your gun. I don't know if I actually killed any people, because you really can't tell if you're shooting people or not. I might have killed people in the course of the fighting . . . . I remember the first time I was in the front line. The other side started firing, and the commander ordered us to run towards the bullets. I panicked. I saw others falling down dead around me. The commanders were beating us for not running, for trying to crouch down. They said if we fall down, we would be shot and killed by the soldiers.

In Sudan we were fighting the Dinkas, and other Sudanese civilians. I don't know why we were fighting them. We were just ordered to fight.

- Timothy, fourteen

The Acholi people of northern Uganda have a proverb:
"Poyo too pe rweny. " "Death is a scar that never heals. "

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In northern Uganda, thousands of children are victims of a vicious cycle of violence, caught between a brutal rebel group and the army of the Ugandan government. The rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) is ostensibly dedicated to overthrowing the government of Uganda, but in practice the rebels appear to devote most of their time to attacks on the civilian population: they raid villages, loot stores and homes, burn houses and schools, and rape, mutilate and slaughter civilians unlucky enough to be in their path.

When the rebels move on, they leave behind the bodies of the dead. But after each raid, the rebels take away some of those who remain living. In particular, they take young children, often dragging them away from the dead bodies of their parents and siblings.

The rebels prefer children of fourteen to sixteen, but at times they abduct children as young as eight or nine, boys and girls alike. They tie the children to one another, and force them to carry heavy loads of looted goods as they march them off into the bush. Children who protest or resist are killed. Children who cannot keep up or become tired or ill are killed. Children who attempt to escape are killed.

Their deaths are not quick--a child killed by a single rebel bullet is a rarity. If one child attempts to escape, the rebels force the other abducted children to kill the would-be escapee, usually with clubs or machetes. Any child who refuses to participate in the killing may also be beaten or killed.

The rebels generally bring their captives across the border to a Lord's Resistance Army camp in Sudan. In the bush in Sudan, a shortage of food and water reduces many children to eating leaves for survival; deaths from dysentery, hunger and thirst are frequent. Living conditions in the Lord's Resistance Army camp are slightly better, because the Sudanese government supplies the Lord's Resistance Army with both food and arms in exchange for assistance in fighting the rebel Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA).

Those children who reach the Lord's Resistance Army camp are forced to serve the rebels. Smaller children may be made to run errands, fetch water or cultivate the land; girls as young as twelve are given to rebel commanders as "wives." All of the children are trained as soldiers, taught to use guns and to march.

The Lord's Resistance Army enforces discipline through a combination of violence and threats. Children who do not perform their assigned tasks to the rebels' satisfaction are beaten. Children who flout rebel orders are beaten or killed, often by other abducted children. Failed escape attempts continue to be punished by death, and successful escape attempts lead to retaliation: if one sibling escapes, the rebels often kill the other sibling, or return to the child's home village and slaughter any surviving relatives.

In effect, children abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army become slaves: their labor, their bodies and their lives are all at the disposal of their rebel captors.

Once they have been trained (and sometimes before being trained), the children are forced to fight, both in Uganda and in Sudan. In Sudan, the children are forced to help raid villages for food, and fight against the Sudan People's Liberation Army. In Uganda, the children are also made to loot villages, fight against Ugandan government soldiers, and help abduct other children. When the rebels fight against the Ugandan government army, they force the captive children to the front; children who hang back or refuse to fire are beaten or killed by the rebels, while those who run forward may be mown down by government bullets.

The Lord's Resistance Army's use of children as combatants is an extreme example of a troubling worldwide trend toward increased reliance on child soldiers in conflicts of all sorts. Graca Machel, who headed the United Nations Study on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Children, has pointed out that the proliferation of inexpensive light weapons has contributed to the increased use of children as soldiers:

[T]he reality is that children have increasingly become targets, and not incidental victims [of war], as a result of conscious and deliberate decisions made by adults. . . . War violates every right of the child. . . . The injury to children--the phsyical wounds, the psychosocial distress, the sexual violence--are affronts to each and every humanitarian impulse that inspired the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The continued use of child soldiers, says Machel, "demonstrates the failure of the international community to protect and cherish its children."

It is hard to know how many children have been abducted by the rebels. Most estimates suggest that three to five thousand children have escaped from captivity during the past two years. UNICEF estimates that an equal number of children remain in captivity, and an unknown number are dead.

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The actions of the Lord's Resistance Army violate the most elementary principles of international humanitarian law. In particular, the rebels stand in blatant violation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which establishes the minimum rules binding on all parties in internal armed conflicts. Common Article 3 states that people taking no active part in an internal armed conflict (including combatants who are wounded, or who have surrendered or been captured) must be treated humanely, and in particular, it forbids the taking of hostages, the use of murder, mutilation, cruel treatment, torture, and humiliating and degrading treatment.

Escape is rarely the end of an abducted child's ordeal, for those children who escape often find that they have nowhere to go. Their villages may have been destroyed by the rebels; their parents may have been killed or may have fled the countryside for the comparative safety of the towns. Even those children with homes to return to may hesitate to do so, fearing rebel reprisals against them or their families, and ostracism by community members who blame the children for complicity in rebel atrocities. There are few safe havens for these children: two nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) provide live-in trauma counseling centers for escaped abductees, but the centers cannot possibly take in all of the children.

Even those children not captured by rebels suffer the effects of the conflict. The frequent rebel attacks have destabilized the countryside in northern Uganda, destroying the region's agricultural base and wreaking havoc on education and healthcare. Hundreds of village schools have been burned, and scores of health clinics have been raided by rebels desperate to get their hands on medicines. As a result, northern Uganda today faces an acute humanitarian crisis. The two northern districts of Gulu and Kitgum, the homeland of the Acholi people, have been hardest hit; the violence and instability have displaced more than 200,000 northern Ugandans from their rural homes.

The Ugandan government has established a number of "protected camps" near Ugandan army installations, in order to decrease the vulnerability of civilians living in isolated rural areas. Tens of thousands of displaced people have fled the countryside and set up temporary homes in the camps, but crowded conditions and lack of food and sanitation facilities have rendered the population vulnerable to death from malnutrition and disease. Thousands die every month, and despite the nearby military presence, the camps remain targets for rebel attacks.

There is no end in sight. The Lord's Resistance Army's rebellion is deeply rooted in Uganda's troubled history of ethnic conflict, and the war has now dragged on for more than ten years. The last two years have seen a great increase in the scale of the fighting, as a result of Sudanese government support for the Lord's Resistance Army. The Ugandan government army has been unable to combat the rebels effectively, and the prospects for a negotiated peace are bleak.

Children who have escaped from the rebels wake screaming in the night from dreams of pain and death: their dreams are of deaths feared, deaths witnessed, and, all too often, deaths participated in. Perhaps some day, if peace comes, the scars of death will begin to fade. But they will never fully heal.

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