This report is based on research in Uganda from late May to early June of 1997. The research was conducted by Rosa Ehrenreich, a consultant for the Human Rights Watch Children's Rights Project, and by Yodon Thonden, counsel for the Children's Rights Project. The report was written by Rosa Ehrenreich, and edited by Yodon Thonden and Lois Whitman, the director of the Children's Rights Project. Peter Takirambudde, the director of Human Rights Watch's Africa Division, and Joanne Mariner, associate counsel for Human Rights Watch, provided additional comments on the manuscript. Linda Shipley, associate to the Children's Rights Project, provided invaluable production assistance.

This report would not have been possible without the assistance of the UNICEF office in Uganda. In particular, we wish to thank Kathleen Cravero, Ponsiano Ochero, Leila Pakkala, and Keith Wright in Kampala, and George Ogol and Moses Ongaria in Gulu. We are also grateful to Professor Semakula Kiwanuka, the Ugandan permanent representative to the United Nations, and to the many Ugandan government officials who facilitated our mission, including Lieutenant Bantariza Shaban, the public relations liasion officer for the Fourth Division of the Uganda People's Defense Force (UPDF), Colonel James Kazini, Commander of the UPDF Fourth Division, and J.J. Odur, the vice-chairman of Gulu's Local Council Five and the chairman of the Gulu Disaster Management Committee.

In Kampala, a number of individuals provided us with helpful background information. They include Richard Young of Red Barnet, Robby Muhumuza of World Vision, Sister Bruna Barolla of the Camboni Sisters, Livingstone Sewanyana of the Foundation for Human Rights Initiative, Cathy Watson, Jim Mugungu of the Monitor newspaper, Dr. Fillipo Ciantia of AVSI, the Italian Development Corporation, John Mugisha of the Uganda Law Society, Robina Namusisi of the National Association of Women Lawyers, Regina Lule Mutyaba of the Human Rights Education and Documentation Center, Anna Borzello, the members of the Uganda Human Rights Commission, Hilary Wright, Sister Judith Achilo, Andres Banya of the Acholi Development Association, Hon. Norbert Mao, M.P. for Gulu, Saeed Bukunya of the Office of Child Care and Protection, Hon. Livingstone Okello-Okello, M.P. for Kitgum, Hon. Daniel Omara Atubo, M.P. for Lira, Hon. Alphonse Owiny Dollo, minister of state for the north, Diane Swayles of Save the Children Fund U.K., and Ron and Pam Ferguson of the Mennonite Central Committee.

Outside of Kampala, we were assisted by more people than we can mention here, but especially by Charles Wotmon of World Vision, Paulinus Nyeko of Gulu Human Rights Focus, Sister Rachele Fassera of the St. Mary School in Aboke, Dr. Bruno Correda and Dr. Matthew Lukwiya of Lacor Hospital in Gulu, and the many parents in the Concerned Parents of Aboke organization. We are also grateful to the counselors, teachers and staff at Gulu Save the Children Organization, World Vision in Gulu and Kiryandongo, and the St. Mary School in Aboke.

Finally, we wish to thank the many Ugandan children who told us their stories. We would thank them each by name, but to do so might endanger their safety. Their courage is an inspiration to us.

I. SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS

II. THE ABDUCTION OF CHILDREN BY THE LORD'S RESISTANCE ARMY

Background
The Children's Stories
Capture and Early Days
On the March in Uganda and Sudan
Life in the Rebel Camps in Sudan
Religion and Ideology
Going into Battle
Escape
The Future
Relevant International Humanitarian Standards

III. OTHER EFFECTS OF THE CONFLICT IN THE NORTH

IV. THE HISTORY AND CAUSES OF THE CONFLICT

V. CONCLUSION

APPENDIX A
Letters from the Aboke School Girls

APPENDIX B
U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child

APPENDIX C
African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of the Child

APPENDIX D
Draft Optional Protocol to the Convention on
the Rights of the Child on Involvement of Children in Armed Conflicts

Arabs: a term often used by the children to describe Muslim Sudanese, and/or Sudanese government soldiers.

Dinkas: a people living mostly in Southern Sudan.

Gunship: helicopter.

HSM: Holy Spirit Movement.

Jerrycan: a plastic container used for carrying water and food.

Jok (plural: jogi): spirit; a powerful supernatural force.

Lakwena: messenger.

LC/RC: local council/resistance committee: terms often used interchangeably to refer to local government committees.

LRA: Lord's Resistance Army. More usually referred to by Ugandans as "the Kony Rebels," or simply "the rebels. "

Malaika: angel.

NGO: nongovernmental organization.

NRA: National Resistance Army. The old name for Yoweri Museveni's soldiers. Although the name has been changed to Uganda People's Defense Force (UPDF), some Ugandans still refer to government soldiers as the National Resistance Army.

Panga: a broad-bladed machete.

RPG: a rocket-propelled grenade.

Simsim: a kind of grain.

SPLA: Sudanese People's Liberation Army.

Tipu: spirit, soul, ghost.

Tipu Maleng: God; the Holy Spirit (usually associated with the Catholic Holy Ghost).

UNICEF: United Nations Children's Fund.

UPDA: Uganda People's Defense Army. A rebel alliance, now defunct. Not to be confused with the similarly named Uganda People's Defense Force (UPDF), the army of the Ugandan government.

UPDF: Uganda People's Defense Force, the army of the Ugandan republic.

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. "

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.

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.

Recommendations

To the Lord's Resistance Army

• immediately stop abducting children;
• immediately stop killing children;
• immediately stop torturing children;
• immediately stop sexually abusing children;
• immediately release all children remaining in captivity;
• ensure that Lord's Resistance Army combatants respect the human rights of civilians in the areas of conflict.

To the Government of Sudan

• cease all military aid and other support to the Lord's Resistance Army, until it complies with the recommendations outlined above;
• use Sudanese influence over the Lord's Resistance Army to stop the LRA's abduction, killing, torture and sexual abuse of children, to ensure that all LRA captives are treated humanely, and to bring about the immediate release of children held by the LRA;

To the Government of Uganda

• take all possible steps to protect children from abduction;
• when fighting the Lord's Resistance Army, take all possible steps to minimize child casualties;
• ensure that all children who escape or are captured from the rebels receive prompt and adequate access to medical attention and counselling while in government custody;
• release children as promptly as possible to their families or to appropriate child welfare organizations, rather than holding the children for questioning in military barracks;
• ensure that an adequate number of trained counselors exists to work with the children, with special attention paid to the needs of girls who have been sexually abused;
• promptly reunite children with family members;
• initiate a widespread information and education campaign to inform communities of the special needs of children who were abducted;
• facilitate the children's full and speedy reintegration into their communities;
• develop a concrete plan for meeting the long-term needs of the children;
• ensure that government soldiers respect the human rights of civilians in the north;
• ensure that people living in government-established "protected camps" have adequate food, water, sanitation, and health care, and are protected from rebel attacks.

To the United Nations

• the U.N.'s special rapporteur for Sudan should investigate and report on the role of Sudan in supporting the Lord's Resistance Army, with special attention to the LRA's abduction, killing, torture and sexual abuse of children;
• the U.N. Secretary General's special representative on the impact of armed conflict on children should promptly investigate the abduction, killing, torture and sexual abuse of children by the Lord's Resistance Army;
• the U.N. Secretary General should request that the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) work with Ugandans who have been internally displaced because of the conflict in the north, to help ensure that displaced persons, and especially children, have access to adequate food, water, health care and sanitary facilities;
• the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child should conduct an on-site investigation into the situation of children held in captivity by the Lord's Resistance Army, and into the situation of children who have escaped from the LRA and returned to Uganda;
• UNICEF should monitor conditions for children in trauma counseling centers and protected camps, and work with the government, NGOs and relief agencies to improve conditions;
• the U.N. Working Group on a Draft Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on Involvement of Children in Armed Conflicts should uncompromisingly seek to raise to eighteen the minimum age at which people may be recruited into armed forces and participate in hostilities (whether that recruitment is voluntary or compulsory, and whether it is into governmental or nongovernmental armed forces). African states should be encouraged to participate actively in the working group.

To the international community

• urge the Ugandan government to take all possible steps to minimize child casualties during fighting with the Lord's Resistance Army;
• press the Sudanese government to use its influence to stop the Lord's Resistance Army from abducting, killing, torturing and sexually abusing children, and to discontinue all Sudanese aid to the Lord's Resistance Army until it complies with the recommendations outlined above.
• actively support the efforts of the U.N. Working Group on the Draft Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child to raise to eighteen the minimum age for recruitment into armed forces and participation in hostilities.

To the Organization of African Unity

• the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights should investigate and report on human rights abuses by the Lord's Resistance Army.

Background

The origin of the current conflict lies in the complex religious traditions of the Acholi people who inhabit Uganda's northernmost districts, and in the deeply-rooted ethnic mistrust between the Acholi and the ethnic groups of southern Uganda--a mistrust that has often erupted into widespread violence.

During the period of British colonial administration, the British employed mostly southerners in the civil service; people from northern Uganda, and especially the Acholi, were primarily recruited into the armed forces. This created a division between northern and southern Uganda that persisted through independence in 1962: the south was more developed and contained the bulk of Uganda's educated elite, while the north, including Gulu and Kitgum, the homeland of the Acholi, was much poorer, with the people relying on cattle and military service for subsistence.

The socio-economic division between north and south has been exacerbated by frequent bouts of ethnic violence. According to most historians of post-independence Uganda, Acholi soldiers have been both victims and perpetrators of this violence. Under Milton Obote's first presidency, Acholi soldiers were implicated in many of the government's questionable activities. In the 1970s, during the administration of the notorious Idi Amin, many Acholi soldiers were slaughtered by Amin's henchmen. After Amin's 1979 overthrow, Milton Obote returned to power, and the Acholi soldiers in his army were implicated in the deaths of thousands of civilians during the civil war against Yoweri Museveni's guerrilla National Resistance Army, which drew its support mostly from people in Uganda's southern and western regions.⁽¹⁾

Museveni's eventual military victory was preceded by a brief period of Acholi control of the government, when Acholi army officer Tito Okello ousted Milton Obote. After Okello's coup, Okello entered into peace talks with Museveni's still-hostile National Resistance Army, and after several months, the Nairobi Peace Accord was signed by the two parties. But the peace accord was never implemented, because fighting broke out a mere two weeks after it was signed, with each side accusing the other of having breached the agreement. On January 26, 1986, Museveni's National Resistance Army took Kampala.⁽²⁾

Okello's Acholi soldiers retreated north. Some crossed the border and took refuge with the Acholi people of southern Sudan, but many retreated only as far as Gulu and Kitgum, where they could rely on the support of the civilian population. Nonetheless, the National Resistance Army soon succeeded in taking the major northern towns, and it appeared that Museveni was firmly in control of all of Uganda. Acholi ex-soldiers were asked to turn in their weapons, and many did so.

Some, however, never relinquished their weapons. According to Paulinus Nyeko, chairman of Gulu Human Rights Focus, since Uganda's history for twenty-five years had been one of ethnic purges and reprisals, many Acholi feared that it was only a matter of time before Museveni's soldiers sought revenge on them for atrocities committed during past regimes.⁽³⁾ And the behavior of many of the National Resistance Army soldiers did little to quell these fears. Harassment, looting, rape and cattle-theft by National Resistance Army soldiers were not infrequent, and did little to increase Acholi faith in the new Museveni government.⁽⁴⁾

By August 1987, many of the Acholi ex-soldiers in Sudan had joined up with other opponents of the Museveni administration, and formed a rebel alliance. The rebels made frequent incursions into Uganda to fight the government's National Resistance Army. (The NRA was later rechristened the Uganda People's Defense Force, or UPDF.)

One of the rebel units, the Holy Spirit Mobile Force, was led by self-styled Acholi prophetess Alice Lakwena. She claimed to be possessed by the Holy Spirit, and garnered enormous Acholi support with her promises to defeat Museveni's government and purge the Acholi people of witches and sinners. (The fourth section of this report discusses the emergence of Alice Lakwena's Holy Spirit movement in greater detail).

In late 1987, Alice Lakwena led thousands of Acholi soldiers against government troops; her soldiers were anointed with shea butter oil, which Lakwena assured them would cause bullets to bounce harmlessly off their chests. Aided by the civilian population, Lakwena's Holy Spirit Mobile Force soldiers got to within sixty miles of Kampala, where they encountered a large government force. Lakwena's soldiers, armed largely with rifles and stones, proved to be no match for modern heavy artillery, and thousands of her followers were killed. Lakwena herself fled to Kenya.

In the wake of Lakwena's defeat, the Acholi rebel movement disintegrated and many Acholi rebels surrendered. But a few remained in the bush, under the leadership of Joseph Kony, a young relative of Lakwena's. Kony claimed to be the inheritor of Lakwena's spiritual tradition, and his small group of rebels, based in Sudan, eventually came to call itself the Lord's Resistance Army. Like Alice Lakwena, Kony promised both to overthrow the northern-dominated government and to purify the Acholi people from within--and both these goals were to be accomplished through violence.

Despite years of government attempts to stamp it out, the Lord's Resistance Army (often called the "Kony rebels" by Ugandans) persists, never strong enough to seriously destabilize the government, but never weak enough to die out completely. Sudanese government spokesmen have repeatedly accused the Ugandan government of providing military support to the rebel Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA), and several years ago, in apparent retaliation, the Sudanese government began to aid the Lord's Resistance Army.⁽⁵⁾ According to the many children interviewed by Human Rights Watch, the Sudanese government also relies on the Lord's Resistance Army to help fight the SPLA. Sudanese government aid has turned the Lord's Resistance Army into more of a threat than ever, since the rebels are now armed with land mines and machine guns in place of rifles and machetes.

The recent activities of the Lord's Resistance Army have turned Gulu and Kitgum into permanent battle zones, filled with burnt schools, ransacked homes, abandoned fields, and a huge population of internally displaced people. One of the many tragic aspects of the conflict is that it is mostly Acholi civilians who are dying as a result of the activities of the rebels, the vast majority of whom are Acholi themselves. But it is the region's children who have suffered the most.⁽⁶⁾

The Children's Stories

The children of northern Uganda are the victims of atrocious human rights violations of a severity that is difficult to imagine, and the actions of the Lord's Resistance Army violate the most basic principles both of customary international law and of human morality.⁽⁷⁾

This report is based on research conducted in Uganda in late May and early June of 1997. In addition to holding background interviews with representatives of the government, the military and the NGO community, we interviewed about thirty children who had escaped from rebel captivity.⁽⁸⁾ Most of the children we interviewed were between the ages of ten and seventeen. Some of our interviews were conducted in English, but the majority were conducted with the aid of interpreters. We also collected written testimonials (in English) from over a hundred schoolgirls who had been abducted en masse from St. Mary's school in the town of Aboke in October of 1996.⁽⁹⁾

Words like "brutal" and "egregious" appear frequently in the reports of human rights groups. Although such terms are used with care and justification, at some point they lose their power to move us: the litany of violations becomes numbing, rather than shocking. For that reason, the first part of this report will be almost entirely in the children's own words. The second section of the report will discuss the indirect effects of the conflict, while the third section will provide a more in-depth discussion of the history and causes of the violence that is devastating northern Uganda.

The following excerpts from the children's stories have been lightly edited for clarity, but are otherwise unchanged. Ages given are ages of the children at the time of our interviews in May 1997. Most of the children we met had been held by the rebels for months and sometimes several years before managing to escape.

To protect the children, we have changed all names and altered other identifying characteristics.

Capture and Early Days

Typically, the rebels appear to divide into small bands in order to lead raids into Uganda. Groups of five to twenty rebels wander through the bush, maintaining radio contact with their fellows. In towns, the rebels loot trading posts and steal medicines from small health clinics. In the bush, they loot compounds, beating and often killing the adults, and abducting many of the children. They burn huts when they leave, and steal everything edible or useful. The small rebel bands then reunite, and march together back across the Sudanese border.

Abducted children are generally tied up and forced to carry looted goods. Unused to long marches through the bush, most of the children soon develop swollen and infected feet. Despite the constant looting of stores and homes, the rebels often have only limited food supplies, and new captives receive little to eat. The children are frequently beaten for little or no reason.

Weak with hunger, sore from constant beatings, and limping on infected feet, many of the children have trouble keeping up with the group. But children who cannot keep up are killed, and those children who try to escape face brutal repercussions: the rebels force other new captives to help beat or stab to death unsuccessful escapees. For those children who survive, taking part in the murder of other captives forms a gruesome initiation into the ways of the Lord's Resistance Army.

Charles, fifteen:

There had already been rumors that rebels were around, and we were very fearful. My grandmother was hiding in the bush. It was morning, and I was practicing my music when I heard a shot. I started running into the bush, but there was a rebel hiding behind a tree. I thought he would shoot me. He said, "Stop, my friend, don't try to run away!" Then he beat me with the handle of the gun on my back. He ordered me to direct him, and told me that afterwards I would be released.

But afterwards it was quite different. That afternoon we met with a very huge group of rebels, together with so many new captives. We marched and marched. In the bush we came across three young boys who had escaped from the rebels earlier, and they removed the boys' shirts and tied ropes around their throats, so that when they killed them they would make no noise. Then they forced them down and started clubbing their heads, and other rebels came with bayonets and stabbed them. It was not a good sight.

Thomas, fourteen:

In our village, we realized the rebels were coming, and my whole family hid in the bush at night. At dawn, we thought they were gone, and I went back to the compound to fetch food. But they were still there, and they took me. It was very fast. The rest of my family was still in hiding. The rebels had already abducted about a hundred children, and they had looted a lot of foodstuff. But they would just give you only very little food to keep you going.

I had to carry a bag of groundnuts, maybe twenty kilos. It was heavy but there was no alternative to carrying it. Some young children were given very heavy loads, but with any load you must struggle to carry it, or otherwise the rebels say, "You are becoming stubborn and rebellious!" And they kill you. If your feet swell they also kill you.

I saw quite a number of children killed. Most of them were killed with clubs. They would take five or six of the newly abducted children and make them kill those who had fallen or tried to escape. It was so painful to watch. Twice I had to help. And to do it, it was so bad, it was very bad to have to do.

Stephen, seventeen:

I was abducted twice. The first time I escaped. It was not safe in my village so I came to the town, but after a while I decided to go back to the village and collect my property. But while I was there I was again abducted. Luckily it was a different group and they did not recognize me, or they would have killed me.

They cut me with a panga (machete) and tied me and they said that if I had money, I must give it to them. I said, "Where can I get money? I am just a schoolboy." So they beat me and beat me. They took all the food in our house, and they took the bicycle my uncle gave me to ride to school and cut it up with an ax.⁽¹⁰⁾ They beat all my young cousins who were just small boys, four or five years old. One of them they killed. Then they burned the house.

The youngest child we interviewed was ten-year-old William. He trembled throughout the interview, and clung to the interviewer's hand. As he spoke, his voice got softer and softer, and his head bowed down until his forehead rested on the table.

William, ten:

It was at seven p.m. We were in the house, and two of us were abducted. It was me and my older brother. My mother was crying and they beat her. She was weakly and I do not know if she is all right at all.

They beat us, then they made me carry some radios and carry the commander's gun. It was heavy and at first I was afraid it would shoot off in my arms, but it was not filled with ammunition. We joined a big group and we walked very far, and my feet were very swollen. If you said that you were hurting they would say, "Shall we give this young boy a rest?" But by a "rest" they meant they would kill you, so if you did not wish to die you had to say you did not need a rest.

Many children tried to escape and were killed. They made us help. I was afraid and I missed my mother. But my brother was very strong-hearted and he told me we must have courage, we will not die, so I kept going.

After the interview, William went and sat by himself on a patch of grass near our interview table. One of the counselors, looking at him, sighed: "This one, he is needing a lot of love."

On paper, the children's stories have a terrible sameness: "The rebels took me, they made me march, I was afraid, my feet swelled, I had to help kill another child . . . ." But for all their similarities, the stories are each unique: one child recalls a visit from the spirit of his dead brother; another remembers the chicken the rebels forced him to pluck more quickly than he was able; a third remembers the blood that dripped from the mouth of a child being clubbed to death.

James, fourteen:

Me and my brothers and cousins were playing football. Five rebels came and took all six of us, my three brothers, two cousins and myself. They tied us with ropes around our waists and gave us heavy loads to carry. [They led us to a larger group.] There were about eighty rebels and fifty abductees in the group. At night, we stopped to rest, and they beat us--they used a bicycle chain to beat us. The next morning we came to the government soldiers when we were walking. They were firing at us. We ran with the luggage.

My eldest brother escaped but the rebels caught him and they killed him. They beat him on the back of the head with a club. I watched him being killed. His tipu (spirit) came to me and covered me and told me, "Today, I am dead."

I was in shock . . . . My other two brothers and I were allowed to stay together but we were told that if any of us escaped, one of us would be killed.

George, fourteen:

It was around ten a.m. and my two brothers and I were doing handicrafts. The rebels appeared all of a sudden. They had guns. They took all three of us, and they ordered us to remove our shirts and run with their group. We ran for about five miles, and came to a larger group, and they gave us chickens and ordered us to remove their feathers very fast. I was not good enough and they beat me with their guns to make me hurry. As we prepared their meal we were attacked by government forces. I was shot in the arm but I still had to march. They killed you if you could not march.

Stella, fifteen:

They came to our school in the middle of the night. We were hiding under the beds but they banged on the beds and told us to come out. They tied us and led us out, and they tried to set the school building on fire. We walked and walked and they made us carry their property that they had looted. At about six a. m. they made us stop and they lined up in two lines, and made us walk between them while they kicked us.

On the second day of marching our legs were swollen. They said, "Eh, now, what should we do about your legs? You must walk, or do you want us to kill you? It's your choice." So we kept going.

On the third day a little girl tried to escape, and they made us kill her. They went to collect some big pieces of firewood. Then they kicked her and jumped on her, and they made us each beat her at least once with the big pieces of wood. They said, "You must beat and beat and beat her." She was bleeding from the mouth. Then she died. Then they made us lie down and they beat us with fifteen strokes each, because they said we had known she would try to escape.

Many of the children spoke of being so frightened and bewildered that nothing seemed real anymore. The pain, fear, and shock combine to create a numbness, a dizziness--a sense, at times, that madness is not far off.

Sharon, thirteen:

I was abducted while my mother and I were going to the field . . . . One of the other abducted girls tried to escape but she was caught. The rebels told us that she had tried to escape and must be killed. They made the new children kill her. They told us that if we escaped, they would kill our families.

They made us walk for a week . . . . Some of the smaller children could not keep up, as we were walking so far without resting, and they were killed . . . . Some of the children died of hunger. I felt lifeless seeing so many children dying and being killed. I thought I would be killed.

Samuel, seventeen:

About thirteen rebels came and took me and my brothers from our home. It was at night and I was sleeping. The rebels made us take off our shirts and tied our hands behind our backs. We began walking and met up with other rebels and children who had been abducted. They untied our hands and tied us by the waist to the other children.

Many people were killed because they could not walk further. They were stabbed with bayonets in their chests and heads. It was so horrible, I felt that I was going crazy. I felt dizzy a lot, my head spinning most of the time.

Christine, seventeen:

It was around two or three a.m. I woke to the sound of windows breaking, and torches flashing. I don't know how many rebels there were. Some of us were beaten. I was shaking . . . . We walked the whole night, through the bush and on small paths. While we were walking, they would kick us or slap us, or hit us with gun butts, and sometime with sticks.

Whenever they killed anyone, they called us to watch. I saw eleven people killed this way. One of them was a boy who had escaped. They found him in his home, and called him outside. They made him lie down on the ground, and they pierced him with a bayonet. They chopped him with the bayonet until he was dead. Seeing this, at times, I felt like I was a dead person--not feeling anything. And then sometimes I would feel like it was happening to me, and I would feel the pain.

Phillip, fourteen:

I saw my older brother go mad . . . He would be given food and would just throw it on the ground, and mix it with dirt and eat it. I was allowed to talk with him, and he would tell me about how our mother was here and our sister. He thought that we were at home. I don't know what happened to him. We saw so many people killed, bodies sticking out of trenches, and gun shots all around. It was so frightening. Maybe that made him mad.

On the March in Uganda and Sudan

After abduction, some children remain in the bush in Uganda for several months, used by the rebels as porters and servants. At some point, however, most children who have not escaped or been killed are brought across the border into Sudan, where the rebels have their main base. In southern Sudan as in Uganda, the rebels loot homes and trading centers, spreading carnage and destruction wherever they go.

Charles, fifteen:

After my abduction, we marched and marched. Once we passed close to my homestead, but I was carefully guarded and I could do nothing. We came across a car which we ambushed, and later we came to a homestead and found a family with a father who was drunk. The rebels said, "This one is drunk, we cannot spare him!" So they clubbed him to death, then dragged him to a hut and burned it. As we went we burned many houses. I also recall that after we attacked a Kitgum trading center, we came across two hunters, and they were killed with clubs and bayonets.

This looting and killing continued as we marched. So many people were killed. You had to adapt yourself quickly to that kind of life.

James, fourteen:

Every day, each rebel had to get abductees. Our team's major work was to abduct other children. They would have contests to see who could get the most captives. We worked a lot. The abductees were made to dig, making granaries. They told us we were fighting to overthrow the government, but we didn't do fighting. When we saw government soldiers, we just ran.

Timothy, fourteen:

We walked very long distances. All I could think about was home and being with my family. Sometimes there were helicopter attacks [by government forces]. I was injured: my skin and my chest and arms were burned during an attack. Many children were killed, and others lost legs from bombs.

Marching, looting, marching, looting, killing. For many children, the clearest memories from this period are of the exhaustion and the apparently aimless marching. And, of course, of the atrocities they witnessed and were forced to take part in.

Teddy, thirteen:

We walked for a very long distance, day and night, and we slept with no food given to us. As we moved we crossed the river between Gulu and Kitgum. The water almost killed us, because we could not swim. We crossed a main road and came across five people riding bicycles, and the rebels killed them because bicycles are against their rules: the rebels fear fast delivery of information about their presence. They would send young children to climb trees for observation, but still we were often attacked by government soldiers, and many were killed. I was shot in the leg, but it missed the bone and afterwards I recovered.

After one battle where many rebels were killed we spent a long time deep in the bush, far from villages. After a time we came to a camp for rebels who had been wounded or were sick. This was still in Uganda. My duty was to go look for food. Often we stole it. Another of my assignments was to wash the clothes of the wounded and sick. They were dirty clothes, covered with blood and stains, and I also had to clean out gumboots that had filled with blood.

When I had been with the rebels for some weeks they learned that I had not given them my own name, Teddy, but had told them my name was different. They learned this because of a bad coincidence: we met with another group of rebels as we marched, and one of the boys in the other group was from my village. He recognized me and called me by my name. So the commander of my group was angry, and said "Why did you deceive me?" He said he would kill me and they began to prepare for my death.

When they want to kill somebody they start with prayers for your soul. They even started praying for me. But the commander of the other rebel group pleaded for me, and said, "Do not kill this young boy. Instead let him join us in our struggle."

Catherine, seventeen:

We would walk through villages where the civilians had fled . . . we would sleep in deserted villages, and eat and stay in the houses. Sometimes there were villagers who had stayed behind . . . the rebels would accuse them [of supporting the government]. One day, they found a man riding a bike. They just cut off his foot with an ax. When his wife came out of the house, they told her to eat the foot. I turned away not to see what happened.

Christine, seventeen:

They told us we were soldiers now, we were no longer students. We were walking always, day and night. I don't know where we were going. Sometimes I found that we were walking in circles--we would pass a spot that I recognized from before. As far as I know, their work was to walk around, but they had no place to stay. Sometimes we slept in houses, in the same houses with civilians. The rebels would ask the villagers if the government soldiers were around. The civilians would tell them. They made us carry clothes, and food for cooking. We had to cook for ourselves--they would give us food to cook for ourselves. Sometimes there was not time to eat.

[Sometimes] they beat us, fifteen strokes each. When they beat you, they tell you not to touch the areas where we were beaten. I touched myself there, and so did another girl. For that they made us step out and lie down on the ground. Then they beat us with canes. There were seven of them.

Patricia, fifteen:

They made us walk for a week. Some of the children were young and not used to walking, but if you sit down to rest, they beat you, and sometimes they just shoot you . . . . I saw so many children dying. About fifty children in my group died. I was so scared. I didn't know where we were going.

They would make us cut people's legs off. If you don't help they beat you. My back still hurt from the beatings. But I would not help. They said, "We will kill you some day, you are misbehaving!" I said, "If you kill me, I will become a saint."

When we reached the Sudan border and I saw the Arab people I knew I was in Sudan. In Sudan, so many children died of diarrhea and hunger.

In southern Sudan, a severe draught makes survival difficult, and during long marches through the bush, water is often scarce or non-existent. Food, too, is limited, and when it cannot be looted from villages, the children are reduced to foraging for wild leaves. Many children die of hunger, thirst, or dysentery before ever reaching the Sudanese camp.

Charles, fifteen:

After a time we received a radio message to go to Sudan to meet Joseph Kony's group. We started marching and it became very dry. We could not find water or food, and we ate the leaves of trees. Many became sick and died, and you would see children everywhere, lying down like they were sleeping. But they were dead.

Susan, sixteen:

I spent three months in Uganda and three months in Sudan with the rebels. In Uganda, we were made to do a lot of hard work--getting rice, pounding rice, hulling rice, stealing food, and gathering wild leaves and preparing food. We were always hungry. There was never enough food. Most people in the villages we passed through had run away.

On the way to Sudan we passed so many dead bodies of people who had died along the way--people who died of hunger, or sickness, or were killed.

Samuel, seventeen:

It was so hot. It was the dry season and I had blisters on my feet from walking so much. They never told us where we were going or why we had been taken. We were given raw food, simsim and boiled sorghum to eat, but no water. The water ran out after two days, and many people died of thirst. We walked for three days straight, without sleeping, until we reached Sudan. In Sudan, the main problems were diseases: dysentery and malaria--and food shortages and not enough water.

Life in the Rebel Camps in Sudan

The rebels have at least one major camp in southern Sudan. Kony, the Lord's Resistance Army leader, lives in the camp along with his top commanders. There may at one time have been many more Lord's Resistance Army camps, but some were recently destroyed by the rebel Sudanese People's Liberation Army, which has friendly ties to the Ugandan government.

In the camp in Sudan, the children (both boys and girls) are trained to use weapons and fight. The weapons are supplied by the Sudanese government; children report the frequent arrival of heavy lorries containing weapons and supplies, driven by soldiers in Sudanese army uniforms.

We heard repeated allegations that in Sudan, some Ugandan children were sold as slaves to the Sudanese, in exchange for guns and food. We were unable to obtain any direct confirmation of these rumors, but the possibility cannot be discounted.⁽¹¹⁾

Thomas, fourteen:

In Sudan, they brought us to a large camp. There were maybe 5,000 people there. My duties were mostly to farm. I would dig fields and plant maize beans. I spent most of my time digging. They also trained us in how to be soldiers. I was trained to use mortars, RPG, and SMG weapons. The guns came from the Arabs and the Sudanese government. Kony had lorries that were given him by the Sudan government. They would leave the camp and come back, loaded with guns.

Sharon, thirteen:

When we got to Sudan, I saw some children there that I knew from my village. They had also been abducted earlier. Our group was divided into four smaller groups of about a hundred people. I was the youngest in my group. I was twelve. Others were about thirteen or fourteen years old. They trained us in how to use guns, and the names of all the gun parts. The camp in Sudan was large. There were about a thousand people there. I stayed there for three months. Most of the time I was just made to work--like digging for potatoes.

Timothy, fourteen:

After we crossed into Sudan, we went to a place called Kit where they trained us. Kony told us we would go back to Uganda and overthrow the government--we were trained how to attack vehicles, and how to shoot.

Kony would tell us that we would overthrow the government. People should be happy and wait for that day to come. He also warned us that if we were caught becoming friendly with any girl, we would be killed together--the boy and the girl. He also warned us that if we tried to escape we would be killed.

After my training, I was given a gun: an AK47. I had to carry it on my right shoulder at all times. It was so heavy. The loaded magazine made it so heavy. For a while, my right arm was paralyzed from the weight, and the skin on my shoulder burned from carrying it. I had chest pains. I was also given things to carry like cans of water.

Mary, fifteen:

In Kony's camp we saw things like weapons and guns, all types of guns and ammunition. I think they came from Khartoum. We all underwent training, every day, training in how to operate the guns, and how to name them. Sometimes we would have to jog with our guns and sing soldier songs, and also prayer songs. Then we would go home and cook the vine leaves. Children tried always to escape, but some of them were recaptured and killed.

Sarah, sixteen:

In Sudan they gave us training for three weeks. Kony sent a message to send the young ones to him in Palataka. Kony wanted those who had been in schools to be trained as nurses, to give first aid to the rebels. I was one of those. But I was also trained to shoot, and how to put together guns and handle the weapons--antipersonnel mines, antitank mines, SMG, LMF, PKM, mortars. The weapons were brought by Arabs in uniforms.

Samuel, seventeen:

In Sudan, we were informed that we were now soldiers. They said we would be given one week to rest, and then we would be begin military training. I went through three weeks of military training. We were given guns and were selected to fight in Sudan. There were confrontations between the Lord's Resistance Army and the UPDF in Sudan. The weapons we used [included] mortars and antipersonnel land mines. The BKs were the preferred weapon among us--it was the most reliable. It takes two people to operate it: one person to hold and feed the chain of bullets, and the other to shoot.

Kony abducts children for military purposes. The children are trained to make soldiers. Other children are taken to be wives--the girls. Others are taken to be porters, to carry things. There are also some who are brought to be killed in front of the new recruits, to build courage. In Sudan, some men were brought before us, and we were made to gather in a circle. We had to beat the man to death. The real killing was done by about ten people, and the rest were made to beat the person who was already dead. The new recruits are made to do this to build courage.

Although conditions in the camp are somewhat better than conditions on the march, many children still spoke of being hungry and thirsty all the time. The best food is reserved for the rebel commanders, and child captives often have to supplement their meager rations with wild leaves. Deaths from malnutrition and disease continue.

Jessica, fourteen:

There was no water in the camp. Every day we would have to go search for water. The Arabs brought food and guns from Juba, and the food was mostly beans, but it was not enough. We ate bitter leaves. People were dying, especially young boys. There were many boys of about seven years of age who had been abducted from Gulu, and they were many of them dying.

There were more than a thousand people in the camp at the time I was there. Most rebels were young children who had been captured like me, but there were many who were very old, forty or older. Kony himself is about thirty or thirty-five years old. He had eighteen women for himself, and six children had been born to him.

Patricia, fifteen:

In Sudan, so many children died of diarrhea and hunger . . . . We were given food, but very little--maybe a little bread and beans. They would give us food maybe once a month--the food was brought by the Arabs. During the days, I would go out looking for food. Sometimes we would be beaten if we came back without finding any food. There was no water. You had to walk miles to collect water. At night, I slept in an adaki [trench].

Phillip, fourteen:

There was very little food in Sudan. Ten people would be fed from one small bowl. I was always hungry.

I was made to beat two boys who took too long to get water. They were little boys.

I was given a sub-machine gun and had to carry it with me at all times: when you're going to get water, or to collect firewood, you still have to carry it. It was very heavy for me.

Stephen, seventeen:

When we were in the Sudan there, we were not feeling well at all. There was lack of food and no medicines, and we were feeling very, very, very bad, and not okay at all.

In the Sudan, some people were dying of hunger, and diarrhea was also very serious. But should you make a mistake of stealing things, you will be tied to a tree and shot by a firing squad. These very young children especially, they very much miss the food they used to have at home. But if you take food they just shoot you, even the very young ones. Death only is the punishment for this.

For girls, life in Sudan is particularly hard. In addition to military training, farming, and cooking, most girls who have hit puberty have an additional duty: they are given to rebel commanders as "wives." Although the Lord's Resistance Army has strict rules against voluntary sexual relationships between captives, girls given as wives to commanders are forced to provide sexual services; those who refuse are often beaten until they comply.

Theresa, eighteen:

I was made to be wife to three men. Three rebels were fighting over me and each one wanted me to be his wife. One of them wanted to kill me. He took me as his wife, and I did not want to be his wife. He said if I refused he would kill me, and if I ran away he would kill me. He was sent away to fight, and then I was made to be wife to a second man. Then he also was sent away to fight, and I was given to a third man. The third man was a big leader, and when he went away to fight he wanted me to go with him.

Susan, sixteen:

One week after I was abducted I was given to a man called Abonga. He was thirty years old. Two girls were given to him. He was trying to be nice to me, to make me feel happy and not want to run away, but all I wanted to do was go home. I was taken away from him when I got to Sudan because I had syphilis. They said they wanted to give me treatment, but I refused--I did not trust them and thought that they might try to hurt me, and I felt fine anyway. Because I had syphilis, I was not given to another man in Sudan. Instead I was kept separately and guarded because they thought I would give the sickness to others.

No one was allowed to have free relationships there. If they caught a boy and a girl together they would shoot you in public. The only relationships they allowed were the ones that they forced on you.

Catherine, seventeen:

They gave us all as wives. I think four of the girls abducted from the St. Mary School at Aboke were given to Kony as wives; they stayed with Kony's other girls. They gave me as a wife, but I refused the man. The soldier I was given to already had a girl who was five months pregnant. He ordered other boys to beat me on my back with a panga. He hated me. I got eight strokes with the panga on my back. It hurt so much, I thought I would die. After that we never spoke. I just stayed with the other girls.

Sarah, seventeen:

After the military training, I was given to a man called Otim. There were five women given to one man. The man I was given to was very rude to me: he thought I wanted to leave him and escape. He beat me many times with sticks. He thought I wanted to escape. Now I'm going to be a mother soon.

I don't want to be a mother at this age. But it happened and I must accept this.

Religion and Ideology

The children we interviewed had only the haziest idea why the rebels were fighting: "They want to overthrow the government" was a refrain we heard repeatedly, but few children, regardless of how long they had been with the rebels, were able to articulate anything specific about the rebels' program.

Thomas, fourteen:

Joseph Kony came out to address us several times. He said the present president of Uganda is biased and is only developing the west and south, and is neglecting development in the north, but that he, Kony, would develop the north. He always would warn the abductees not to escape. He would tell us to be patient, and we would overthrow the government, so be patient and wait.

Catherine, seventeen:

When we tried to ask them questions, they said they capture people because they want to disappoint Museveni, and to break the government. I don't know how they'll ever do that. They will never overthrow the government.

Stephen, seventeen:

The rebels say that they don't want this man Museveni who is ruling Uganda, because he has killed a lot of Acholi, he has killed a lot of their brothers, mothers, fathers, aunts and sisters. So they don't want this man who is ruling, and they want to take the government from him. Museveni caused a lot of Acholi life to be lost, and therefore he can never rule Acholiland, and the rebels say they will fight until the government falls down and the Acholi are rich in Uganda.

Mary, fifteen:

Kony was talking of the overthrow of the government and was prophesizing that the government would soon come to an end. He said it was wrong that Museveni was ruling over the Acholi. "Let him go rule his own people in the south and west," he said, "But we will not let him rule in Acholiland."

Western news reports tend to depict Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army as a group of violent Christian fundamentalists, committed to establishing a government based upon the Ten Commandments. This is a misleading oversimplification, however. Kony was brought up partially in the Catholic tradition, and claims to be doing the bidding of the Holy Spirit, but in practice the rebels perform an eclectic mix of rituals, some drawn from Christianity, some from the indigenous Acholi tribal religion, and, increasingly, some from Islam.

Molly, seventeen:

They prayed a lot, but they didn't pray like normal Christians. Sometimes they would use rosaries, but sometimes they would bow down like Muslims. They said they had a malaika [spirit, angel]. They said the malaika said there would be a terrible fight, and that the government would be overthrown. After that, they said, we would be released. Sometimes they would gather us together and try to convince us to believe them.

They believed in their local gods, and they didn't want us to learn about their malaika. They discouraged us from asking questions about them or their beliefs. If you asked too many questions they would become cruel.

Christine, seventeen:

The rebels call Joseph Kony their father, and say that the Holy Spirit speaks to him, and tells him what to do. But I don't see anything to their religion. At times they pray like they're Christians, and at times like they're Muslims. They made us kneel and face in one direction to pray, like Muslims. Their customs are strange. If they've just abducted you, they smear you with oil in the sign of the cross, on your forehead and on your chest. They did that to us on the third day after we were abducted. They said it was their custom. Another one of their customs is they don't eat with strangers.

After we had been with them for three weeks, they drew a picture of a large heart in the ground, and divided it into thirty squares. They told us to bathe and to remove our blouses and remain bare-chested. They told each of us to stand in one of the squares. They dipped an egg in a mixture of white powder and water, and drew a heart on our chests and our backs. They also made a sign of the cross on our foreheads and on our across our lips. Then they poured water on us. The commander, Lagira, told us to stay without our blouses for three days. He said what they were doing was written in the bible. Another man told us they were doing this for our protection.

They said they were preparing to overthrow the government, and that the day for the fight would take place if a child between ten and fifteen years old would have a certain dream about them, or if someone would rise at dawn and see a hand in the clouds--that would mean that there were five days before the fight. But this would happen, and then time would pass, and nothing happened. They didn't overthrow the government.

Stella, fifteen:

Sometimes they behaved like Muslims, sometimes like Catholics, sometimes like Protestants. They said they would overthrow the government within three years. They said they wanted Uganda to become a paradise. I said, "If you want a paradise, why are you killing people in Northern Uganda? The government is down south in Kampala, so how can you expect to overthrow the government if you kill people here?"

They said, "Be patient."

One day, I asked our commander, "Why are you killing mostly your own people, people from the North?"

He said, "We do not kill them because they are from the North, but because they are misbehaving."

I said, "Why do you kill those who try to escape?"

And he said, "Jesus did not ask his disciples to come with him, he just told them, 'Follow me. ' But today Ugandans do not follow the Holy Spirit, so they must be forced."

I said, "People of northern Uganda would not refuse to follow you if what you did was truly right."

He said, "Stella, you are joking with the Holy Spirit. You don't know what we are doing. We are pretending we are bad, but we will be the first to enter God's Kingdom. One day you will believe in us and you will see we are God's people."

Many Ugandan government officials insist that Kony and his top commanders are motivated by greed and a thirst for personal power, rather than by any political or religious program. Indeed, it's impossible to assess the degree to which rebel actions are "truly" motivated by religion: the children we interviewed were all escapees from the rebels, non-believers more or less by definition. But it would be a mistake to dismiss out of hand the force of the rebels' beliefs: Kony's Lord's Resistance Army grew directly out of Alice Lakwena's Holy Spirit Movement, in which thousands of Acholi rebels met their deaths by walking into government bullets, armed with nothing more than stones, accepting Lakwena's assurance that the shea butter oil smeared on their chests would protect them.

Charles, fifteen:

Kony was telling us that Tipu Maleng [the Holy Spirit] was protecting him. If a rebel who was a captive had ill feeling against Kony, Kony would be told by the spirits and would kill him. Spirits would also tell Kony who tried to escape.

I don't know much about the Holy Spirit. Several times I was in Joseph Kony's hut, though, and I saw very many strange animals: you would find snakes, turtles, chameleons. I believe these are the instruments he used to communicate with the spirits.

George, fourteen:

After we were first abducted, before they gave us food, they said we must become clean. We had to spread shea butter oil on our chests and our backs, because we were unclean, and had to become clean enough to eat with them.

This is because we Acholi are a very bad people, and we must all become better before we can rule in our land. This is what the Holy Spirit has ordered. This also is why some people must be killed: we must become pure, and many Acholi do not follow the orders of the Holy Spirit anymore. Many of them are working with jok [spirits]. So they must be killed. This is what the rebels told me.

Lily, seventeen:

Everything they did was because of the malaikas (angels). For an example: there was a malaika from Sudan, that sent a message at one time that they should not sleep with their wives before fighting.

And there were very many rules: before they crossed water they must pour water over their head. Also, you must not throw or step on certain stones. If a girl was during her period, she must not touch anything that a man will touch, and she must sit very far away from the fire. Also, you must not greet anyone who is not a rebel with your hands.

Samuel, seventeen:

Kony preached to us that no one should worry--he said the malaika said that no one should worry. He said the Holy Spirit knows the source of worry--the Holy Spirit says that if you worry or show signs of unhappiness, all your family members will be killed, or you will never be able to return to Uganda.

James, fourteen:

The leader, Kony, would speak in tongues. Jok would speak through him--they would say that tomorrow such and such would happen. I only half-believed what he said. There were contradictions in what he said, so I didn't believe it all. But some of it was true. Like when Kony would order no eating--if you eat during the day you'll die in battle. I believed that, because I saw a boy who ate that day, and he later died in battle.

Stephen, seventeen:

When you go to fight you make the sign of the cross first. If you fail to do this, you will be killed. You must also take oil and draw a cross on your chest, your forehead, and each shoulder, and you must make a cross in oil on your gun. They say that the oil is the power of the Holy Spirit. Some young children believe it--and those who have been there so long, five, seven, ten years, they believe in it very much.

Also you take a small stone, you sew it on a cloth and wear it around your wrist like a watch. That is to prevent the bullet that might come, because in battle it is acting as a mountain. So those people on the other side will look at you, but they will see only a mountain, and the bullets will hit the mountain and not hurt you.

You also have water: they call it "clean water," and they pour it into a small bottle. If you go to the front, you also have a small stick, and you dip it in the bottle and fling the water out. This is a river and it drowns the bullet that might come to you.

Finally you wear a cross on a chain. But in the fighting you wrap it around your wrist and hold it in your hand. Should you make a mistake and not wear it on your hand, you will be killed.

Kony would say that he doesn't want jogi [spirits]. People working with jogi are witch-doctors, and if he got those people he would kill them.

But me, I was observing very carefully, and it is my observation that he was working with jogi himself. His spirit is not the real Holy Spirit, not Tipu Maleng. He is not working with God. Kony has control of where medicines were to be mixed, and when you see the materials, you know Kony is working with jok. I only saw from a distance. His jok is called Kivaro, and his jok is very powerful: when he said something is to be done, it is done according to his voice. When Kony talks he says it is Tipu Maleng talking, but it is Kivaro.

That is what I think. The Tipu Maleng could not work in this way to kill people.

Going into Battle

At some point, nearly all of the children end up in the midst of fighting. The rebels seem to rely mostly on teenage boys as fighters, but this is not a rigid rule; all children are expected to fight if necessary during raids on villages and stores. For planned battles, the rebels select boys to go and fight, but when ambushed by the Uganda People's Defense Force or the Sudan People's Liberation Army, all of the children are expected to take part in the fighting. Those who retreat are beaten.

The rebel commanders use the children as shields: when battle approaches, the children are sent to the front lines, while the commanders remain safely in the rear. At times, the children are told not to take cover, and they are beaten if they attempt to duck down or crouch behind trees or buildings. At other times, taking cover is permitted. There does not appear to be a pattern; it all depends on what orders the Holy Spirit gives Kony.

The children are told that those who obey the Holy Spirit will not be killed in battle: those who obey will be protected, while only those who have offended the Holy Spirit will die. Unknown numbers of captive children do die in the fighting, often killed by the bullets of government soldiers. Some of the children forced to the front are not even armed; caught in the crossfire, most of them die quickly.

Charles, fifteen:

After training in Sudan, the rebels sent me back to Uganda. I was to be part of a group that would attack trading centers in Kitgum and abduct new children. I was well-armed, a soldier already. As we were returning, we were attacked by government soldiers. The frontline was somewhere ahead of where I was, and the commander said, "Run, run to the front-line!" It didn't matter whether you had a gun or not. If you did not run they would beat you with sticks. Many children without guns had to run to the front.

You are not allowed to appear to be thinking too much. If you had a gun, you had to be firing all the time or you would be killed. And you were not allowed to take cover. The order from the Holy Spirit was not to take cover. You must have no fear, and stand up as you run into fire. This was because they said you would be protected by the Holy Spirit if you stood tall and had no fear. But if you took cover, the Holy Spirit would be angry and you would be shot dead by all the bullets.

So many, so many were killed.

Samuel, seventeen:

When the commanders sensed that there was an ambush ahead, they made us walk in a single line in front of them. The commanders were behind us directing us where to go. At the beginning you could hear gunshot sounds, and then, when you were right in the middle of the firing, you couldn't hear anything, but only feel the bullets rushing by you, and pieces of them falling on you, and burning your skin.

The UPDF had very sophisticated weapons--when we met them, we often just took cover and ran. The whole rebel group dispersed and ran. We found each other later in the bush and began walking back to Uganda. There were about twenty-five of us. Our group had been eighty people, but I don't know what happened to the others in the fighting. As we were walking, we met up with a rebel group near Palabek. They put us under arrest for retreating, and took our weapons away--that was our punishment.

Thomas, fourteen:

At times when the war was coming some would be selected to go fight. You were just selected at random. It did not matter if you were young or old, or if you had a gun or not, you just had to go fight.

Going to the battle you must clap your hands and sing. There are many songs: some are prayer songs, some soldier songs. Some are both. For an example: "God, God, God, you come and help us, we have prepared to come to you." If you fail to clap your hands while you sing, a bullet will hit your hand. If you fail to sing, a bullet will hit your mouth. If you fail to walk always forward, a bullet will hit your leg.

We were told not to take cover. When you started fighting, as soon as you would fall down to take cover, the bullets would cut you up. If you stood strong you would be protected and there would be no need to retreat.

Stephen, seventeen:

It happens like this: Kony himself, he says he works with the Holy Spirit, and it talks to him, and he translates to the soldiers. So some days he says: "Today, you must burn the earth and kill the people." That is the reason the rebels make so much destruction.

When you have been selected to go and fight, you have been selected by the Holy Spirit. And so they say to you, you will go and fight with these people, but nobody will die, you will all come back after the battle. We have the Holy Spirit and it is going to work on you so that you will be protected, if you have been having good behavior. Maybe the bullet will hit your leg or your shoulder--but you will not die.

So many children were killed.

When they were killed in the battle, Kony would say, "Maybe they made an offense against the Holy Spirit." If you obeyed the Holy Spirit in all ways, you could not be killed. So if you died maybe it was because you did not follow his orders.

We used to question ourselves: this man, Kony, why is he sending us to go kill our brothers, our sisters, our fathers and mothers, to burn their houses, eat their food? Why are we having to do this? But there was no answer at all. We cannot see an answer to that question.

Escape

It is impossible to know the percentage of abducted children who die while in rebel captivity. The lucky children are those who manage to escape. Some escape shortly after capture, while others escape only after several years with the rebels.

Children who try unsuccessfully to escape from the camp or while on the march are killed, apparently without exception. But during battles, the rebels appear to relax their normally draconian rules: children who become separated from the group, but are later found, are treated as strays rather than as potential escapees, and receive only mild punishment.

As a result, many children wait until fighting breaks out to steal away in the confusion. Some simply drop their guns at an appropriate moment and surrender to government soldiers (UPDF) or to the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA); the SPLA sends the children to Uganda People's Defense Force bases. Other children run away into the bush, and eventually approach a civilian to request assistance. Civilians usually bring escaped children to the Uganda People's Defense Force, although it is possible that some escaping children are killed by civilians who, viewing the children as rebels, shoot first and ask questions later. Several children spoke of near-escapes from civilians who wanted to kill them.

We heard scattered reports of captured children being charged with treason, although government spokespersons denied that this ever occurs. By all accounts, the Uganda People's Defense Force and Sudan People's Liberation Army treat child rebels who surrender or escape with sympathy, and release them to trauma counseling centers or their families after interrogation.

While fear and bewilderment had left many of the children we interviewed with only the blurriest memories of their experiences with the rebels, most children became animated and detailed in their descriptions of their escapes. For these children, perhaps, escape was a literal return to real life.

Lily, seventeen:

We were by the river between Gulu and Kitgum when we entered a UPDF ambush. People began to run and there were bombs everywhere. I ran into the deep water to hide from the bombs. I had a bag on my back that I was carrying, and it got wet and heavy and pulled me down until the water covered me. I dropped it and began to float in the river. Finally I reached a certain place where my legs touched a stone, and I stood there. The fighting was still going on, and bodies were falling into the water beside me. I saw some tall grasses in the shallow water, and I went and hid inside the tall grass. A UPDF airplane came, and I feared it would bomb me, so I stayed hidden until it left. Then there was no more noise of bullets and I got up.

I heard someone crying. It was a little girl who was drowning in the river, and she was crying, "Come and help me, the water is taking me and I am dying!" I could not reach her because the water was too fast and deep. There was an old man and a young boy of eight or nine, and the little girl called to the old man for help, but his legs were swollen and he could not walk. We had to leave her.

The old man said to me, "My daughter, pick for me that stick for me to lean on, and let us walk to Gulu town." So we began to walk with the young boy, who held a small jerrycan full of ground nuts. Then we heard voices, and UPDF people appeared, and began shooting at us. The young boy threw away the jerrycan and we began to run.

In the confusion I became separated from the old man and the young boy, and for a long time I was lost in the bush. I could not find any homes or anything to eat. I moved, and I could not find anyone. I thought, "I cannot move anymore." In the night I heard wild animals pass me. Once I came across a place where people had been cooking, and I thought I was saved, but when I looked closely I saw it was a fire that had been made by the rebels. You can tell because the rebels don't use stones for setting fires, because the malaikas say they must not: if stones are used in fires, they say they will burst like bombs upon you. Also, the malaikas forbid cigarettes, while at UPDF fires you see cigarette butts.

After many days I came across a village and saw two women. They were washing their hands to eat. I asked them, "What is the name of this place?" They told me to enter inside their home, and they told me to wash my hands and eat. They asked me many questions, and people from all through the village came to see me, then they took me to bathe and put me to bed. In the morning they said, "You cannot stay here, because the UPDF will harm us if we keep a rebel girl here. " So they took me to barracks, where I stayed for some weeks, and then they brought me back to my family in Gulu.

Teddy, thirteen:

As we were walking, we came to a thick forest of bamboo. I had been given old gumboots to wear, and they had become filled up with water, so I stopped to empty my boots and the rebels went on ahead. As I was emptying my boots, I heard a sudden noise of bullets being fired. I looked around and could see no rebels. There were bullets all around, flying past me. I began to run, and although a bullet hit me in the leg, I kept running. I ran until I came to a village. When people saw me, they screamed and ran away, so I shouted, "People, help me! I am a civilian like yourselves, I am only escaping from the rebels. Please take me to a leader here."

I had forgotten that I was still holding a gun. That is why people were running from me. Someone said, "If you are truly escaping, then throw down your gun!" So I did, and they led me to the home of the village leader.

All of my leg was swollen and I could not walk well now, but the wife of the leader was very kind and started nursing me. I spent the night at the home of the leader, and the next day he took me to a government detachment.

Catherine, seventeen:

There was to be a big fight that day. The Arabs and Kony's group and another group of rebels commanded by Juma Oris [leader of the West Nile Bank Front] had come together and were fighting the Sudan People's Liberation Army. They had ordered all the pregnant women to be taken in a lorry to Juba. We could hear the bombs from afar.

A woman ordered me to go get water, so we girls went to the well. We heard gunfire very close by and ran into the bush. I couldn't run well because I had hurt my foot when we were digging. I didn't know what to do and tried to go back to the camp. I hid in a trench.

I could hear tanks entering the camp. It was getting dark. Bullets are red at night. I was praying. I got up slowly when things became quiet. There were dead bodies all around in the camp. No one was left in the camp. The rebels had all run away or were dead. I heard people speaking Kiswahili, and I knew they must be the Sudan People's Liberation Army, because the Arabs and Kony's rebels don't speak Swahili. One of the SPLA found me and started yelling. Another SPLA said that if I was a girl, I might be one of the Aboke girls. I felt so happy when I heard this. They took me to the Uganda government soldiers, who were in Sudan, and then I was flown to Gulu.

Ellen, fourteen:

My escape happened in the fighting against the Sudan People's Liberation Army. We were sent to fetch water, and we said to each other, "Let us each run our own way." So we started running.

After a time nine of us found each other again, and we walked until we came to a certain home among the Dinkas. The villagers surrounded us and said we were rebels, and we should be lined up and killed. But an elder from that place came, and said, "You do not kill these young children!" So instead they asked us if we had eaten, and they made some porridge for us, then took us to the Sudan People's Liberation Army, and the Sudan People's Liberation Army put us in a vehicle and brought us back to Uganda.

The Future

Children who escape from rebel captivity are in poor shape: they are usually in lice-ridden rags, covered with sores, scarred from beatings and bullet wounds. According to World Vision's Robby Muhumuza, the children arrive at trauma counseling centers "sick, malnourished, with low appetite. They have guilt feelings, are depressed and with low self-esteem . . . . They have swollen feet, rough skin, chest infections . . . they tend to be aloof . . . with little confidence in themselves or others. They tend to lapse into absentmindedness as well as swift mood changes."⁽¹²⁾

Many of the children--especially the girls, who are routinely given to rebel leaders as "wives"--also have sexually transmitted diseases: "They arrive with gonorrhea, syphilis or sores, skin rash and complaints of abdominal pain and backache."⁽¹³⁾ At World Vision in Gulu, 70 to 80 percent of the children newly arriving at the center test positive for at least one sexually transmitted disease.⁽¹⁴⁾ Some of the girls are pregnant, while others, who tested negative for pregnancy, have stopped having their menstrual periods because of malnutrition and stress.⁽¹⁵⁾ The trauma counseling centers do not test the children for HIV, reasoning that after their experiences in the bush, the children are not yet psychologically ready to be told that they may have contracted a fatal illness. But with HIV infection rates of 25 percent in parts of Gulu and Kitgum, it is overwhelmingly likely that many of the children--especially the girls--have become infected.

Counselors and children's advocates criticize the Uganda People's Defense Force for not providing escaped children with adequate medical care while the children are in UPDF control. "They don't always give them treatment right away," says Richard Oneka, a counselor. "Sometimes by the time they reach us, they've been with the UPDF for weeks without seeing a doctor."⁽¹⁶⁾

The Uganda People's Defense Force also sometimes brings recently escaped children to appear at public rallies, to drum up popular support for the fight against the rebels. This practice, too, is sharply criticized by children's advocates: "They display the children, and read out their names, which only increases the likelihood of rebel reprisals against the child or his family," explains Paulinus Nyeko of Gulu Human Rights Focus. "Also, they give details on how the child escaped. The rebels come to hear of it, and that makes it hard for other children to escape. The army is just using the children."⁽¹⁷⁾

In its 1996 report to the U.N.Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Ugandan government affirmed its general commitment "to improve the lives of . . . child soldiers" and its "special concern" for children abducted by rebels.⁽¹⁸⁾ Nonetheless, the Uganda Child Rights NGO Network (UCRNN) has been critical of the government's response to the crisis in the north, noting that while the Museveni government provided "special services" for children who were caught up in civil wars of the early 1980s (when Museveni's guerrilla army fought the Obote and Okello regimes), "children caught up in the armed rebellion in northern Uganda since 1987 have not received adequate support from the government." According to UCRNN, "no government programmes or resources have been identified" for children abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army. UCRNN has called upon the government to "take concrete measures to address the needs of children caught up in armed conflict" and to "establish adequate responses for the long-term support of these children." ⁽¹⁹⁾

Some of the children who escape from the rebels go immediately home to their villages, and some return to their boarding schools, but many end up staying, for a time, at the trauma centers operated by World Vision or the Gulu Save the Children Organization (GUSCO). Conditions in the centers are poor: too many children in small huts and tents, too few trained counselors, and not enough for the children to do. At one center, children are taught basic skills like carpentry, tailoring and bicycle repair, but at the others, the children spend much of their time just sitting around, playing card games or staring into space.

But at least the centers feel safe to the children: at the centers, they are surrounded by other children who have gone through similar experiences, and cared for by supportive, non-judgmental adults. This is not always the case outside of the centers: according to Robby Muhumuza, children who return home sometimes find that other families with young relatives still in captivity are "jealous of those who have returned." Some people also blame the children for rebel atrocities. Those villagers who had themselves suffered at the hands of Lord's Resistance Army rebels are sometimes "antagonistic, labeling the children 'rebels.'"⁽²⁰⁾ Occasionally, children face physical threats from community members who identify them as perpetrators of atrocities.⁽²¹⁾

For girls, in a culture which regards non-marital sex as "defilement," the difficulties are even greater: reviled for being "rebels," the girls may also find themselves ostracized for having been "wives." They fear "shame, humiliation and rejection by their relatives and possible future husbands." They may suffer "continual taunts from boys and men [who say they are] used products that have lost their taste."⁽²²⁾

For many children, lack of community acceptance is the least of their troubles. "Many of these children have parents who were killed during their abductions," explains World Vision's Charles Wotman. "Others have families, but they have been displaced, and no one knows where they are."⁽²³⁾ Children without families worry that they will be unable to support themselves. Even those children with supportive homes and communities fear leaving the centers, because of the danger of being re-abducted and killed.

Sharon, thirteen:

I haven't been home since I was abducted, and I don't know where my family is. I met my cousin in Gulu and she told me that after I escaped, my uncle was killed. She said my mother and family ran away.

I want to finish my course in tailoring here, and try to look for a place to stay in Gulu town. I won't go home--I think I would be abducted again, and maybe killed.

Patricia, fifteen:

I'm afraid to go home because I'll be abducted again and killed. Home is not safe. My parents came to see me when I was in Gulu. They were so happy to see me. They said they thought I was dead. But they told me to stay away, to stay at [the trauma counseling center], because home is not safe.

Samuel, seventeen:

I've been here at the center for three weeks now. My mother came to see me last week. She told me that my other two brothers [who were abducted with me] have not returned. I hope they are still alive. I do not want to think about them.

My mother said that shortly after me and my brothers were abducted, the Lord's Resistance Army attacked our home again, and looted, and burned it down. My mother has moved to Atiak trading center. She says home is not yet secure, and that she will look for a home for me in Gulu town. I want to take vocational training here at the center.

I think the world should think about Kony's actions because he is abusing children so much. Children also want to enjoy peace like their fathers and mothers enjoyed when they were young.

In the short term, the children face many direct threats to their lives and livelihoods. But the long-term psychological effects of their experiences can only be guessed at. For many children, fears about the future are accompanied by memories of the past, memories of their own pain and of the atrocities they witnessed and took part in:

William, ten:

I am afraid to go back home to my village, because the rebels are still there in plenty. I fear they will kill me if they come to know of me here. I was in primary three when I was abducted, and I would like to go back to school, if there is somewhere that is safe. I don't know. I am sad now. The other thing I would like to say is that I experienced the deaths of many children. I wish there could be a solution.

Thomas, fourteen:

When I think back, the hardest thing was seeing other children being killed. That was the hardest thing. The second hardest thing was the brutal life--someone can be beaten on no grounds at all. I don't know what I will do, now: I would like to go back home but it is still unsafe, and I fear the rebels coming again. I am learning bicycle repair here, but when I must leave I fear having no tools. I do not know how I will support myself.

Molly, seventeen:

I have been back at school now for almost three months. I tend to forget, almost, that it ever happened to me. But it often comes to me suddenly. I look around in class and see the seats that are still empty because of our girls who are still in the bush, and I think that the bad things that for me are over are still happening to them, and then I feel sad and afraid.

Teddy, thirteen:

A thing I remember is how if you tried to escape, they would put you in the center of the circle and stab at you with bayonets or pangas. Sometimes little pieces of the bodies would come off. This is what I remember most often.

As for me now, I am very happy here for the time right now. I would like to go home and continue a normal education, but there is nobody to support me. There is nobody to care for me. I pray to God to help.

For other children, it isn't the waking memories that are worst, but the dreams. "These children don't want to remember what they've been through," says James Kazini, commander of the army's Fourth Division in Gulu. "My wife and I had several of the escaped girls staying in our house, before they went back to school, and they were all dreaming in the night: at one time, one of the girls woke us shouting, because she said she was seeing blood everywhere, blood floating out of the bed." ⁽²⁴⁾

Stephen, seventeen:

I went to the elders and I was cleansed: I had to be cleansed because I killed. It does not matter that you did not wish to kill. You still have killed and must become clean again. For me, I am older, and I think I will be all right. But I am thinking that it is the young boys and young girls who will not be all right.

I am very much interested to go back to school. So for now I am just here, and I am feeling okay. But I don't feel yet free, because of some dreams that can come at night, because of the bad things that happened to me in the bush. Killing people, dead bodies, the sound of gunshots--sometimes you wake up and it is as though that is what is still taking place. Life with the rebels was really very bad.

Timothy, fourteen

I don't know what I will do in the future. Since I've been here [at the trauma counseling center], I haven't seen my family, and am sad that they haven't come. I don't know anything about them--I have no news. I can't go home. I'll be re-abducted and killed straightaway. At least here, I feel safer than at home. I dream at night of being re-abducted, or that I am still a captive, walking somewhere.

Susan, sixteen:

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.

Relevant International Humanitarian Standards

The human rights abuses of the Lord's Resistance Army shock the conscience, and violate the most elementary principles of international humanitarian law. The LRA's abuses of children's rights are both too numerous and too self-evident to make an exhaustive list of relevant international human rights standards necessary. Most pertinently, however, the LRA's actions violate the provisions of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which lays out the minimum humanitarian rules applicable to internal armed conflicts:

In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions:

(1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.

To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:

(a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, or mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;

(b) taking of hostages;

(c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment;

(d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples.

(2) The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for.⁽²⁵⁾

Since Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions is binding on "each Party to the conflict"--that is, it is binding on both governmental and non-governmental forces--the Lord's Resistance Army currently stands in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law.

Currently, the Geneva Conventions and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child establish fifteen as the minimum age at which states that have ratified these treaties may recruit children into their armed forces. Since the Lord's Resistance Army is a nongovernmental force, it is not a party to these treaties (although it remains bound by Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, cited above). Nonetheless, these treaties establish clear principles of customary international law with regard to the use of children as combatants. Serious violations of the rules and customs of war, including the forced recruitment of children into armed groups, should be punished by law.

The 1996 United Nations Study on the Impact of Armed Conflict on Children documented the tragedy of child soldiers throughout the world; as Graca Machel, who headed the study, says, "War violates every right of the child--the right to life, the right to grow up in a family environment, the right to health, the right to survival and full development and the right to be nurtured and protected, among others."⁽²⁶⁾ In the study, Graca Machel also recommended that the minimum age for recruitment and participation in armed forces be raised from fifteen to eighteen.

It is Human Rights Watch's position that no one under the age of eighteen should be recruited (either voluntarily or involuntarily) into any armed forces, whether governmental or nongovernmental in nature.⁽²⁷⁾

Piny dong oloyo acholi woko pi lweny man. ("The Acholi are helpless because of the insecurity in the north.")

-Title of a song written by children at the World Vision Center at Kiryandongo

Who will protect us? Even in Amin's time, we were not killed like this.

- Hon. Livingstone Okello-Okello, MP for Kitgum⁽²⁸⁾

Abducted children are not the only victims of the conflict in the north. The conflict, which has now persisted for over a decade, has taken the lives of thousands of civilians of all ages. Some have been killed by the rebels during raids; others have been caught in the crossfire between rebels and government soldiers. While at times several weeks go by with few rebel attacks, during other periods, the death toll is astounding: during a single two-week period in July 1996, for instance, violence took the lives of forty soldiers, thirty-two rebels and 225 civilians. Between January 6 and January 10, 1997, 400 civilians were slaughtered during a rebel attack in Kitgum.⁽²⁹⁾

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: relief agencies estimate that over 240,000 people are currently displaced from their homes and villages,⁽³⁰⁾ while some local officials estimate that the figure is as high as two million displaced people.⁽³¹⁾ In Kitgum, nearly half of the displaced people are children, and more than a third of those children have been orphaned by the war.⁽³²⁾

The infrastructure in Gulu and Kitgum is in a state of collapse. The constant danger of land mines and rebel ambushes has made many of the region's few roads unsafe for travel. Rebel attacks destroyed thousands of homes. Agriculture has come to a standstill in parts of the region, since the insecurity has forced people to flee their homes and abandon their fields.

Education, too, has stopped in many places. The rebels target schools and teachers, and in the last year, in Gulu alone, more than seventy-five schools have been burnt down by the rebels, and 215 teachers have been killed. Many more teachers have been abducted or have fled the region. An estimated 60,000 school-aged children have been displaced, and during 1996, the number of functioning schools in Gulu fell from 199 to sixty-four.⁽³³⁾

Attacks on schools are an efficient way for the rebels to abduct many children at once. In October 1996, for instance, the rebels raided St. Mary's, a Catholic girls' boarding school in the town of Aboke, in Apac district. The rebels arrived in the middle of the night, and entered the school through a window. They destroyed a of school vehicle, ransacked the school clinic, attempted to burn down a number of school buildings, and abducted 139 girls, aged mostly fifteen to seventeen.⁽³⁴⁾ The scale of the Aboke abductions was unusual, as was the rebel incursion into Apac, but the rebel tactic of raiding schools is typical, and has gravely disrupted the north's educational system.

The health care system in the north, always rudimentary, has almost collapsed. Many of those who are wounded in the fighting receive little or no medical attention; as a result, figures giving the number of dead and wounded are almost certainly too low, since many deaths and injuries never come to the attention of the authorities. Rebel raids on clinics and dispensaries have diminished the store of medicines available, and the instability has caused many health workers to flee. This has disrupted most basic non-emergency services, including immunization campaigns. Officially, there are thirty rural health units in Gulu, but as of May 1997, only fourteen remained in operation.⁽³⁵⁾

The results are predictable: by almost any health care indicator, Gulu and Kitgum lag far behind other parts of Uganda. At the end of 1995, for instance, the infant mortality rate in Gulu was 172 per thousand live births, compared to eighty per thousand live births in Kampala. Most estimates suggest that the HIV infection rate in the region hovers at around 25 percent of the population.⁽³⁶⁾ And AIDS deaths compound all of the region's other problems, further straining health care resources, rendering immune-compromised people more vulnerable to other diseases, and leaving still more children orphaned.

The health crisis has been greatly exacerbated by the government policy of encouraging civilians to leave rural areas and move to "protected camps" near Uganda People's Defense Force military installations. The rationale behind the protected camps is straightforward: by concentrating the civilian population in a few well-defined areas, the army hopes both to simplify the task of protecting people from rebel attacks and make it harder for the rebels to find food by raiding villages. But in practice, the protected camps have been, at best, a mixed blessing for the internally displaced people of Gulu and Kitgum: tens of thousands of them thronged to the camps, only to find that virtually no provision had been made for sanitation or sustenance.

In the protected camp at Pabbo, in Gulu district, for instance, a displaced population of over 30,000 relies for water on only two boreholes, one of which was not functional as of May. The likelihood of any improvement in the situation is minimal, because the district lacks the staff and equipment to fix breakdowns: according to the Gulu Disaster Management Committee, "most of the [district's] field crew were laid off in the recent restructuring exercise [and] all the vehicles attached to the water dept. in this district are broken down except one which is moving but in very bad mechanical condition." Along with the paltry water supply in Pabbo, no latrines had been created for the camp. And Pabbo is not unusual; according to the Gulu Disaster Management Committee, "[T]he whole situation is pathetic . . . . Suffering in long queues, and swamps of flies over the stinking garbage and human excreta is the order of the day in most camps."⁽³⁷⁾

Unsurprisingly, limited water, poor sanitary facilities and minimal provision of medical care in the protected camps has led to thousands of deaths each month.⁽³⁸⁾ Ten of the twenty-four camps in Gulu district are situated in areas with no health care facilities at all, and a recent survey in three of the camps found that 41.9 percent of the children were malnourished. Epidemics of measles, malaria and dysentery kill off many of the weakest in the camps In Pabbo alone, there were more than four thousand deaths during the month of February 1997 (more recent figures are not available).⁽³⁹⁾

A local doctor's words give some sense of the scope of the humanitarian crisis in the north:

In 1995, we saw a total of 335 war injuries at this hospital. In 1996, we saw 117 victims of land mines, and 515 gunshot wounds. This year, from January through late April, we saw fourteen mine victims and 155 other war wound victims. Remember those are just the people who we see--most people never come to the hospital.

The majority of children come to us because of the indirect effects of the war. When there is inadequate food, children are usually the first to become ill. We see epidemics, malnutrition, malaria, and most of the outbreaks start in the protected camps. More children are sick, and those who are sick are sicker than usual. Now the malnutrition wards are full of children from the camps. In the camps, children are very sick; many of them are dying. Most of them never get to the hospital.

The government thought that protected camps would deny the rebels access to support and information, but it was done in such a hurry, and without planning, that really it was a source of great suffering to the people. Last year, when people began surging to the towns, the population in Gulu town swelled by 70,000 people, and a measles epidemic struck. About 20 percent of the children brought into the hospital died. In the villages, maybe half of the children who got sick died, because they got no medical care.

If there had been prior planning, if there had been planning for sanitation, food, water, and medicines . . . . but by herding people into the camps, just like that, this cost a lot of lives. Some of the camps have only a few soldiers nearby, and people say, "They are using us as human shields." So if the rebels try to attack the soldiers, it is civilians who are killed. And if the people leave the camp, if they even just go home for a day to try to find food, then they are targeted by the rebels for having gone to the camps. Many people lose their lives that way.

The problem is that we don't see an end to the problem. When you have a problem and you think it's coming to an end, then you say, let's persevere. But I really don't see how this is going to end. I foresee unlimited suffering . . . the last two years have been the worst in ten years. We cannot do anything, we cannot go outside in the community, we cannot do our work. We are trapped, we can't move on the roads. So now the sense of hopelessness is the biggest problem with the people. And this is the easiest situation for the rebels to operate in. The people have no will except to surrender.

It has to stop, it must stop. It is painful to live in a place where the rebels are around, and you have to hide your own children in the bush and bring food to them, to try to keep them safe. The rebels' main interest is in the children, it's how they recruit. Children are malleable, they can be easily managed. The rebels don't care if some die: they just abduct more. And there is really no protection for these children. If they were taking adults, I would not care as much, I would perhaps say that this kind of thing is just part of the problem with us here in Uganda--but these children are just used. They are not the ones who voted for Museveni. If our country is troubled the fault is not theirs.

When you are in the medical field, you are trained always to look for solutions. But I cannot see one here. ⁽⁴⁰⁾

According to Paulinus Nyeko of Gulu Human Rights Focus, civilians frequently complain of harassment and human rights abuses by the Ugandan People's Defense Force, including robbery, rape and torture.⁽⁴¹⁾ Since the focus of our investigation was on the abduction of children, we were not able to look into these charges, but we asked military officials if they were aware of them. Lieutenant Bantirinza Shaban, the public relations officer for the UPDF in Gulu, confirmed that he was aware of such allegations, and attributed any such incidents to "communication problems" stemming from "ethnic difficulties and language differences."⁽⁴²⁾

Colonel James Kazini, commander of the UPDF Fourth Division, had a different explanation: he attributed such abuses to the Acholi soldiers, saying, "If anything, it is local Acholi soldiers causing the problems. It's the cultural background of the people here: they are very violent. It's genetic." He expressed his regret that Ugandan law prohibits summary justice against soldiers found to have committed abuses: "We used to have field court martials, and try and sentence them right in the market place. We used to just kill them. But now the president does not allow it . . . soldiers accused of misbehaving are taken to the police and charged."⁽⁴³⁾

But where is the world? Why do they not like the Acholi? What have we done that the world should just watch us suffer?- Andres Banya, Acholi Development Association ⁽⁴⁵⁾

During our stay in Uganda, we were struck repeatedly by the contrast between north and south. The international press has been full of glowing reports on the prosperity and stability Uganda has enjoyed under President Museveni, and the atmosphere in Kampala appears to bear this out: the streets are bustling, there is construction everywhere, and Kampala enjoys a reputation as one of Africa's safest cities.

From the air, the south is a blanket of green farms, plantations and forests, with small houses dotting the landscape. Flying north, the scene gradually changes. Houses become mixed with huts, and ultimately give way to huts entirely. In Gulu, the observer sees a landscape filled with burnt huts, deserted compounds, and abandoned fields. There is virtually no traffic on the few roads.

It's only a four-hour drive from Kampala to Gulu or Kitgum, but it might as well be a thousand miles. Cultural and linguistic differences ensure that residents of southern Uganda have few social reasons to venture north, and the relative under-development of the far north makes it unlikely that southerners will visit Gulu or Kitgum for commercial reasons. The danger of mines and ambushes along northern roads further diminishes southerners' incentive to visit their Acholi compatriots, and the lack of telecommunications infrastructure in the north makes even phone contact rare.

As journalist Cathy Watson observes, "There's no Acholi elite in the south, and so there's no one to put the north on the agenda or keep it in people's minds. The north just slides off the map."⁽⁴⁶⁾ These factors, in combination, mean that southern Ugandans often have little awareness of the atrocities and the humanitarian crisis in the north.

The apparent senselessness of the conflict in the north exacerbates the problem. Although they are ostensibly dedica