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Uganda: The Horror
In Uganda, tens of thousands of children have been abducted, 1.6 million people herded into camps and thousands of people killed: A dispatch from the world's "largest neglected humanitarian emergency"
Night after night, children in northern Uganda hide from the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a murderous cult that has been fighting the Ugandan government and terrorizing civilians for nearly two decades. Led by Joseph Kony, a self-styled Christian prophet believed to be in his 40s, the LRA has captured and enslaved more than 20,000 children, most under age 13, U.N. officials say. Kony and his foot soldiers have raped many of the girls�Kony has said he is trying to create a "pure" tribal nation�and brutally forced the boys to serve as guerrilla soldiers. The LRA has killed or tortured children caught trying to escape.
With the U.S. State Department scheduled to report on the crisis to Congress this February, journalist Paul Raffaele reports on the continuing crisis for SMITHSONIAN. He spent weeks in Uganda last November, and in a powerful, and at times disturbing story he describes how the LRA's terror tactics and the bloody clashes between the rebels and the army have caused 1.6 million people, or about 90 percent of northern Uganda's population, to flee their homes and become refugees in their own country. One medical aid group said the conditions in the government camps were "beyond an acute emergency."
"To spend time in northern Uganda and learn firsthand about the situation," Raffaele writes, "is to become horrified by the atrocities and appalled by the lack of effective response." |
