The Independent
By Tim Judah in Kitgum, northern Uganda
23 October 2004
War, cannibalism, sex slavery and massacres were supposed to have been consigned to Uganda's past. The country has been touted as one of Africa's success stories, combating Aids and bringing relative prosperity to Kampala. But away from the capital, a horrific civil war is claiming the lives of tens of thousands of children, the United Nations warned yesterday.
"Northern Uganda
the biggest neglected humanitarian crisis in the world," said Jan Egelund, the UN's under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs. "The situation is a moral outrage."
Few people outside Uganda know that in the north the government is fighting a fanatical and murderous cult - the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) - whose fighting force is made up in large part of abducted children. Up to 95 per cent of the population in these areas have been forced from their homes by the war. Nearly two million Ugandans, out of a population of 24.7 million, now live in refugee camps for fear of being attacked and killed in their villages.
Children have told how they had been forced by the rebels at gunpoint to abduct and murder other children and to drink their blood. A former commander of the rebel group explained that he had forced villagers to chop up, cook and eat their neighbours before he killed them, too.
The LRA is led by the self-proclaimed prophet Joseph Kony, who says he wants Uganda to live by the laws of the Ten Commandments. He and most of his fighters are from northern Uganda's Acholi tribe, as are most of their victims. Mr Kony says he is guided by spirits who tell him what to do and whom to kill. The UN says he may have abducted more than 20,000 children, 90 per cent of LRA fighters.
More:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/story.jsp?story=575237
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