Things Fall Apart

by hilzoy

From the International Herald Tribune:

"It sounds like some incredibly dark Grimm Brothers fairy tale. Each night before the sun sets, thousands of children march in grim procession along dusty roads that take them from their rural villages to larger towns. The children are afraid to sleep in their beds, terrified that they will be abducted by a madman who will force them into a marauding guerrilla army that hunts down their friends, families, and loved ones.

The fleeing children sleep in churches, empty schools, makeshift shelters, and alleyways. And every morning at sunrise, the children walk home, free for another day."

These are the 'Night Commuters' of northern Uganda:

(photo copyright Bruno Stevens.)

For years, they have walked from their homes to the nearest large town each night to avoid being kidnapped by Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army, which uses children as soldiers, servants, and sex slaves. Normally, there are 30-40,000 night commuters; more when times are bad.

Times have not been so bad recently, but they are about to get worse.

The war in northern Uganda has been going on, in one form or another, for decades. It seems to have started in 1986, when Museveni (the current President) took over Uganda. His predecessor had been an ethnic Acholi, from northern Uganda; Museveni himself, however, was from a different tribe. The Acholi were worried both by their loss of power and by the possibility of reprisals for atrocities they had committed. At this point, an Acholi spirit medium named Alice Auma was commanded by the spirit she was channelling, a dead Italian officer named Lakwena, to form an army:

"Their methods were unorthodox. Lakwena, giving orders that his soldiers wrote down neatly in school exercise books, forbade them to use weapons. They did not need to, because they were pure. Each man had burned his witchcraft charms, and had appeased the spirit of anyone he had killed previously; and as the army marched into battle, singing Catholic hymns and with their bare torsos smothered in shea-nut oil, the bullets of the enemy would bounce right off them. Nature, too, was on their side. Water, if they were polite to it and “bought” each river they crossed with coins and shells, would block the enemy or drown him. Stones, if they threw them, would explode like grenades."

Strange to say, the enemy's bullets did not bounce off them, and her army was routed. Its remnants, under the command of Auma's cousin, Joseph Kony, regrouped as the Lord's Resistance Army, and seems to have some of the same sorts of beliefs. Here's a seventeen year old ex-LRA soldier describing the LRA's preparations for battle:

"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."

Initially, the LRA seems to have had some popular support among the Acholi, but their tactics, in particular their abductions of children and their habit of cutting off the hands, noses, lips, and ears of alleged collaborators, destroyed it. Apparently, Kony believes that his mission is not just to overthrow the Ugandan government and replace it with a government based on the Ten Commandments (?!), but to purify his people, who have suffered the overwhelming majority of his atrocities. (Whenever I hear the leaders of movements talk about cleansing and purifying, and they are not talking about food preparation or lab safety or something, I get very nervous.)

Around 66,000 children have been kidnapped by the LRA. They seem to be used as soldiers, porters, servants, and sex slaves. They are often "initiated" by being forced to kill people. Thus:

"Some of the children, while too afraid to refuse the orders of the LRA, nevertheless spoke later with difficulty about performing these killings. They feared the spirits of the dead children and possible revenge. They had recurring memories of the brutality they were forced to perform. James K. told Human Rights Watch:

"[A] group of children escaped. Two girls, aged fourteen, were [re]captured. They were given to the group of child abductees and we were told that we must kill them with clubs. Every one of the new recruits was made to participate. We were warned that if we ever tried to escape, we would be killed in the same manner."

According to seventeen-year-old Samuel B., he was spared from killing personally-but he was forced commit another reprehensible act: to mutilate the corpse of a boy beaten to death by other child abductees, because the boy had tried to escape. "One time I was ordered to cut up a dead body with a knife. I was then forced to pick up the pieces of flesh and throw them down on the ground to show my loyalty."

Mark T., also seventeen years old, spoke of one death by trampling, also administered by new recruits under orders, which occurred when the abductees were marching towards Pajule in Pader district. The eighteen-year-old male victim had tried to escape. Mark T. said, "Soldiers laid him on the ground and told us to step on him. All the new recruits participated-we trampled him to death."

During his time with the LRA, other children escaped, and seven of these were caught. They were all killed, either by or in front of the other young abductees: "Two were hacked to death with machetes and five were clubbed or trampled. We were either made to participate or watch the killings. The youngest recruit killed was maybe nine or ten years old.""

This is why tens of thousands of children walk for miles every single evening.

This war has been going on for twenty years.

The LRA spent some time in that sort of civil war limbo in which they are too strong to be wiped out, but not strong enough to do more than make the lives of everyone around them a misery. (Thank God for that.) They survived for a while in part because their army, being composed largely of kidnapped children, is endlessly replenishable. More recently, however, the Sudanese government began to support them as payback for Uganda's support of the rebels of South Sudan.

The death rates are staggering. From March 2006:

"Rates of violent death in northern Uganda are three times higher than those reported  in Iraq following the Allied Invasion in 2003. (The violent death rate for northern Uganda is currently at 146 deaths per week, (0.17 violent deaths per 10,000 people per day). This is three times higher than in Iraq, where  the  incidence  of  violent death in the period following the allied invasion was estimated to be 0.052 per 10,000 people per day."

Recently, it seemed as though this nightmare might end. Last June, the LRA and the Ugandan government began talks aimed at a ceasefire in Juba in South Sudan, and they signed a ceasefire last August. People started to leave the refugee camps, and to imagine the possibility of leading normal lives.

However, the talks have broken down, the ceasefire expires on Feb. 28, and the LRA has announced that it will not sign on to any extension of the truce. Its members seem to be leaving their camps in the Southern Sudan, and heading for the Central African Republic, which has its own civil war, complete with child soldiers and general misery.

***

It's not entirely clear why the talks broke down. The South Sudanese government seems to have made the LRA unwelcome, and as a result the LRA has demanded a new venue for the talks. Each side has accused the other of bad faith, and for all I know both may be right. However, there are two other factors. First, the International Criminal Court has issued warrants for Kony and several of his top commanders. Jonathan Edelstein has some interesting posts about the issues this raises for the negotiations.

Second, these negotiations have not gotten a lot of support from the international community. There's an interesting discussion at the Washington Post's PostGlobal blog, featuring a bunch of people who have been involved with this issue; it's very much worth reading. There's a pretty clear consensus that the international community generally, and the UN and the US in particular, have just neglected the issue. No one involved denies that the parties are primarily responsible for the conduct of the talks, but pretty much everyone seems frustrated that neither we nor the UN have done much of anything to help this process forward.

That's a real shame, since this seems like precisely the sort of problem that some real high-level attention might help to resolve. Even leaving aside the obvious moral and humanitarian reasons, we have, I think, a very clear interest in working to solve problems like this, that fester away out of view until -- well, until they either explode or are resolved. One never knows which problems are going to explode, of course, but the example of Afghanistan might suggest to us that it's a good idea to pay attention to horrible simmering nightmares before they become our nightmares.

Uganda is in the middle of a large troubled area of Africa, next to such trouble spots as the Sudan and the Congo, and near the Horn of Africa. (Here's a handy map, for those of you who don't know African geography cold.) If nothing else moves us to action, the idea of a large numbers of young people wandering around a volatile region with post-traumatic stress disorder ought to. Though of course, I'd rather the idea of working to end a source of misery for millions of people was motivation enough.

As things are, however, it seems likely that the truce will expire and the war will go on. And that's a tragedy.

***

Grace Note: In the course of researching this, I found all sorts of horror, but also stories of astonishing grace. Consider this man, who was kidnapped by the LRA.

When he was released, his various wounds untreated and rotting, he found his way to a hospital:

"My thoughts were filled with bitterness. I hated life and wished that I had just been killed. All I wanted was to commit suicide and die.

My wife started taking care of me in the hospital. I had asked her to leave me alone, explaining that because I was deformed, I couldn't be her husband anymore.

She refused. Over and over she rejected my request, saying that the baby she was carrying for us, the child we were expecting, needed a father.

She kept saying that I hadn't asked to be deformed like that and someday God would let me know why I had been put through such an ordeal."

May none of us ever have our generosity and decency tested in that way, but if it is, may we all find the grace that his wife managed to find, in the face of the unspeakable.

Comments

[Priest]

hilzoy, how you have the psychological fortitude to seek out and pass on such information continues to amaze and humble me.

I despair for humanity when I read such things; the veneer of what we call "civilization" seems quite thin and fragile.

[Abidemi]

I can't imagine.

[Lars]

What on earth do you do with a story like this? It makes me simultaneously want to throw someone through a wall and to find one of these kids, hug them, and never let anything bad happen to them again. But I know I'm completely useless and there is nothing I can do that will ever change situations like this.

[OCSteve]

No one involved denies that the parties are primarily responsible for the conduct of the talks, but pretty much everyone seems frustrated that neither we nor the UN have done much of anything to help this process forward.

How do you go about changing that?

The media is not writing much about it. 23 hits on Google News.

Compared to 7,570 for “Scooter Libby” and 22,276 for “Anna Nicole Smith”. Nice.

A search of all web sites yields 157,000 hits: Some foreign press, a few TV news shows, and a bunch of humanitarian groups. (26.8 million for ANS).

The blogosphere has been successful at pushing much less significant issues into the MSM, but I don’t see that happening with something like this. Sadly, blogs are about politics more than anything else these days and if something doesn’t have a political angle for one side or the other there is no traction (present company excluded of course).

Technorati currently has only 743 hits for this search and many are just MySpace pages. Searching only blogs “with a lot of authority” yields 14 results.

Not a scientific study by any means but I’d say that public awareness of this issue is pretty minimal.

Not to be the pessimist – but short of a huge public outcry, attention from the UN or even just the US is not likely to happen.

Maybe a letter writing campaign to try to get local and regional papers and news shows to highlight the issue would have some impact?

More likely, what we need is for Madonna or Angelina Jolie to go and adopt a couple of these kids. That may get them some attention. Maybe Oprah could build them a school…

[hilzoy]

OCSteve: the lack of attention in the blogosphere is something I thought I could change, at least in my small corner of it.

More generally: we need to elect people who notice these things. And the best way I can think of for that to happen is to turn ourselves into an electorate who notice them. I admit it's hard, what with the endless media focus on Anna Nicole Smith, but hey, I think to myself: why not try?

The thing about the lack of media focus that really gets to me is: this is not an average day in the life of this story. The ceasefire expires the day after tomorrow. The talks have been disintegrating for months. Still, nothing, or next to nothing.

[cleek]

I think to myself: why not try?

keep at it.

it'll start sinking in, eventually.

[Nell]

The blogger most likely to follow this is Jonathan Edelstein of Head Heeb (link is the most recent post of his I could find on the topic via Google, but because his intra-blog search isn't working for me, there may well be more recent posts).

I gave a heads-up to this post in comments of his current top post, in which another commenter reports on Uganda's recent offer to send troops as peacekeepers in Somalia. That seems odd for a government facing an armed opposition near the end of an eroding cease-fire.

[Jonathan Edelstein]

I responded as follows to Nell over at my place:

I'm afraid I've been derelict in writing about Uganda over the last few months. I've been following the situation, but it's been hard to tell from here how much of the ups and downs in the negotiations were for real and how much represented posturing by the parties. The signs now are very bad, though, given that the LRA is actually evacuating the assembly points. If the war resumes, it would be a catastrophe on so many levels, not only for the child soldiers and their victims but for the the two million Acholi villagers who were just starting to go home and normalize their lives after years of forced migration to government-run camps.

I'd agree with Hilzoy that this is a case where high-powered international mediation could have made a difference. The southern Sudanese government, which is trying to increase its profile in regional diplomacy, was able to provide a venue for the talks, but it couldn't offer the guarantees necessary to seal an agreement. As I argued in my comment of 23 February, part of the reason for Uganda's participation in the Somali peacekeeping mission could be to attract international attention to the northern rebellion and obtain American and/or European aid in bringing the LRA back to the table. On the other hand, if the LRA conflict begins again in earnest, it could jeopardize the UPDF's ability to lead the Somali mission. Museveni is walking a very narrow tightrope.

Anyway, the best place to look for Uganda coverage is the Ugandan online media. I'd recommend the Monitor, which is independently owned, but the government-run New Vision can be useful for getting a read on government policy. The UN-run IRIN Uganda is also a good source of humanitarian news. I'll try to put something more complete together this week, although probably not today.

[someotherdude]

I send informative posts to the e-mail communities (Christian students, leftist students, stay-at-home-fathers, B-Boys & DJ's, urban artists, OLD Marines) I am a part of.

So, they do not go to waste.

(Head Heeb is one of the best international bLogs.)

[Meagan]

Hi all, I read on the Washington Post site that it was okay to share this with you here, so my apologies if it is not.

After reading about this tragedy there are many that would like to help in some way. There is an organization called Invisible Children and they are actively seeking to end this war, child soldiering and save the lives of the people of Northern Uganda. They also have a documentary that assists them in telling the story.

Please visit www.invisiblechildren.com to find out more and how you can help.

[Jonathan Edelstein]

I've updated here, for those who may be interested.

[dutchmarbel]

youtube

[Karen Mireau]

Thank you for raising awareness of the plight of the children of Uganda! I am currently presenting a children's picture book titled "The Truth-Telling Tree" to publishers, which was funded by the International Book Project, Inc. (www.intlbookproject.org) that showcases artwork and expressions by Ugandan children. I would be happy to share this with you if you are interested.

Again, thank you for the work you do!

Karen Mireau