Children play in a hospital compound outside Gulu, Uganda. ...click any image for a photo gallery

GULU, UGANDA - Every night as the sun goes down in Gulu, Uganda you can see a long line of children from the surrounding villages snake their way through the dusk and dusty roads into town. They are looking for a place to spend the night where they may be safe from the abductions, rape, robbery and torture at the hands of a rebel group called The Lord’s Resistance Army….and sometimes even their own government soldiers who have been known to prey on the Uganda’s internal refugees.

During the day most of these children are in their villages, going to school, or just roaming the dirt streets, but at night they seek sanctuary in this northern town, not far from the Sudan border and on the front line of the ongoing battle between Uganda’s UPDF army and the LRA. The children seek out protection on the grounds and in the compounds of hospitals, churches, government buildings or camps set up by the various international aid organizations providing humanitarian assistance to the 1.6 million internally displaced persons (IDP’s are refugees in their own country) driven from their homes since this 18 year old conflict escalated in 1996

At St. Mary’s, a long established Italian missionary hospital (where the children greet you with an unexpected “CAIO!”) in Lacore, just west of Gulu, you walk amongst shadows, dark figures moving around the dimly lit compound and hospital grounds. When your eyes adjust, the heaps of rags in the shadows of unlit corners you thought were garbage are actually thousands of people sleeping. A barely perceptible rustling, the fleeting glimpse of a moving hand or flash of eyes or the crying of a baby the only thing to give them away.

Make your way through these living shadows, the fleeting stench of disease that assaults your nostrils and the abandoned building that once housed an Ebola outbreak, to the rear of the hospital grounds, to a guarded steel gate and you will find an emergency shelter that is a village of 2000 children, down from 6000 in recent weeks. This compound was set up by a team led by Cameron Kiss, a 31 year old Australian working as a field coordinator for the Swiss section of the international medical aid agency, Medecines Sans Frontieres (MSF). It was an attempt to provide a safe place for unaccompanied children only. For even outside these walls, but still in the hospital compound, the younger children are preyed upon by adults and small gangs of teenage boys. This place is only for those under 16 and who have made the trip down the dusty, dangerous roads by themselves. Some as young as 4 years old can be seen making their way through the night with a blanket on their heads. This night we notice a lot of kids with new blankets which means some aid group has been handing them out in the villages.

THE LIMITS OF HOPE AND DISPAIR
In a plastic tarp tent with a filthy curtain for a door and a cold fluorescent tube for light, four young counselors face their own doubts and limits while trying to help children deal with the horrors they have witnessed and endured. They sit and talk with Dr. Carrie Bernard, a family practice MD from Brampton, Ontario, who has become their councilor, trying to guide them through their difficult task along with her other duties as a doctor with MSF in the region.

All have worked with children at risk before but there was always some other support or resources. These children are the worse traumatized with PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) they have seen and there this is no food, medical program, family support or supporting NGO. Bernard says, “if these kids had HIV we could have all the food we want for them.”

One of the councilors, Patrick, an intense 28 year old and former abductee of the LRA, says, “these children even have it worse than I did. At least I was in a re-integration program where I had a place to live, had food and was getting training. I had an idea what my future would be.” “These children are simply abandoned to the world to survive by their own wits.”

REIGN OF TERROR
The LRA are unconscionably brutal with their use of murder, rape, abductions and mutilations in the terror they inflict on the people of northern districts of Uganda. After witnessing the conditions people are living in the district of Lira and Pader, areas most recently hit by the fighting, United Nations under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs Jan Egeland called Northern Uganda the “largest neglected humanitarian emergency in the world”.

Surveys conducted by MSF - Holland this past October in 6 internally displaced people’s camps in most remote parts of Lira and Pader found a “crude mortality rate of 2.8 deaths/10,000 people per day for the general population. According to the internationally agreed benchmarks a rate of more than 2 per 10.000 a day is classed as an ‘emergency out of control’. The mortality rate was even more alarming among children under five years of age at 5.4 deaths/10,000 children a day, with the rate as high as 10.5 deaths/10,000 children a day in one location.”

Not surprising as an estimated 60% of the population are infected with malaria which is more fatal in children due to lower resistance.

The stories of horror seem endless. From dismemberment of lips, ears, tongues, and genitals of those suspected of working for the government, to a school head master butchered, cooked and consumed in front of his pupils as an initiation ritual into the LRA of one group of new child conscripts.
But the LRA’s favorite tactic is the abduction of children. The boys become child soldiers and the girls …slaves. There is even evidence emerging that some of the children are sold to Sudanese slavers in exchange for weapons and supplies. Indeed, the conflict in Uganda has many ties to the conflict in South Sudan and the Darfur region.

The Lord’s Resistance Army (formerly the Holy Spirit Movement, founded by Alice Lawena who sought to establish a theocratic state based on the 10 Commandments) is a fundamentalist Christian terrorist group led by former alter boy Joseph Kony and based in Sudan. Kony is the nephew of Lawena and is said to take his devine instruction from a large rock on the road between Gulu and Awere. The irony is that they are armed and supported by the fundamentalist Islamic Sudanese government.

The word war should be used very loosely here. Like so many other “wars” in the past few decades it is not a fight between armies but “armies” with no other objective than sweeping through regions attacking unarmed civilians (usually woman and children) causing refugee crises with its attendant famines and diseases.

With no solution to the problem of the LRA in the north, a new rebel movement in the south and Museveni having a falling out with the powerful Paul Kagame of Rwanda, clashing with Rwandan backed militias in the unstable and resource rich DR Congo, there seems to be little relief for the people of Uganda. There will be many more people on the dust choked back roads of Uganda and many more children fleeing the terror of yet another brutal civil war in Africa.