{UAH} IDDI AMIN NEVER TARGETED LANGIs/ACHOLIs, THEY TARGETED HIM {---Series ninety seven }

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At age 14 Charlotte Awino got her first kill and the girl she murdered was older than her. She was ordered with 29 other girls to gather stones and beat her to death because she one time tried to escape, they gathered the stones and whacked her to death. Steve Rabey wrote this report in Christian Research Institute paper.

 

Ugandans we need to  discuss Acholi violence but candidly.

 

Terrorizing the Innocents in Uganda

Article ID: JAL110 | By: Steve Rabey

EQUIP Others:

This article first appeared in the News Watch column of the Christian Research Journal, volume28, number2(2005). For further information or to subscribe to the Christian Research Journal go to: http://www.equip.org

 

Thousands of his devoted supporters see Joseph Kony, rebel leader of Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army, as a prophet of God who is working to fight government injustice and preparing to usher in a golden age of peace under the rule of the Ten Commandments. Millions of other people in the African continent, as well as growing numbers of international aid workers, see Kony as a terrorist, a madman, or the Devil incarnate, who combines Christian apocalyptism with elements of animism, witchcraft, and voodoo to create a deadly blend of radicalism, violence, death, and destruction. No matter what one thinks about Kony, it is clear that during the past 18 years he has been leading a brutal rebellion against the Ugandan government.

The seeds of the present conflict in Uganda were planted in 1986 when the nation's current leader, Yoweri Museveni, took power by force. Those who had battled Museveni fled, many fearing they would be sought out and punished. In time, many of these rebels rallied around a spiritualist named Alice Lakewenya who founded the 7,000-member Holy Spirit Battalion.

Battalion members were told that God would protect them even though they fought armed only with sticks, stones, and voodoo dolls. They were also told that Lakewenya's "Holy Oil" would render the government soldiers' bullets harmless.

The Battalion marched on the capital of Kampala but was soundly defeated in 1987. Out of the ashes of this failure arose a new rebel group, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), led by Lakewenya's nephew, Joseph Kony.

An estimated 25,000 children have been forcibly enlisted in Kony's army as soldiers, porters, and sex slaves and forced to commit acts of horrifying brutality. More than 100,000 people have been killed, the vast majority of them civilians; and more than 1.5 million Ugandans have been displaced from their homes, leading both the United Nations and Doctors without Borders to declare the conflict in Uganda the world's most neglected humanitarian crisis.

Reading the many conflicting reports about Kony leaves the impression that he is a combination of Ché Guevara, Adolf Hitler, and Jim Jones. Some stories claim he is deranged or demon possessed. Other stories report that he has 60 wives and occasionally wears women's clothing. Kony does little to correct such impressions, for he knows that his fledgling movement thrives on publicity—the nastier the better.

In the West, the carnage in Uganda has gone virtually unnoticed. Greater attention has been given to the long-running crisis in Sudan, Uganda's northern neighbor, and to the AIDS crisis in Africa. Recently, however, dozens of reporters have written articles (some of which can be found on ReligionNewsBlog.com) documenting the horrors inflicted on innocent children in Uganda. Many of these articles detail how the LRA soldiers often kidnap new child recruits in sneak attacks on Ugandan villages during the dead of night. The ideal recruits are between the ages of 10 and 14, but children as young as 4 reportedly have been abducted.

During these attacks, parents and other adults are killed—many of them hacked to death with machetes—and their houses burned to the ground. Once captured, the children are marched for miles to LRA compounds, many of which are based in Sudan, which has its own long-running conflicts with the Ugandan government and offers support to Kony and his rebels.

Innocent Children in Captivity. The LRA operates as a fear-based authoritarian military cult, complete with elaborate religious rhetoric and symbols. Many children are formally inducted into the LRA with a mock-baptism service that mimics Christian rituals and presses home the point that Joseph Kony is their new spiritual ruler. Children eat (or often don't eat) as directed by their commanders. The children are subjected to violence until they conform to the ethos of the LRA, then routinely subjected to sexual abuse, with the most prized female victims serving as wives to Kony and his top commanders.

The LRA turns innocent children into brutal killers by forcing them to participate in violent acts that deaden their consciences. For many children, this initiation into Kony's cult of blood begins as soon as they are captured. During many village raids, captured children are forced at gunpoint to murder their own parents and relatives. These crimes also make it extremely difficult for children who escape the LRA to return home to their villages.

Daisy Asiimwe Byarugaba is a communications specialist with Compassion International, which works with more than 35,000 children in Uganda. "The biggest crisis concerning this war is that it is birthing a generation of traumatized people who are filled with hatred and feel that nothing was done to help them," says Byarugaba. "In this war the biggest victims are children, who are abducted, indoctrinated, maimed, tortured and even killed by both the rebels and the Ugandan army."

A July, 2003, report by BBC correspondent Hilary Andersson described the tactics LRA commanders use to indoctrinate their child conscripts: "A woman called Laweel was told that she and 10 others were to be made an example of as a way of warning the community not to fight the rebels. They were to be mutilated, and sent home alive." She continues, "They were lined up in front of their captors. Kidnapped children were told to sharpen the knives and machetes laid there, and one by one the women had their noses, lips and ears cut off. Then they were made to eat their own flesh."

Sudarsan Raghaven, a correspondent for the Detroit Free Press, reported on one child in October, 2004: "Five days after she was abducted in the night from her Catholic boarding school, Charlotte Awino learned how to kill. She was 14. The girl she killed, who was even younger than she was, had tried to escape from the [LRA]. The rebels ordered Charlotte and 29 other schoolgirls to execute her. They refused. The rebels beat them with guns and machetes, and gave the order again. This time, they obeyed."

"'They told us to gather stones and beat her to death,' Charlotte recalled, her voice quivering. 'If you wanted to live, you did it.'" Raghaven notes that Charlotte remained a captive soldier for the next eight years, until she escaped in July of 2004.

 

 

Stay in the forum for Series ninety-eight on the way   ------>

 

EM

On the 49^th Parallel          

                 Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja and Dr. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda is in anarchy"
                    Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi
"Pamoja na Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja na Dk. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda ni katika machafuko"