HUMAN RIGHTS-UGANDA: Rebels Step Up Child Abductions

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Feb 12 1998 (IPS) - The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group seeking to topple the government of President Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, has been abducting more and more children in the north of the country, according to various sources.

“Every week children are taken,” says Leila Takkala of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) office in Uganda. Between 1994 and 1997, the rebels abducted at least 8,000 children. According to Takkala, half of kidnapped children have since returned home while the rest are still missing.

The worst affected areas are the districts of Kitgum and Gulu, which are on the border with the Sudan. “In Kitgum district alone a total of 2,657 children have been abducted by the rebels during the past two years,” Takkala told IPS by telephone from the Ugandan capital, Kampala, on Wednesday.

UNICEF has been compiling new data on child abduction with local officials from six affected districts. “What we have just released are preliminary figures,” Takkala said. “We plan to publish the new findings in March. In fact, we anticipate the number of abducted children to be far in excess of 8,000.”

Last year an alliance of human rights groups (Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International) and the United Nations charged that up to 8,000 children had been abducted over the past 36 months. The children — some as young as eight years old — were abused, forced to become child soldiers or in the case of girls, compelled to “marry” senior soldiers, which in actual fact meant that they were held as sexual slaves.

Abducted children are made to fight in a complex war that pits the LRA, backed by the Sudanese government, against units of the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) on the one hand, and against the Ugandan army on the other.

According to the Kampala government, the LRA uses bases in Sudan as a springboard for raids into northern Uganda. The Sudanese authorities counter that Uganda is supporting the SPLA, which has been fighting the Khartoum regime since May 1983.

Khartoum also see Museveni’s government as part of an international conspiracy against it, especially since the United States in 1996 pledged 20 million dollars in military aid for Uganda, Ethiopia and Eritrea to fight the threat of Islamic fundamentalism alledgedly spread by Sudan.

Caught up in the web of conflict in which their area is enmeshed, more than 200,000 people have been displaced by the LRA’s rebellion in northern Uganda, and who now live in camps around army bases there.

The LRA stepped up child abductions in 1994, often targeting schools. It is estimated that around 90 percent of LRA soldiers are abducted children, and it is widely believed that the group could not operate without them.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty have condemned the LRA’s human rights abuses and urged the rebel group to release all children held as captives or child soldiers. They have also called on the international community to improve efforts to protect children in armed conflict and to press Sudan to stop supporting the LRA.

“The Sudanese authorities could intervene to save children,”said Andrew Mawson, Amnesty International’s Researcher on East Africa. “Instead they have sunk to new depths of cynicism about human rights by tolerating the killing and torture of children as they fight their wars by proxy. Their active use and support of the LRA makes them responsible for abuses by the organisation.”

But LRA officials here have repeatedly denied that their movement commits human rights abuses. “The LRA rebels would not have survived among the population if its human rights record was that poor,” one official said here.

He told IPS on Thursday that UNICEF, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International received their information from the Uganda government and that “they don’t have a clue about what’s happening in northern Uganda”.

“They have never visited LRA-controlled territories to hear the stories of children orphaned by Museveni’s army,” he said.

Throughout the world, an estimated quarter of a million children under the age of eighteen serve as soldiers in government forces or armed opposition groups. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch both support the efforts of a U.N. working group under the Commission on Human Rights that wants to set the minimum age for soldiers at 18 by adding of an optional protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The LRA is headed by herbalist Joseph Kony, whose goal is to rule Uganda on the basis of the 10 biblical commandments. It began its fight against Museveni’s government in 1987, shortly after the defeat of a rebellion by the Holy Spirit Movement, led by Kony’s cousin Alice Lakwena.

HUMAN RIGHTS-UGANDA: Rebels Step Up Child Abductions

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Feb 12 1998 (IPS) - The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group seeking to topple the government of President Yoweri Museveni in Uganda, has been abducting more and more children in the north of the country, according to various sources.
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