According to the Child Soldier Initiative “over 250,000 children are currently serving in armed groups in wars around the world. While human rights and children's oriented humanitarian organizations have been calling attention to the phenomenon, its effects are widespread, undercutting security and development efforts in many countries.”
Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army
Under the leadership of one Joseph Kony the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has been fighting against Uganda’s central government since 1988. According to the LRA its goal is to install a government based on the Ten Commandments and to achieve this Global Security says it has “continued to kill, torture, maim, rape, and abduct large numbers of civilians, virtually enslaving numerous children…
“The LRA has abducted large numbers of civilians for training as guerrillas; most victims were children and young adults. The LRA abducted young girls as sex and labour slaves. Other children, mainly girls, were reported to have been sold, traded, or given as gifts by the LRA to arms dealers in Sudan.”
When the children are in its clutches, the LRA terrorizes them into killing other children. Once desensitized to brutality they are sent to fight government troops. Estimates of the numbers children in LRA ranks range from 3,000 to 20,000.
Extreme Level of Brutality in Uganda
In his 2009 book, “First Kill Your Family,” reporter Peter Eichstaedt chronicles the unimaginable level of violence used by the Lord’s Resistance Army in its recruiting program.
He tells the story of Richard Opio. He was 13 years old when the LRA overran his village. He was ordered to tie his parents to a tree and to club them to death with the blunt end of an axe. He knew that if he refused to obey the LRA soldiers he would be maimed and/or killed; the treatment he had seen meted out to other children in his village.
At the urging of his parents he followed the instructions he was given; it was the only way he could survive.
Richard Opio escaped after two years with the LRA but his ordeal is not over. The Human Rights House Foundation says he “continues to fight the urge to kill, which often comes up when he’s teased for being a former rebel. And he still has nightmares. He sees himself cutting off legs and arms. He hears people screaming. Soldiers’ orders echo in his mind: ‘Hit him! Hit him!’ He wakes up in the middle of the night and lies awake in bed praying for dawn to come. Richard Opio is not alone.”
Child Soldiers mostly an African Problem
The Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers says in its 2008 report that there are 17 conflicts in which child soldiers are involved, most of them in Africa.
The report estimates that in Chad alone, between 7,000 and 10,000 children were press-ganged into fighting in 2006 and 2007. The fighting in Chad has spilled over from the conflict in Darfur, Sudan, where children are also under arms. It has also spread to the Central African Republic.
Reporting on the Chadian conflict for The New York Times (May 22, 2008) Lynsey Addario wrote: “As one Chadian Army commander put it in an interview with Human Rights Watch, ‘Child soldiers are ideal because they don’t complain, they don’t expect to be paid and if you tell them to kill, they kill.’ ”
A quarter of a million youngsters are trapped in this horrendously violent existence with, even if they escape, almost no hope of ever living a normal life.
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