(R)evolution of evil
This is yet another sad African story - perhaps the saddest. Since the white man showed how easy it is to kill, kidnap and enslave - Africa live a life of violence. Violence in Africa as it evolves and as if to tell the rest of the world - the human race was created here and here will disappear!
In Africa there are many rebel groups and armies, but none was so scary and brutal as the Lord's Resistance Army ( LRA), led by Joseph Kony, which is responsible for the longest armed conflict on the continent. With a campaign of kidnapping children to turn into soldiers or sex slaves, and slaves, and tactics that include mutilation by cutting the ears and mouth, torture, rape and murder, the LRA has for more than 20 years terrorizing and destabilizing the very heart of Africa. The clashes have killed thousands of civilians, abducted more than 30,000 children, and recent data humanitarian organizations speak about the 2 million displaced, and 90% of the total population of the northern provinces.
Information on the situation in this region seldom come to us, mostly through staff of humanitarian organizations. Some would say that this story that probably will never reach the newspapers or television to the impact of the term, just another sad and tragic in Africa series. But these are children, women and men are the same as you and I, no less valuable. So, enough of ignorance and shake of his head!
Lord's army? No way!
That movement appears 1987. in northern Uganda among the members of the Acholi people who started fighting the central government of President Yoweri Museveni in Kampala. Political goals of this movement were not clearly defined. Nominally, the struggle was directed against the central government that the rebels were accused of exploitation and neglect of the northern provinces. In the background stood the insurgency and concerns of some neighboring countries, primarily the northern Sudan that supplied the armed group since 1994. until 2002. years (some say up to 2005). LRA is quickly lost all support he initially may have, after she started stealing people, primarily children and forcibly recruit. Joseph Kony, who claims to be lives within multinational host thirteen ghosts, and that everything works according to the instructions of the angel which daily talks, believed to be protective of their people in northern Uganda. Someone would give him an urgent need to explain what is meant by "protection".
Kony is considered a cousin of Alice Auma, which in 1986. insurgent religious movement founded by the Holy Spirit in Acholiland in northern Uganda. This group represented the Acholi people who felt excluded by the government, after Museveni overthrew the northern government leader Milton Obote. Lakwena promised his followers that they will be smearing butter protect against bullets, but Museveni's army in 1988. managed to defeat the insurgents, which led to the disintegration of the movement, and Alice Lakwena fled to Kenya. Her successor Kony is just inside the movement founded by Lord's Resistance Army, which broke away and began to act independently and bloodthirsty first in Acholiland, and after being pushed from the government of Uganda 2005th destroys the rugged border areas of DR Congo, Southern Sudan and the Central African Republic (CAR), and since 2009. even in South Darfur in western Sudan.
Ruthlessness and cruelty as a driving force
Although the LRA initially operated as a rebel movement against the government in northern Uganda, with the supposed aim of creating a theocratic state based on the Bible and God's 10 Commandments, it is now terrorizing the civilian population of these regions. The functioning of the LRA is still relatively unknown outside world, about the criminal activities of its most learned over the survivors. In the last 23 months is a lot of things have changed within the LRA. Kony is no more direct and complete control over all the groups that are dispersed and numerically weakened. Nevertheless, their propensity to violence is still the same. Although the entire LRA now estimated at only about 400 adult fighters and hundreds of abducted children (account for 80% of the movement), it is very efficient in its ravages, which is not surprising, given that they target unarmed civilians. Also, you misrepresent the LRA's a Christian fundamentalist group consisting of drugged children led by a fool led to a profound underestimation of its forces and military capabilities. Its great advantage of many years of experience in guerrilla warfare throughout the African jungle where armies of regional government is not coping well. Kony is known to sometimes walk back to the opposing troops led the wrong way, or crossing the river, without leaving any traces. Many former rebels say that the vast majority of them still remain within the LRA is not because of ideology, but because of fear - fear of being killed the commanders of the LRA's if they try to escape or Ugandan troops if they catch them. No LRA is used wisely and religion for the implementation of military discipline.
''When you start the fight, you must first cross. If you do not, they will kill you. You also need oil to make the sign of the cross on his gun. They say it represents the power of the Holy Spirit.'', said a former rebel. Forced abduction and violence, as well as the purification of sinful people, especially the Acholi people, is often justified by religious and biblical terms of comparisons.
Although the government of Uganda and Congo claim that the LRA no longer poses a serious threat because most or killed or dispersed, the latest data as well as the statements of survivors indicate a completely different reality. In the last 2 years more than 2,000 people were killed and about 3,000 were kidnapped, while a further 400.000 people were forced to flee their homes. At the LRA's action was due to great uncertainties regular occurrence of large commuting children. Specifically, in fear of abduction of children from rural areas every day at dusk and walk up to 20 km to the security found in the larger settlements, which disrupts the normal flow of life. Victims of such statements governing feel abandoned. "They forgot us. As it does not exist. The government says the LRA is no longer a problem, but I know that's not true.", said one octogenarian Human Rights Watch.
Hope does not infuse any one of the worst massacres committed by the LRA in December 2009. in Makombo in DR Congo, when he was killed 321 civilians, and abducted them was 250, including at least 80 children. The youngest child killed was a year-old girl that was burned alive. Only a year earlier, the so-called. Christmas''massacre'', Lord's Resistance Army in a revenge raid on the northern Congo and southern Sudan has killed more than 865 civilians. But their brutality seems no limit. In many cases documented by Human Rights Watch, many abducted children as part of a''disturbed''spiritual initiation, was forced to kill those children who are breaking the rules. Children were ordered to surround the victim and that child turns hitting a large wooden stick on the head until it dies. From the I write these words sick in the stomach, because it is impossible to exclude emotions and remain indifferent to this kind of cowardice. For what else but a coward, a person who is able not only to kill innocent children whose lives have not even started honestly, but to urge the killing of each other.
I was a child-soldier
LRA children rarely deliver. They were easily manipulated and can quickly learn to obey the rules of the rebels. Many children at the age of 10 or 11 years now armed with rifles and forced to fight the LRA's side. Stephen Taban spent 2 years fighting for the LRA. The now 21-year-old has no doubts about what it was the worst. ''Killing people and chasing kids,''he said. ''It was a difficult time. They told us: 'Go and bring small children'. ''I did not liked it, but I was forced to fight.''
One is a 12-year-old girl from Congo who escaped told Human Rights Watch that she was forced to take part in the murder of dozens of adults, so as not to reveal the location of LRA e-government soldiers.
"The rebels to the victims hands tied behind his back, the cable around the legs and laid them face to the ground" she said. "Then the LRA us children had heavy wooden sticks and forced us hitting on the head until he died."
Children who still somehow manage to escape are deeply traumatized. One 15-year-old who has spent 8 months with the LRA before he fled, "said Human Rights Watch: "I am no longer the same. I often think about how many people I killed and then you can not sleep. I'll never forget what drove me."
For all the sorrow, this is not the only case in the world where children are used as a military power. UN figures say that in recent decades, tens of thousands of child soldiers participated in conflicts in many countries, including Burundi, Ivory Coast, Nepal, Somalia, Southern Sudan, Uganda, Afghanistan, Congo and Liberia. Children who survived these atrocities are forever lost its innocence and will never be the same. The only thing they left is the hope that one might look all the better.
SOS!
Although the Ugandan government made great efforts to catch and eradicate Konyja LRA, failed. Has scheduled the international community, as well as the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an arrest warrant for Konyjem for crimes against humanity, but even after so many years have not managed to bring before justice. One of the main reasons for the fact that the Western world, especially the U.S., turned to other, more interesting and more profitable areas. But can the U.S. president Barack Obama, who in December 2010. announced a strategy aimed at ending the devastation of Lord's Resistance Army and protection of civilians, something really changed? This strategy is not exhaustive, but does not seem that American troops be sent to the center of Africa. This raises the question whether the U.S. has a real political will to undertake something concrete. I think that this skepticism is justified given the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan. Since Obama was evident in terms of scheduled completion of the so-called. the war against terrorism, perhaps it can at least partially redeem urgent implementation of this strategy. I think it's time to begin to justify the Nobel Peace Prize, which is without any doubt got undeserved. For as long as Joseph Kony at large, a man who is responsible for the thousands killed and kidnapped, the population of Central Africa will never be safe.
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