UGANDA: Declan Walsh reports on the grotesquely named Lords Resistance Army in northern Uganda.
Darkness was thickening over Gulu as a flood of children scurried towards the town centre. It was like a scene from Peter Pan - the old dragging the young, blankets in hand, under the pale moonlight. But this was a deadly reality.
The pace quickened. Behind was the countryside, where rebels from the Lords Resistance Army (LRA) spread terror using an army of brainwashed child soldiers. Ahead lay the promise of safety. Martha Fambi (15) paused under a line of giant mahogany trees.
"We are afraid to sleep at home," she explained, a two-year-old sister strapped to her back. "The rebels come at night. They want to abduct us."
For 18 years the LRA, under its sinister leader Joseph Kony, has been fighting one of Africa's most bizarre yet tragic wars. Mr Kony is an enigmatic and ruthless figure, who apparently considers himself an emissary of God and wants to rule Uganda using the Ten Commandments. To achieve this, his troops burn villages, steal cattle and crops and murder indiscriminately.
Fear of his ravages has turned northern Uganda into a ghostly wasteland.
More than 80 per cent of the population in the three northern districts - Gulu, Pader and Kitgum - have fled into overcrowded refugee camps. Such crimes recently prompted the International Criminal Court to start investigations with a view to hunting down and prosecuting the LRA leadership.
But crimes against children are Mr Kony's most ghoulish atrocity. By night his troops abduct children from their parents, frog march them to training camps, hand them a gun and force them to fight. "The children are brainwashed. They are forced to kill their own relatives and shoot fellow soldiers who try to escape," Father Carlos Rodriguez Soto, a Spanish missionary in Gulu, said.
The abductions are ever increasing - more than 10,000 children have been stolen away in the past 18 months alone. As a result thousands hurry for the safety of Gulu, an army garrison town, every night. Locals call them the "night commuters".
Sleeping on street corners or cramming into barn-like shelters provided by aid agencies, conditions are rough for the "commuters". About 1,500 boys and girls had crammed into the dormitory run by Rural Focus Uganda, a local charity, sleeping sardine-like, head-to-toe.
Every night they arrive at dusk and trudge home again at dawn. Some walk 15 km each way. But the perilous alternative - to stay home and risk abduction - is worse.
Kenneth Ouma knows why. His shirt crumpled, the soft- spoken 12-year-old queued for a blanket before bedding down. Eighteen months ago the LRA abducted his sister, Susan, he explained. His family worries she is being used for sex, or worse.
"We pray for her every day, morning and evening," he said.
Vicky Adoch ( 18) fell victim to a surge in abductions two years ago. She was snatched from her home, tied with a rope and marched to a camp in Sudan.
Other children who couldn't keep up died on the way, she said.
At the dusty camp the girl was trained, given the gun of a dead child soldier, and sent out to fight. She also made an amazing discovery - her older sister, Sunday.
The 23-year-old woman had been abducted seven years earlier, had become an LRA lieutenant, and was married with child. "She told me there was no way of escape," she said. She was wrong. A few months later Vicky was caught in an army ambush and shot in the head. Miraculously, she survived, and later escaped. "I wanted my sister to come. But she couldn't leave the child behind," she said.
There is little sign of this extraordinary crisis in the capital, Kampala, 200 km to the south, where mobile phone billboards and fast-food joints line the streets, and street vendors sell racy magazines packed with gossip. Here, the government of President Yoweri Museveni - a major recipient of Irish aid - insists it is close to defeating the LRA. But after 17 years of war, its efforts have yet to yield results.
In 2001 the Ugandan Peoples Defence Forces (UPDF) launched "Operation Iron Fist", an offensive to rout the LRA from its bases in neighbouring Sudan, where it enjoys the support of President Omar al Bashir and his fundamentalist regime. But "Iron Fist" only drove the LRA back into Uganda, where attacks increased.
For the UPDF, the unsavoury reality is that its counter-insurgency involves fighting a force of manipulated child soldiers. Freed abductees speak of the terror of coming under attack from UPDF helicopters gunships or MiG fighter planes - sometimes while still bound by rope.
According to a private survey by a local charity, the Ugandan army claimed to have killed 966 rebels in 2003. Most were probably child abductees.
The difference between killer and victim is often blurred. Robert Ojok, a muscular 15-year-old with cold, hard eyes, sat ramrod straight at a children's centre in Gulu. Having been snatched from his parents at the age of eight, Robert spent his formative years as an LRA killer. "There was a lot of bloodshed. We would run over the dead bodies like stepping stones," he said in a deadpan voice.
Locating and arresting Kony and the LRA leadership is a priority for the International Criminal Court, according to chief prosecutor Mr Luis Moreno Ocampo.Amnesty International has hailed the move, but local religious leaders such as Father Rodriguez fear the manhunt could prolong this brutal conflict.
"\ would practically close once and for all the path to peaceful negotiation as a means to end this long war," he said. Only negotiation - not military might - will end Uganda's tragic rebellion, he added. "We need to get the international community involved - now."
Since filing this report, Father Rodriguez has been ordered to leave northern Uganda for making what the authorities have termed false allegations.