her children who attempt to escape, and are repeatedly told that they will be killed if they try to run away.
To avoid LRA abduction, every night as many as 40,000 children flee their homes in the countryside to sleep in the relative safety of towns. They seek refuge overnight at churches, hospitals, bus stations and temporary shelters before returning home again each morning.
This video spotlights a society living under the constant threat of having its children abducted and shows the world that a crisis that the United Nations has called a “crime against humanity” can no longer be ignored.
This isn’t just an internal Ugandan matter. Ten years back, supposedly in retaliation for the Ugandan government’s support for the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, the Sudanese regime in Khartoum started supplying the LRA with arms, making them a much more formidable force.
Sudanese backing has dried up, but the struggle goes on. The dilemma for those Ugandan forces battling the LRA is that the child soldiers they face are victims as well. They can’t win by force without destroying the people they’re meant to be saving…..and all efforts at negotiation have collapsed. After all, how do you negotiate with a group of millenarian cultists?
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