Children of war in Uganda

"Dateline" traveled to Northern Uganda to report on "night commuters": tens of thousands of children forced to hide in the night to escape being killed or abducted by rebels. If captured by the rebels, these children of war are torn from their families and forced to become soldiers under the maniacal leadership of Joseph Kony. Who is he? And why is his reign of terror unknown to most people in the world?

Around northern Uganda, little children who don’t find a safe place at night are in danger. And so are adults. People who are found by the rebels can be burnt to death, or beyond recognition. Body parts are cut off — noses, lips, ears, fingers.

Jan Egeland is the United Nation’s head of disaster relief. He’s seen it all. But nothing like this. "His is terror like no other terror," he says. “I’ve been in a hundred countries. I’ve been working with human rights, peace, and humanitarian problems for 25 years. I was shocked to my bones, seeing what happened in Uganda. For me, this is one of the biggest scandals of our time and generation.”

The root of this trauma is a civil war that has raged for 19 years in northern Uganda, almost unnoticed by the rest of the world.

What makes this stand out from other wars is that it is being fought with children. Children stolen from their families are forced to become soldiers. At the age of 8, or 10 or 12, children forced to kill. 

Joseph Kony: 'Worst of the worst'
Who steals the souls of children?

His name is Joseph Kony. He imagines he’s a reincarnation of Jesus and calls his group “The Lord’s Resistance Army.” With virtually no popular support, he has increasingly resorted to abducting children to fight for him— against not only government forces but his own civilian people. His army has stolen as many as 30,000 innocent kids since the war began.

He is anything but a defender of the people. He terrorizes.“Your nose will be cut off together with your ears and in the end the sword will kill you. Your children will be taken into captivity and they will be burnt to death,”  he says on video tapes.

His maniacal rants are more than empty threats. Listen to what these kids say they were forced to do:

Patrick: There was a boy who could not walk anymore because he was too thirsty. So they made us kill him with a club.

Attempting to escape is dangerous.

Patrick:  If you are captured trying to escape, you will be beaten or killed.

Girls are no exception. They are forced to fight. Or, something else— become sex slaves for the rebels.

Jennifer: They gathered all the girls aged 13 years and above. They then distributed us to the commanders as their wives.

Some of them are lucky, they escape, now in recovery centers like this.  But you can see the damage in their eyes. It's in the pictures they draw, that the horror at the hands of Kony comes back to life.

“He knows how to instill utter fear,” says Egeland.  “But he also knows how to make them believe that he has some kind of a mission.”

Keith Morrison: Almost a supernatural power?

Jan Egeland: Yes. 

Morrison: Where does Kony fit in the in the sort of pantheon of evil people?

Egeland: I think Kony is among the worst.

Among the worst because Kony preys on children— they’re easier to indoctrinate, control, have them commit atrocities.

Fear of Kony and his rebels is so strong, that more than a million and a half people have been forced from their homes for fear of being killed or abducted.

ENCARTA UGANDA: Maps, facts and figures

They go to squalid camps, like Pabbo, barely surviving on foreign food donations hoping that government army patrols might provide a little more protection than they had in their villages.

On the scale of sheer misery, there’s little that can top Pabbo.  About 63,000 souls are jammed into a vast sea of tiny, round mud-huts, ten to a room or more. There is one water well for every five thousand people.

There’s malnutrition, malaria, cholera, HIV. People here have grown accustomed to tragedy upon tragedy.  In the past year alone, Pabbo has been burned out, flooded out, and attacked constantly.  But if life in the camp is dreadful, outside it is a catalog of horrors. Children are taught early that if to stray to the edges of Pabbo, for fun or firewood, is to risk being abducted, or raped or hacked to death by the rebels.

Night commuters
More often than not, the children in northern Uganda have their own survival routines. 

Patrick is one of the 'night commuters.' Terrified of being recaptured, and has joined the tens of thousands of so-called night commuters in northern Uganda, each one of them simply hoping  to stay alive to see the morning.

He lives in a tiny, unprotected village in a mud-hut with his aunt and uncle, and his dog, Sarah. And because he knows the danger of being killed or abducted into the rebel army all too well, he has a survival ritual: Each morning he washes, puts on his school clothes and walks to class. Each evening, as dusk arrives, he joins what may be the world’s most astonishing migration.

Barefoot, a blanket stuffed in a sack, he walks for 5 miles through remote and sometimes dangerous terrain to the relative safety of town, where the rebels are less likely to attack. Mothers with infants, small children, boys, girls, leave their parents behind in those isolated villages. They carry straw sleeping mats, their worldly possessions. Here, at least, they feel safe from the rebels.

Most of the children know no other way of life, let alone why this war is being fought.

Patrick sleeps in a crowded school, a nighttime shelter run by volunteers. Others find spots on the grass, under verandas, on hospital grounds, in large tents. Worn blankets are their only protection, their bodies crammed together, tangled and entwined.

Night after night after night, thousands dream of the restless dreams of the forsaken. 

In the morning, before the sun rises, they gather their belongings and leave for home, surviving another night. 

But it’s not just a matter of survival: For Patrick, the shelter gives daily comfort to a soul tormented by what he witnessed, and even more so by something the rebels forced him to do.

Patrick is an escapee.

Morrison: Did you see other people being killed?

Patrick: Many. Many, many. 

Patrick, now a tiny 13-year-old, was a 10-year-old when the war came his way.  Within minutes, he had committed murder.

Patrick: We normally use a big sticks to kill somebody if you need.         

Morrison: You said you usually used a big stick?

Patrick: Yeah.

Morrison: Did you kill more than one?

Patrick: Yeah.

Morrison: Many?

Patrick: Many. For fear, you must kill. If you refuse, you are going to be killed.

And then, out came the story that none of us who heard it have been able to forget — how Patrick learned the lesson: kill or be killed.

It was, he said, the very first night of his abduction.  Patrick, his parents and his siblings, were forced at gunpoint into the bush near a river. And then he watched as the rebels killed his father. He watched as they slashed away at his mother with their knives. And then, as she lay grievously wounded, a rebel commander turned and spoke to the children.

Patrick: Then they say that we must kill our mother. 

Horrified, Patrick and his young brothers and sisters refused.

Patrick: Then they said, if you refuse, they’re going to kill us all.  Then we do that. So then, after that...

Morrison:Well, wait a minute, Patrick.  Then you had to kill your own mother?

Patrick: Yeah. With fear to be killed, we kill our own mother.

Morrison: Hard for you to remember that, isn’t it?

Morrison: Do you dream about that?

Patrick: Sometime I dream.

Occasionally as we talked, Patrick seemed to get lost in his thoughts,  searching his memory for his mother as he so often does, wondering what he’ll do without her.

Patrick: I was thinking that without my mother, how can I stay in the world?

During his year in captivity, he witnessed countless atrocities.

Patrick: Babies, babies, babies.

Morrison: They killed babies?

Patrick: If they started crying in the bush, there they can destroy them—like this. That’s how the world of northern Uganda here is.

And year after year goes by with more of this every day: Children are losing their mothers and fathers, mothers and fathers losing their children.

Who is there to protect?  In the midst of all this misery, there are some voices of hope.

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