1.

THE NIGHT COMMUTERS
By Ron Adkins

November 7, 2005

On the evening of November 1 about 7:00 p.m., a dozen or so Rotarians from the U.S., along with a couple of local Rotarians, three or four Rotoract members, and a few of the staff from World Vision, piled onto a bus to head from our hotel to an area closer to the schools and centers that were serving as overnight shelters. It was already quite dark; Gulu has no street lights. Electricity is precious in Gulu. Even our hotel was without power occasionally during daytime, and it seemed to shut down regularly from about 10:00 p.m. until just before dawn.

In only a few minutes we were in the midst of dozens, perhaps hundreds, of children, largely between the ages of seven and twelve. They were holding hands and singing; fragments of tunes such as “Jesus Loves Me” were clear. There was almost a joyous mood that quickened as we approached one shelter from which very loud drumbeats emanated in the rhythm of a quick-step march.

All of my companions got off the bus to walk with the children. Due to a bruised knee, I chose to stand by the roadside. Although the adults were there to help protect the children, it was actually the children who lead the adults over the rutted terrain. Our driver elected to put the bus on the roadway to better illuminate the activity with his headlights. I joined him on the bus and from my elevated seat was able to see that there was a veritable swarm of people, virtually all youthful.

What was occurring was the nightly march of children from the camps and enclaves around Gulu, some as far away as ten kilometers. Few children in the area stay in their huts at night except for the very few who live in the more densely populated areas of Gulu town. This has been going on for the better part of eighteen years. Tonight the temperature was moderate and the mood was almost festive. In the rainy season, I imagine, the mood might be different.

These children were not coming into town for a basketball game or school dance. They were coming to the centers for personal safety. For nearly twenty years the Lord’s Resistance Army [LRA] has terrorized the area. The LRA typically descends upon the refugee camps and enclaves at night. The primary goal is to kidnap children, who are tethered together and marched back to the LRA’s encampment. Resisting children are whipped or beaten; the more stubborn or injured are often clubbed to death.

Once in camp, the captives are “inducted” into the LRA. The process, as related to us by the staff at World Vision’s Children of War Rehabilitation Center, involves marking the captives’ foreheads or torso with a simple cross. The nut oil, mixed with white clay, is particularly shiny. Even once it wears off, the children are told, the LRA leaders will always be able to see it and identify the children as purified. Some of the captives will actually be children who have been previously captured, and often these become objects as to the futility of trying to escape. The newly captured children are forced to beat the recaptured with clubs. If the recaptured child dies as a result of the beating, then those who administered the beating are instructed to drink their blood to gain strength and to learn not to fear blood. If the recaptured child does not die, or if any of the newly captured refuse to participate in the beating, then they are likely to be singled out for a special torture typically involving the cutting off of lips, ears, or noses. Girls are frequently raped; some are pledged as wives to the more senior males.

The LRA, according to the best estimates, is composed largely of children. About 80%, perhaps even 90%, of the warriors are indistinguishable from the captives, differing only in that they are usually a few months older and are armed with machetes or Kalashnikov rifles. These “regulars” have been convinced by the leaders that they cannot return to their villages and families. Periodic raids against villages involve killing villagers and burning huts. Even reluctant children are easily convinced that these acts of terror do in fact make them unacceptable. Other evidence is found in the acts of the Ugandan military. In its suppression of the LRA, helicopter gun ships make no distinction between LRA troops and the captives. It is not uncommon that in such skirmishes more captives are killed than troops.

At World Vision’s Children of War Rehabilitation Center I sat in on the testimony of three children. The first, who was called Jeanette, seemed to have escaped some of the more serious physical abuse. She had been promised as a wife to an officer. While in captivity, she had been witness to several killings, including that of her own brother as well as others from her village. Her testimony focused on her becoming a captive, the forced march, and the witnessing of beatings and killings. As it turned out, she managed to escape, apparently in the wake of a raid on the camp that resulted in the death of her intended husband.

As the second child was being fetched to testify, the World Vision official indicated the file cabinets and book shelves crammed with files. These files were the recorded testimonies of the hundreds of children who have been processed through the center. The walls of the room had large, almost childlike, paintings of the various “stages” of the captives’ experiences: the assault on the village, the forced march of tethered captives, attacks by helicopter gun ships, and the like. The official describing the in-take process said that the children’s stories might vary in minor detail but that the overall experience was so similar that children who were so traumatized that they found it difficult to talk of their experience often could point to one or more of the paintings.

The second girl had been so traumatized that she still spoke and behaved like an automaton. In her case, when she was being taken away from the village she had an infant tied to her back. The identity of the infant was not totally clear except that it was not her own baby. In the course of fleeing the village, an RPG blew off the head of the infant, soaking the captive in blood. Also, several fragments scarred her body and seriously injured one leg. A World Vision staff member says that the girl is still awaiting the opportunity to leave for special corrective surgery. Unlike the first girl, the second had been sexually molested many times, and she was carrying a baby about six months old. She held the baby as though it were an alien object for which she had little regard. She related her story of the injuries and being “made to be a wife” in a low voice that was particularly devoid of any emotion.

As the girl and her translator were moving out of the room, a local official started telling us a little about the boy who was being summoned. At this point, I was struck by a wave of concern that all of this was beginning to smack of a stage production with a host of actors performing well-rehearsed roles. More specifically, upon arrival in the compound we were treated to a medley of native songs and dances offered up by some 15 women pretty well “gotten up” in nearly matching dresses. As we walked into the compound, I noticed a fairly large group of young people, perhaps as many as 40, arrayed at the far end. I didn’t think much about it at the time, assuming that it was a class or similar activity. After the dancing we were walked down the compound and some comments were made to the effect that the group, in fact, was waiting to see us. I was mildly surprised when we were then directed into the room where these testimonies were to be related to us, all the while allowing the group to sit and continue to await our attention. “These poor kids,” I thought to myself. “Not only are they sad statistics of a brutal war, but now they have to sit in the sun to be viewed by another set of white dignitaries.”

My feelings were only momentary, but they were distracting enough that I had trouble tracking with the gruesome story unfolding from the young man. He did not seem quite an automaton like the second girl, but he did evidence what I, without any clinical training, sensed as post-traumatic stress. He had twice been captured and twice escaped. He had been brutalized, but unlike the girls, had engaged in brutality and killing himself. As he talked I hoped he was on a suicide watch. At the end of his presentation and couple of the members of our group posed questions along the lines of “What do you see for your future, especially completing your schooling?” He stated rather flatly that he did not expect to complete his education, partly because he felt certain his family had rejected him. In short, he felt he had no future.

Perhaps because this testimony ended on such a downer, the staff took us outside. Most of us headed for the seats facing the assembled crew, but we were instead directed to a larger poster board covered with photos. Among these pictures were many that looked like shots taken in war-zone hospitals, including some showing distorted skin covering bullets and shell fragments. Some of those victims were still in the camp awaiting surgery; a vial was passed around containing a couple of bullets recently removed from the skull of a patient by a surgical team in Alabama. Part of the point here was that several patients continued to need sophisticated surgeries but that this was hard to arrange, partly due to transportation costs and partly due to potential liability concerns, especially in the U.S.

One touching set of snapshots showed a young woman whose face was severely mutilated. As it happened, the mutilator turned up in the Center and she recognized him. Other photos showed their reconciliation. World Vision seems to advocate a posture of reconciliation rather than retribution, but that stance also seems to conform easily to local norms. Certainly most of the children we talked with did not seem to think in terms of revenge; they seemed to recognize that their tormentors were victims as well, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that several, like the young man, had probably been party to the administration of abuse while in the custody of the LRA.

We then went on to the final segment of the visitation. Instead of hearing individual testimonies, the staff introduced children as representatives of groups, largely sorted by age and circumstance. For example, if the children were younger than 9 or 10, they tended to be housed together. Above that age, they were segregated by sex. Girls with infants seemed to be further segregated, but that aspect of segregation may have been for instructional purposes. These young mothers are, after all, only children themselves, and part of their training included basic skill development in motherhood. Several of the children had suffered severe physical injury, including some four or five who were seated on a blanket, most of them having lost an arm or a leg.

It was now time for the presentation of our gifts. An aspect of the Rehabilitation Center is education. While there was some focus on basic literacy and numeracy, most of the training dealt with job skills. Seattle 4 in cooperation with other Seattle area Clubs presented the Center with four manual sewing machines. Scott Jackson of World Vision had brought a suitcase of materials that included a few soccer balls and similar toys. A couple of Rotarians had brought assorted school supplies. Jeanette and I had also brought a suitcase including toothbrushes, school supplies, soccer balls, and T-shirts, but we had already delivered the 50-pound suitcase into the care of World Vision. From that case one soccer ball was pulled for us to make a symbolic presentation in person.

The Children of War Rehabilitation Center typically has about ninety resident students, but there have been times when several hundred children were in the Center. The goals of the Center are relatively simple and straight-forward: deal with immediate concerns [clothing, nutrition, counseling], assist through a period of adjustment or decompression, especially focusing on counseling, education, and skill development, and attempt to reunite the children with their families. The latter is possibly the most difficult.

One of the difficulties is simply finding families. In many ways, this area in northern Uganda is accurately described as a war zone. Outside of the town of Gulu itself, many “locals” appears to be buffeted about by the winds of war. A dominant feature of the larger Gulu area and Kitgum (some sixty miles further north), is the refugee camp. According to the U.N.’s World Food Program, in April, 2003, some 465,000 people were living in these camps.

If and when the family is located, it is not uncommon to encounter resistance in getting the family to accept the child. Everyone in the area knows that the children are very likely to have been seriously abused and, sadly, likely to have inflicted abuse on others themselves. Many will have physical impairments that will make them more of a burden than a help to families eking out a meager existence; virtually all will come with psychological impairments that will strain social reintegration.

Perhaps most importantly, there is a serious hazard is reintegrating the children. The LRA has a policy that they will attack villages or compounds known to have taken back “their soldiers,” and there are numerous accounts of the LRA torching entire villages. Partly due to this, when the Center celebrates a family’s reunification, it never announces which village is accepting the child back into its fold.

It is not fully clear to me just how many “night commuters” there are, but the estimates indicate that there are some 20,000 in and around Gulu and another 21,000 in Kitgum. We certainly personally witnessed several hundred in Gulu, some walking to the centers hand-in-hand with nothing, others carrying a blanket or mat. Upon reaching the centers the children break into song and cheer, raising cries of “hallelujah,” thankful to be in a place of safety for the night.

Here they receive little other than safety and a little water. They are not fed; some centers lack facilities for feeding, but officials declare that they don’t want the centers to be turned into feeding stations for several reasons. The children soon cuddle together to sleep, only to arise around dawn for the walk home where they will change into school uniforms, perform some chores, and, perhaps, have a bit to eat. Then they walk back into town for school where they will receive lunch. After school, they walk home to change out of the school uniforms, do chores, perhaps have something to eat and a chance to study. As darkness approaches, they resume the ritual of night commuting, retracing the dusty lanes and paths back to the shelters as many of the parents scatter into the bush, themselves fearful of sleeping in their huts.

The origins and political complexities of this war/insurrection/rebellion are beyond the scope of this piece, but it has raged on and on for nearly two decades. The casualties number, conservatively, around 20,000 deaths and untold thousands of physical and emotional casualties. The situation is over-shadowed by the even larger scope of difficulties in neighboring Sudan.

On the surface, many Americans might look at the situation and conclude that if it weren’t so tragic it might almost be regarded as silly. No one knows for sure just how large the LRA is at any given point in time, but the estimates tend to suggest something on the order of 20,000. An army of 20,000, with at least 16,000 of them children, seems faintly ridiculous as a military force. Nevertheless, it strikes terror in the hearts of many thousands of people and, indeed, has been listed officially as a terrorist organization. Attempts to resolve the conflict diplomatically have failed and, as suggested above, military action by the regular Ugandan forces tend to inflict about as much damage to the captive children as to their captors. Until some resolution is found, this part of northern Uganda will continue to see some 40,000 children walking paths in darkness every night, their primary safety being their numbers and their songs. Heaven help them if the LRA decides to attack the commuter lines directly. Although I am grateful I was able to witness the commute in person, I have great difficulty in suppressing anger and frustration about the situation. More needs to be done to remedy the situation, it should be done immediately.

--For further information, check the article entitled “Uganda, the Horror” by Paul Raffaele that appeared in the February 2005 issue of the Smithsonian magazine. [See #2 below.] National Public Radio has aired at least two pieces on this situation in the last few months, and these segments may be heard from the archives. Using Google, ask for “Uganda + NPR.” Many references pop up through a Google search on “Night Commuters.”

2.

UGANDA: THE HORROR
By Paul Raffaele

Smithsonian
February 2005

http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/smithsonian/issues05/feb05/pdf/uganda.pdf (.pdf)
or
http://www.globalpolicy.org/intljustice/wanted/2005/02horror.htm

As the light faded from the northern Ugandan sky, the children emerged from their families' mud huts to begin the long walk along dirt roads to Gulu, the nearest town. Wide-eyed toddlers held older kids' hands. Skinny boys and girls on the verge of adolescence peered warily into roadside shadows. Some walked as far as seven miles. They were on the move because they live in a world where a child's worst fears come true, where armed men really do come in the darkness to steal children, and their shambling daily trek to safety has become so routine there's a name for them: "night commuters." Michael, a thin 10-year-old wrapped in a patched blanket, spoke of village boys and girls abducted by the armed men and never seen again. "I can't get to sleep at home because I fear they'll come and get me," he said.

Around the time of my trip to northern Uganda this past November, some 21,000 night commuters trudged each twilight into Gulu, and another 20,000, aid workers said, flocked into the town of Kitgum, about 60 miles away. The children, typically bedding down on woven mats they'd brought with them, packed themselves into tents, schools, hospitals, and other public buildings serving as makeshift sanctuaries that were funded by foreign governments and charities and guarded by Ugandan Army soldiers.

The children were hiding from the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a murderous cult that has been fighting the Ugandan government and terrorizing civilians for nearly two decades. Led by Joseph Kony, a self-styled Christian prophet believed to be in his 40s, the LRA has captured and enslaved more than 20,000 children, most under age 13, U.N. officials say. Kony and his foot soldiers have raped many of the girls -- Kony has said he is trying to create a "pure" tribal nation -- and brutally forced the boys to serve as guerrilla soldiers. Aid workers have documented cases in which the LRA forced abducted children to ax or batter their own parents to death. The LRA has also killed or tortured children caught trying to escape.

LRA rebels roam northern Uganda's countryside in small units, surfacing unpredictably to torch villages, kill people, and kidnap children before returning to the forest. The LRA's terror tactics and the bloody clashes between the rebels and the army have caused 1.6 million people, or about 90 percent of northern Uganda's population, to flee their homes and become refugees in their own country. These "internally displaced" Ugandans have been ordered to settle in squalid government camps, where malnutrition, disease, crime, and violence are common. The international medical aid group Doctors Without Borders said recently that so many people were dying in government camps in northern Uganda that the problem was "beyond an acute emergency." Word of the tragedy has surfaced now and then in Western news media and international bodies. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan has called for an end to the violence in northern Uganda, and the U.N. has also coordinated food donations and relief efforts in Uganda. "The LRA's brutality [is] unmatched anywhere in the world," says a 2004 U.N. food program booklet. But the Ugandan crisis has been largely overshadowed by the genocide in neighboring Sudan, where nearly 70,000 people have been killed since early 2003 in attacks by government-supported Arab militias on the black population in the Darfur region.

The U.S. State Department classifies the LRA as a terrorist organization, and in the past year the United States has provided more than $140 million to Uganda; much of that is for economic development, but the sum includes $55 million for food and $16 million for other forms of assistance, such as AIDS education efforts and support for former child soldiers and formerly abducted persons. In May 2004, Congress passed the Northern Uganda Crisis Response Act, which President Bush signed in August. It does not provide for funding but urges Uganda to resolve the conflict peacefully and also calls for the State Department to report on the problem to Congress this month.

Despite some growing awareness of the crisis and recent small increases in assistance to Uganda from many nations and aid organizations, Jan Egeland, the U.N.'s Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, said in a press conference this past October that the chaos in northern Uganda is the world's "largest neglected humanitarian emergency." He went on, "Where else in the world have there been 20,000 kidnapped children? Where else in the world have 90 percent of the population in large districts been displaced? Where else in the world do children make up 80 percent of the terrorist insurgency movement?"

To spend time in northern Uganda and learn firsthand about the situation is to become horrified by the atrocities and appalled by the lack of effective response. "The tragedy here is that it's not an adult war, this is a children's war, these kids are 12, 13, 14 years old and it's despicable, beyond comprehension," says Ralph Munro, who was visiting Gulu (while I was there) as part of a U.S. Rotarian mission to deliver wheelchairs to the war zone. "The world better wake up that this is another holocaust on our hands, and we'd better deal with it. One day our kids are going to be asking us, where were you when this was going on?" Since achieving independence from Britain in 1962, Uganda has suffered almost uninterrupted brutality. Armed rebellions, mostly split along ethnic lines, have wracked the population, now estimated at 26.4 million. Up to 300,000 people were murdered during Idi Amin's eight-year (1971 to 1979) reign of terror. It is said that Amin, who died a year and a half ago in exile in Saudi Arabia, ate some of his opponents and fed others to his pet crocodiles. "His regime goes down in the scale of Pol Pot as one of the worst of all African regimes," says Lord Owen, who was the British foreign secretary during Amin's rule.

Today, many Western governments regard Uganda as a qualified success from a development standpoint. It has made significant progress against AIDS, promoting condom use and other measures; since the mid-1990s, the prevalence of AIDS cases among Ugandans 15 to 49 years old has fallen, from 18 percent to 6 percent. Still, AIDS remains the leading cause of death of people in that age group. Many countries, including the United States, have applauded the willingness of soldier-politician Yoweri Museveni, the president since 1986, to accede to World Bank and International Monetary Fund dictates on free trade and privatization. Uganda claims a 6.7 percent average annual economic growth over the past ten years.

But that growth is largely confined to the south and Kampala, the capital city, which boasts office towers, fancy restaurants, and flashy cars. Elsewhere, deep poverty is the rule. With a per capita income of $240, Uganda is among the world's poorest countries, with 44 percent of citizens living below the national poverty line. The nation ranks 146th out of 177 countries on the U.N.'s Human Development Index, a composite measure of life expectancy, education and living standard. Donor countries and international lending agencies cover half of Uganda's annual budget.

Museveni heads a corrupt regime in a nation that has never seen a peaceful change of rule. He seized power at the head of a guerrilla army in a violent coup 19 years ago, and he has since stage-managed two elections. The U.S. State Department calls Uganda's human rights record "poor" and charges in a 2003 report that Museveni's security forces "committed unlawful killings" and tortured and beat suspects "to force confessions."

Museveni's suppression of the Acholi tribal people, who populate three northern districts, is generally cited as the catalyst of the LRA rebellion. Museveni, a Christian, is a member of the Banyankole tribe, from western Uganda, and the Acholi blame him for atrocities his forces committed when they came to power and for denying the region what they say is their share of development funds. In 1986, an Acholi mystic, Alice Auma "Lakwena," led a rebel army of some 5,000 aggrieved Acholis to within 50 miles of Kampala before being defeated by regular army forces. (She fled to Kenya, where she remains.) A year later, Joseph Kony -- reportedly Lakwena's cousin -- formed what would become the Lord's Resistance Army and pledged to overthrow Museveni. Since then, thousands of people have been killed in the conflict -- no exact casualty figures have been reported -- and it has cost the impoverished nation at least $1.3 billion.

It takes four hours, including a crossing of the roiling, whitecapped waters of the Nile River as it plunges toward a waterfall, to drive from Kampala to Gulu. Nearing the city, villages begin to disappear, replaced by vast, dreary government camps. Gulu is a garrison town, home to the Ugandan Army's battle-hardened 4th Division, and soldiers with assault rifles stroll along potholed footpaths or drive by in pickup trucks. Crumbling shops built of concrete line the main road. The day before I arrived, LRA fighters, in a trademark mutilation, cut off the lips, ears and fingers of a camp dweller two miles from the city center. His apparent crime was wearing the kind of rubber boots favored by government soldiers, arousing LRA suspicion that he might be one himself. The LRA went on to attack a refugee camp along Kampala Road, 15 miles away, abducting several children.

Over the years, about 15,000 of the children abducted by the LRA have managed to escape or have been rescued by Ugandan Army forces, says Rob Hanawalt, UNICEF's chief of operations in Uganda. Many former abductees are brought to Gulu, where aid organizations evaluate them and prepare them to return to their home villages. The Children of War Rehabilitation Center, a facility run by World Vision, an international Christian charity, was hidden behind high shuttered gates, and walls studded with broken glass. Inside, one-story buildings and tents filled the small compound. At the time of my visit, 458 children were awaiting relocation. Some kicked a soccer ball, some skipped rope, others passed the time performing traditional dances. I saw about 20 children who were missing a leg and hobbling on crutches. One could tell the most recent arrivals by their shadowy silences, bowed heads, haunted stares and bone-thin bodies disfigured by sores. Some had been captured or rescued only days earlier, when Ugandan Army helicopter gunships attacked the rebel unit holding them. Jacqueline Akongo, a counselor at the center, said the most deeply scarred children are those whom Kony had ordered, under penalty of death, to kill other children. But virtually all the children are traumatized. "The others who don't kill by themselves see people being killed, and that disturbs their mind so much," Akongo told me.

One evening in Gulu at a sanctuary for night commuters, I met 14-year-old George, who said he spent three years with the rebels. He said that as the rebels prepared to break camp one night, a pair of 5-year-old boys complained that they were too tired to walk. "The commander got another young boy with a panga [machete] to kill them," George said. On another occasion, George went on, he was forced to collect the blood of a murdered child and warm it in a saucepan over a fire. He was told to drink it or be killed. "'It strengthens the heart,'" George recalled the commander telling him. "'You then don't fear blood when you see somebody dying.'"

In Gulu I met other former abductees who told equally ghastly tales, and as unbelievable as their experiences may seem, social workers and others who've worked in northern Uganda insist that the worst of the children's reports have been found to be literally true. Nelson, a young man of about 18, stared at the ground as he described helping to beat another boy to death with logs because the boy had tried to escape. Robert, a 14-year-old from Kitgum, said he and some other children were forced to chop the body of a child they had killed into small pieces. "We did as we were told," he said.

Margaret, a 20-year-old mother I met at the rehabilitation center in Gulu, said she was abducted by LRA forces when she was 12 and repeatedly raped. She said that Kony has 52 wives and that 25 abducted girls will become his sexual slaves once they reach puberty. Margaret, a tall, soft-voiced woman with faraway eyes who that day held her 4-year-old son in her lap, said she was the eighth wife of a high-ranking LRA officer killed in a battle last year. Sixteen-year-old Beatrice cradled her 1-year-old infant as she recalled her forced "marriage" to an LRA officer. "I was unwilling," she tells me, "but he put a gun to my head."

People describe Kony's actions as those of a megalomaniac. "Kony makes the children kill each other so they feel such an enormous sense of shame and guilt that they believe they can never go back to their homes, trapping them in the LRA," said Archbishop John Baptist Odama, the Roman Catholic prelate in Gulu and head of the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative, a Christian and Muslim organization trying to broker an end to the hostilities.

The highest-ranking LRA member in government custody is Kenneth Banya, the rebel group's third in command. He was captured this past July after a fierce battle near Gulu. One of his wives and a 4-year-old son were killed by helicopter gunship fire, but most of his 135 soldiers got away. Today Banya and other captured LRA officers are held at the government army barracks in Gulu. The army uses him for propaganda, having him speak over a Gulu radio station and urge his former LRA colleagues to surrender.

Banya is in his late 50s. When I met him at the barracks, he said he underwent civilian helicopter training in Dallas, Texas, and military training in Moscow. He claimed that he was himself abducted by LRA fighters, in 1987. He said he advised Kony against abducting children but was ignored. He denied that he ever ordered children to be killed or that he had raped young girls. Banya said that when he arrived at his first LRA camp, water was sprinkled on his bare torso and rebels marked him with crosses of white clay mixed with nut oil. "'That removes your sins, you're now a new person and the Holy Spirit will look after you,'" he recalled of his indoctrination.

When I relayed Banya's comments to Lt. Paddy Ankunda, spokesman for the government's northern army command, he laughed. Banya, he said, crossed over to Kony of his own volition. A government handout issued at the time of Banya's capture described him as the "heart and spirit" of the LRA.

The terrorist forces led by Kony, an apocalyptic Christian, could not have flourished without the support of the radical Islamic Sudanese government. For eight years beginning in 1994, Sudan provided the LRA sanctuary -- in retaliation for Museveni's backing a Sudanese Christian rebel group, the Sudan People's Liberation Army, which was fighting to gain independence for southern Sudan. The Khartoum government gave Kony and his LRA weapons, food, and a haven near the southern Sudan city of Juba. There, safe from Ugandan government forces, Kony's rebels sired children, brainwashed and trained new abductees, grew crops, and regrouped after strikes in Uganda. "We had 7,000 fighters there then," Banya told me.

In March 2002, the Sudanese government, under pressure from the United States, signed a military protocol with Uganda that allowed Ugandan troops to strike the LRA in southern Sudan. The Ugandan Army quickly destroyed the main LRA camps in Sudan. Kony then stepped up raids and abductions in Uganda's north; according to World Vision, LRA forces captured more than 10,000 children in Uganda between June 2002 and December 2003.

It was around then that Museveni ordered the Acholi population into the relative safety of government camps. "In April 2002 there were 465,000 in the camps displaced by the LRA," says Ken Davies, director of the U.N.'s World Food Program (WFP) in Uganda. "By the end of 2003 there were 1.6 million in the camps." At last count, there were 135 government camps. In my three decades of covering wars, famines and refugees, I have never seen people forced to live in more wretched conditions.

In a convoy of trucks filled with WFP rations, and accompanied by some 100 armed Ugandan Army soldiers and two armored vehicles mounted with machine guns, I visited the Ongako camp, about ten miles from Gulu. Ongako housed 10,820 internally displaced persons. Many wore ragged clothing as they waited for food in long lines in a field near hundreds of small conical mud huts. The crowd murmured excitedly as WFP workers began unloading the food -- corn, cooking oil, legumes, and a corn and soybean blend fortified with vitamins and minerals.

Davies told me that the WFP provides camp dwellers with up to three-quarters of a survival diet at an average cost of $45 a year per person, about half of it supplied by the U.S. Agency for International Development. The displaced are expected to make up the difference by raising crops nearby. The Ugandan government provides little food for the camps, Davies said. The leader of the camp residents, John Omona, said there is not enough food, medicine, or fresh water. More than half of the camp residents are children, and World Vision officials say that as many as one out of five suffer from acute malnutrition. When I was there, many bore the swollen bellies and red-tinged hair of kwashiorkor, a disorder brought on by extreme protein deficiency, and I was told that many had died from starvation or hunger-related diseases. "The extent of suffering is overwhelming," Monica de Castellarnau of Doctors Without Borders said in a statement.

Benjamin Abe -- a native Ugandan, an Acholi, and an anthropologist at North Seattle Community College -- said he was horrified by his recent visit to a displaced persons camp near Gulu. "It was inhumane, basically a concentration camp," he said when we met last November in Kampala.

Compared with the open countryside where LRA terrorists may remain at large, the government camps are a refuge, but people in the camps say they, too, are preyed upon, as I learned during an unauthorized visit to camp Awer, 13 miles from Gulu. Awer nudged the roadside, a gigantic huddle of thousands of small conical family huts. The air was sour with the smell of unwashed bodies, poor sanitation, and sickness. Men slouched in the shade of their huts or played endless games of cards. Children squatted on bare earth in mud-hut classrooms, with neither pencils nor books. Exhausted-looking women cooked meager meals of maize or swept the dust from family hearths.

About 50 men and women gathered around me. Many of the men bore scars -- on their legs, arms and head -- that they said came from torture by government soldiers. Grace, who said she is in her 30s but looked 20 years older, told me that a Ugandan government soldier raped her at gunpoint three years ago as she was returning to the camp after taking her child to the hospital. "It's very common for soldiers to rape women in the camp," she added. Her attacker had since died of AIDS, she said. She didn't know if she had the virus that causes the disease.

The U.N.'s Hanawalt said that young women in the camp avoid going to the latrines at night out of fear of being raped by government soldiers or other men. One camp leader told me that the AIDS rate in the camp was double that in the rest of Uganda.

In 2000, Museveni, to draw the rebels (and their captives) out of the bush, began offering amnesty to all LRA members, and some have taken advantage of the offer, though not Kony. Then, in January 2004, the president complicated the amnesty offer by also inviting the International Criminal Court into Uganda to prosecute LRA leaders for war crimes. The human rights group Amnesty International supports the move to prosecute Kony and other LRA leaders.

But Anglican bishop Macleord Baker Ochola, vice chairman of the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative, opposes prosecution. He says it would ruin any chance for a peaceful resolution and would amount to a double standard unless government soldiers were also prosecuted for their crimes, including, he said, the rape and murder of civilians. Ochola argues for granting LRA members amnesty, even though he says an LRA land mine killed his wife and LRA rebels raped his daughter, who later committed suicide.

Many aid workers advocate a peaceful settlement. "There is no military solution to the violence and insurgency in the north," the U.N.'s Egeland wrote last fall. One drawback of a military approach, critics say, is the high casualty rate among LRA captives. Relief workers have condemned the army's use of helicopter gunships to fight LRA units because women and children are killed along with the rebel soldiers. The Ugandan Army defends the practice. "The LRA train their women and children to use rifles and even rocket-propelled grenades, and so we shoot them before they shoot us," Maj. Shaban Bantariza, the army spokesman, told me. This past November, Museveni declared a limited ceasefire zone in northern Uganda between the government and LRA forces. In late December, internal affairs minister Ruhakana Rugunda and former government minister Betty Bigombe led a group, including Odama and U.N. representatives, that met with LRA leaders near the Sudan border to discuss signing a peace agreement by the end of the year. But the talks broke down at the last minute, reportedly after the government declined the LRA's request for more time. President Museveni, speaking at a peace concert in Gulu on New Year's Day, said the cease-fire had expired and vowed that the army would "hunt for the LRA leaders, especially Joseph Kony . . . and kill them from wherever they are if they don't come out." He also said: "We have been slow in ending this long war," although, he added, 4,000 child captives had been rescued since August 2003.

At a holding center run by a Catholic relief organization in the northern Uganda town of Pader, ten young mothers and their babies were preparing to go home. They'd flown there from Gulu in a UNICEF-chartered plane. Among the young women was Beatrice, and as soon as she walked into the building a teenage girl rushed up to her. "You're alive!" the girl screamed, high-fiving Beatrice.

"We were best friends in the bush," Beatrice told me. "She thought I'd been killed by the gunships." Such reunions are typically happy affairs, but formerly abducted children face a grim future. "They'll need counseling for years," Akongo said, adding there's little or no chance of their getting any. One day at the Children of War Rehabilitation Center in Gulu, I saw Yakobo Ogwang throw his hands in the air with pure glee as he ran to his 13-year-old daughter, Steler, seeing her for the first time since the LRA abducted her two years before. "I thought she was dead," he said in a shaking voice. "I've not slept since we learned she'd returned." The girl's mother, Jerodina, pulled Steler's head to her bosom and sobbed. Steler stared silently at the ground.

--Paul Raffaele, a veteran foreign correspondent based in Sydney, Australia, is the author of the 2003 book The Last Tribes on Earth.