After Watching "Invisible Children"...

Summary of “Invisible Children”

The largest group victimized by the fighting in Uganda is children- children who are killed, children who live in fear of dying, and children who are trained to kill. No written records exist of how many Ugandan children were abducted by the LRA, or the Lord’s Resistance Army, and then trained in the bushes to become desensitized killing machines.

The LRA are rebels, currently led by Joseph Kony, who are fighting to overthrow the current Ugandan government. However, many Ugandans became tired of fighting and were not inclined to join the rebels. Desperate for more soldiers, the LRA abducts children in the middle of the night and brutalize them to the point where they lose all feelings of morals. Children from age 5 to 12 are big enough to carry weapons and brutally kill, but they are also small enough to enter buildings and capture more children. They are also young enough to brainwash and especially with the spread of the AIDS epidemics, it is easy to find orphaned children in many villages.

These children are taught to kill with guns, knives, and other weapons, and they are forced to kill any and every person who is not with the LRA- including children like themselves.

In fear of abduction, children in Uganda flee every night to major towns and crowd in hospitals, bus parking lots, schools, and even under verandas to avoid capture by the LRA. This rebellion, which started in 1987, held Uganda in a state of constant fear, movement, and malnourishment. The LRA’s goal, as one Ugandan put it, is to “bring peace to the Acholi (majority of the people who are in Northern Uganda, the area most terrorized) by killing Acholi”.

Conditions are so harsh on some Ugandans that now they are beginning to think that even death might be better than the life they are living.

Many Ugandans believe that if the United States, the current superpower in the world, strongly pressures the Ugandan government to do more things to put down the rebellion and provide enough aid and defense to Uganda, the LRA insurgency may be put down in a short amount of time.

Reaction

It’s always heartbreaking to see innocent children caught in the atrocities and violence of war.

However, the situation in Uganda was especially disturbing because this time, the children are not only being killed but they are being kidnapped and brutally trained to be no longer a human, but a little killing machine. Even if all this fighting ends tomorrow, nothing can compensate the psychological horrors that will forever haunt all Ugandans who have witnessed this violence.

It is appalling to think that after so many tragedies in history, such as the Holocaust, it is still possible for any nation to stand by and watch this unravel, but these atrocities are not uncommon in developing areas, such as parts of Africa. The nations with power will not take enough actions to stop this, and they say “It doesn’t affect us” or “It’s just Africa”.

And in a world where such horrors are possible, it seems that only the innocent children weep.