By Josephine Adams
The Rescue was an event organised by three young American film makers, Jason Russell, Bobby Bailey and Laren Poole, who founded Invisible Children, a non-profit organisation that aims to help put an end to the exploitation of children as soldiers.
The idea of The Rescue was that participants would “abduct themselves” by taking just a few survival items to camp at a designated site.
They were not allowed to leave the site until a celebrity or media mogul came and spoke out about the plight of the Ugandan child soldiers. When this happened, the city was “rescued”.
The activists spent their time “abducted” writing letters to the children concerned and also to influential people they hoped would help free the child soldiers.
This event received a mixed response. Some applauded it for bringing attention to the issue, while others said it didn’t highlight the seriousness of the situation clearly enough.
Juliane Okot Bitek, a Ugandan woman living in Canada, felt that “to ask thousands of young people to pretend that they can “abduct themselves” into creating a new reality for the children in the northern Uganda is more than appalling, it is manipulative and undermines the horror of the last two decades of suffering over there”.
The organisers, however, firmly believe that raising awareness, and more than US$23,000, is what’s most important. It also gained the attention of governments around the world, which have put resources towards helping negotiate peace in Uganda.
The reality facing child soldiers
Uganda is not alone in recruiting children to perform the horrific rites of war. Conflicts in Myanmar, Columbia, Liberia, Sierra Leone and several African nations affect young people in horrific ways. They miss out on education, are used as forced labour, as well as being used as soldiers in wars they may not understand.
Children can be forcibly recruited into armed forces, but also ‘volunteer’ because they see no other option; joining the army may be seen as the only way of surviving. Children may see these armies as a way to avenge murdered family members, earn status and power in their societies, or escape domestic abuse.
Unfortunately they are usually mistaken. We know from children who have escaped such situations that they are often required to prove their loyalty to armies by killing a friend or family member, they have no power over themselves or anyone else, and the violent abuse they are subjected to daily is worse than what they would suffer at home.
Photo by Joram Jojo
Uganda, Joseph Kony and the LRA
Uganda is a landlocked country in the east of Africa. Throughout its history, it has suffered various conflicts. The different ethnicities of Uganda have been pitted against each other, first as a method of control by the British colonisers, and after independence in 1962, by the Ugandan government itself.
This has led to the rise of many rebel groups including the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). LRA’s leader, Joseph Kony, is regarded as a holy man by his followers; none of them doubt his apparently ’supernatural’ powers.
The LRA was originally the Holy Spirit Movement, led by Alice Lakwena, whom Kony claims was his cousin. After her death, Kony took over and took the resistance group in a more violent direction, but with the continued aim of making Uganda a state based on the Christian Ten Commandments.
Invisible Children estimate that over 90% of the LRA’s forces were abducted as children.
Children all around northern Uganda live under constant threat of abduction and those who attend school often band together in groups to walk from their schools to safe sleeping areas in large cities.
It is because of these abductions that the current government placed thousands of its people in internal displacement camps (IDCs), originally meant to help protect the people from raids by the LRA. Unfortunately, these camps have just made the rebels’ jobs easier. With so many people packed together, LRA soldiers are able to attack many more people at one time, ruining homes, taking food, raping women and abducting children.
Abducted children can be used as soldiers, porters, sex slaves, or used to lay explosives. All are trained in combat and participate in violence. Many are made to kill friends or family.
A former child soldier, aged 13, describes what happened when he was made to join: “Early on, when my brothers and I were captured, the LRA explained to us that all five brothers couldn’t serve in the LRA because we would not perform well. So they tied up my younger brothers and invited us to watch. Then they beat them with sticks until two of them died. They told us it would give us strength to fight. My youngest brother was nine years old.”
The reality of The Rescue
The children fortunate enough to escape or be rescued then face another set of obstacles. The psychological, and often physical, scarring left after serving in the LRA means that many children are haunted by the abuse they suffered, the people they have killed and by guilt for what they have done. Funding for specialised rehabilitation centres is very limited.
Many will be stigmatised by their communities for what they were a part of, whether they volunteered or not, and post-traumatic stress is common.
Faced with the reality of the life of a child solider, it is easy to understand Juliane Okot Bitek’s criticism of The Rescue, but I believe both Bitek and The Rescue’s organisers have a point.
The Rescue successfully raised awareness of the issue, as well as more than US$23,000. However, it is unclear just how well the young people involved understood what’s actually happening in Uganda.
The biggest appeal of this kind of event for young people is often just the opportunity to get out and actively feel like we’re helping to make a difference. There is nothing wrong with this; it is, in fact, a very good thing. But does The Rescue undermine the suffering of children in Uganda over the last two decades?
Maybe, maybe not, but these young people are trying to recreate an ‘abduction’; a horror that they cannot possibly comprehend.
TAKE ACTION
- Visit www.invisiblechildren.com and donate money, or find out about new initiatives that Jason, Bobby and Laren are planning.
- Donate to organisations such as Save the Children and War Child, which also strive to protect children living in conflicted areas.
- There are several documentaries about child soldiers, such us those by Invisible Children; and Uganda Rising, by Act for Stolen Children. Plan a screening in your community to raise awareness, and encourage others to try to make a difference.
- Organise your own demonstrations or events to help raise awareness and money.
LEARN MORE
www.invisiblechildren.comwww.child-soldiers.org/home
http://therescue.invisiblechildren.com/en/#/watch/
www.savethechildren.org
www.warchild.org
Photo of The Rescue campaign by luos3r.
This article was originally published in Tearaway Magazine.
While I sit at a desk and swivel on an office chair, a little known phenomena has begun on the other side of the world where night is falling and children should be getting ready for bed. Instead, tens of thousands of Ugandan children begin what has now become termed as a “night commute”. Every night, children who live in dangerous rural areas where a militant rebel group have stronghold, walk up to 20km just to be able to sleep in the safety of the city. Fear of being abducted by rebels in their sleep, and being kept as soldiers or sex slaves, easily justifies a nightly marathon. And as thousands of eyes close to go to sleep, dreaming is not likely in a world where nightmares are a reality in more ways than one.