FILMS ARE NOW so violent that it’s hard to imagine that real life could be even more brutal. But when I visited Uganda last year, I met some children who had been through an ordeal that would seem implausible even in a film script. Now living in one of many rehabilitation centres in northern Uganda, these traumatised teenagers are the victims of one of Africa’s longest-running wars. Almost 20 years of fighting between the Ugandan Government and the rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army has killed half a million people. Many of the dead are children.

This war is a real-life horror story. The LRA kidnaps children and forces them to join its ranks. And so, incredibly, children are not only the main victims of this war, but also its unwilling perpetrators. The children I met had recently escaped from LRA captivity. The girls told me they had been given to rebel commanders as “wives” and forced to bear them children. The boys said they had been forced to fight, to walk for days knowing they would be killed if they showed any weakness, and in some cases forced even to murder their family members.

Many of the children were too traumatised to speak about their experiences. I met one girl, who was 15. She had been abducted in 2003 and held for nine months. When I asked her what had happened to her, she just stared at the ground. I didn’t want to push her. I wondered who would listen to her, even if she could bring herself to tell me her story. The world seems deaf to what is going on in northern Uganda.

This month, it was reported that the LRA killed two British men — an aid worker and a businessman — prompting a few headlines. But then this horrific war slipped off the news agenda again.

Almost two million people have been driven from their homes by the conflict. They now live in overcrowded, unsanitary huts in camps, where it feels like “the end of the time”. To date, the international community has done little to bring them any hope. The UN Security Council has passed more than 1,000 resolutions since the war began in 1986 but none of them has been on northern Uganda.

On December 1, the UK takes over the presidency of the UN Security Council. Jack Straw will have many issues to contend with, but I ask him not to forget the children of northern Uganda. In a year when Africa has been top of the Government’s agenda, the war in northern Uganda should be a priority. While the Labour Government has pushed for the international community to intervene in many African conflicts including Sierra Leone and Liberia, it has done comparatively little on Uganda, where there is a humanitarian crisis of equal proportions.

I went to northern Uganda with Oxfam, hoping to raise the profile of this forgotten crisis. Every night, up to 10,000 children walk into the centre of Kitgum, one of the main towns. These children have been sent there by their families because they are not safe in their own beds. They sleep rough, in well-lit streets or makeshift shelters, to avoid night raids by the Lord’s Resistance Army.

More than 25,000 children have been kidnapped by the LRA since the war began. This year, an average of 20 children have been abducted every week.

In the past few weeks, the situation has taken a turn for the worse. After the indictment of five members of the LRA by the International Criminal Court, the rebel group has started to attack aid workers for the first time. Five have been killed so far. This has meant that Oxfam and many other aid agencies have had to restrict operations in northern Uganda. There are concerns that conditions in the camps will start to deteriorate because vital supplies such as medicines cannot get through.

A few months ago, the Foreign Secretary was good enough to listen to me and Oxfam about this humanitarian crisis. The British Government has a stake in Uganda, having given about £740 million in aid to the Government there in the past two decades, which has helped to build up the country’s health and education systems.

So we are asking the British Government to speak up for almost two million people in northern Uganda, who desperately need help and support. They must use the presidency of the UN Security Council to help to protect the people of northern Uganda and to work towards ending the conflict, so that the generation of children who have grown up since the war began can taste peace and security for the first time.

www.oxfam.org.uk

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