Patrick Chengo remembers waking as a hand tore him from bed. Rebels roped together 10 boys from his tiny village, marching them into the black June night. Clenching his jaw, Chengo, the eldest at 14, refused to cry, hoping to calm the other boys; the youngest, just six, had wet himself from fear. Whips drove the boys far from home, deep into the northern Ugandan forest, where they eventually crossed the Nile into the Democratic Republic of Congo. So began Chengo’s nightmare—six years as a child soldier for Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army.
Chengo managed to escape 18 months ago, but freedom has proved bittersweet. His parents didn’t live to see his return. He can no longer read nor do even basic math. His village believes he is a murderer. Chengo, who is haunted by the horrors of the forest, wants Kony captured and tried for what he did to him and tens of thousands of other children. So, apparently, does Barack Obama. In a surprise announcement last fall, President Obama declared the U.S. government was sending combat-ready troops to aid in the hunt for, and fight against, Kony, one of the planet’s most reviled war criminals, and the LRA’s senior leadership.
In the beginning, the LRA was allied with northern Uganda’s Acholi people; it formed in the late ’80s in opposition to the Yoweri Museveni government, which it hoped to replace with one led by northerners, who had ruled Uganda after independence. Political aims, however, were subsumed by Kony’s pseudo-religious imperative: the Christian sociopath claims the Holy Spirit has commanded him to keep killing until Uganda is ruled by the Ten Commandments.
Gay activist Gerald Ssentongo is afraid to talk openly about his cause in Uganda. Not only that, but he is terrified of being "caught" socialising with gay people and only meets his friends at night in out-of-reach places.
The members of Uganda’s parliament are on vacation now, and won’t be coming back to work until February. It might not be much, given the threat hanging over them, but during those two months, L.G.B.T. Ugandans can rest a little easier. As I write in my story in this week’s issue, from the moment last month when Rebecca Kadaga, the speaker of parliament, announced that she would pass the proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill, which would imprison gays (and originally suggested the death penalty for certain homosexual behavior), as a “Christmas gift” to Ugandans, activists have been coördinating a global effort to kill the bill, and those whose sexuality would be criminalized have been watching their government closely, as the bill seemed to be the closest it has come to passage since it was first introduced, in 2009. But lawmakers left for vacation on Friday without holding a vote on it, so now the notorious “Kill the Gays” bill is back in limbo, along with the lives of those in Uganda’s L.G.B.T. community.
We look at the controversial video, "Kony 2012," that targets Joseph Kony and his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA),
a group notorious for kidnapping children, forcing boys to become
fighters, and using girls as sex slaves in Central Africa. Released on
March 5, it was viewed more than 100 million times online in just under a
week, making it the most viral video in history. We speak with two
Ugandans about the impact of the film and how the Kony 2012 campaign
calls for U.S. military intervention in Central Africa to fight the LRA. Milton Allimadi is publisher and editor-in-chief of Black Star News. Victor Ochen is a survivor of the LRA war and director of African Youth Initiative Network, based in northern Uganda.
