It’s hard to believe that there are still places on the Earth where angry men with AK47 rifles might appear at any time, killing, raping and plundering anyone in sight. It’s even harder to bear the knowledge that one of those young men might be your own son, abducted a few years ago as a child and brainwashed into a culture of fear, violence and superstition.
That’s how things have been for many years in northern Uganda. Perhaps it’s coming to an end, but the future is very uncertain. Joseph Kony is the spiritual leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, conjuring magic to make his followers immune to bullets. The LRA sustains its rebel activities by kidnapping boys and brainwashing them by exposing them to slaughter and extreme violence. Girls are kidnapped for use as sex slaves. No-one really can remember what they are rebelling against.
As a result of the constant insurgency, the people in northern Uganda are extremely poor, and they have lived in a state of constant trauma for many years. Now that the insurgency might be coming to an end, they need to work out how to treat the perpetrators of the crimes, bearing in mind that the perpetrators are their own sons, brainwashed and unrecognisable as a result of the terror which they have endured.