The plight of people living in northern Uganda over the past 25 years is incomprehensible to most Westerners. Peter Eichstaedt sets out to change that in his chilling book First Kill Your Family: Child Soldiers of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army. A rebel group, led by a bloodthirsty spirit medium named Joseph Kony, and calling themselves the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), has been fighting against the Ugandan government in a conflict that seems incapable of resolution.
The LRA’s typical modus operandi in their “war” involves raiding unarmed villages, slaughtering adults and kidnapping children to be trained up as soldiers or used as camp attendants and sex slaves. To alienate the kidnapped children permanently from their families, they are forced to do such unspeakable things as bludgeon to death their own family members. Many adults who are not killed by LRA raiding parties are deliberately maimed. The LRA has in recent years moved out of northern Uganda, and is now thought to be in the Darfur region of Sudan, but it is too soon to conclude that the LRA’s influence in northern Uganda is finished.
Peter Eichstaedt paints a powerful portrait of the effects of the war, the ways in which Uganda’s army has exacerbated the problems, and the intractable nature of the attempted peace negotiations. Unfortunately, while the author interviewed a number of former members of the LRA, he did not actually meet or interview Joseph Kony, and the book is more a description of the consequences of Kony’s war than an account of the war itself. I recommend this book for anyone seeking to understand and help people in northern Uganda.