UNICEF highlights plight of children in the north

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has said the plight of thousands children abducted by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda as child soldiers or sex slaves, is being forgotten. UNICEF said this tragedy "has obliterated the idea of childhood as a protected time of healthy growth". The subject of child soldiers, it added, headed a list of "Ten Stories the World Should Know More About" compiled by the UN Department of Public Information. "The world may be awakening to the emergency in Sudan, but it has all but forgotten the tragedy of neighbouring Uganda, where in the past two years some 12,000 boys and girls have been abducted by the LRA," UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy is quoted as saying. Bellamy noted, in an article published on Friday in the International Herald Tribune and reproduced in a UNICEF news release on Monday, that the conflict in northern Uganda was "unlike any other: it is a war on children". "I have seen many disturbing things during my time with UNICEF. But few are as shocking as the sight of the ‘night commuters’ in northern Uganda," she said. The night commuters are children from unprotected villages who, fearing attacks and abduction by the LRA, leave their homes every day to seek refuge and safety in towns before nightfall. The attacks invariably involve appalling human rights abuses. "Children are often forced to kill their parents or other children. Those who are taken, some as young as six, are used as sex slaves in the rebel force, made to work as slaves, or forced to become soldiers. The LRA believes fighting age begins at seven," she added. Bellamy praised the Ugandan government for bringing peace to most of the country, spreading universal primary education, and fighting the HIV/AIDS pandemic, but noted that it was failing "by not ensuring the protection of its citizens", while "the global community is doing almost nothing to help". She noted that the world's governments had pledged only 20 percent of the this year's UN's appeal for US $127 million in humanitarian aid. In this context, Bellamy said: "The night commuters offer a vivid image of what happens when parts of a society are left completely unprotected." "We are calling on the government of Uganda and the international community to bring the kind of potent political will to the problem that has been brought to bear elsewhere," she added.