WILL Headlines, News, & Notes
Wide Angle: Lord’s Children
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
9 pm Tuesday
Former child soldiers in Uganda try to overcome scars of kidnapping, rape and atrocities.
Northern Uganda has been ravaged by one of Africa’s longest civil wars. For more than 20 years, as many 25,000 children, some as young as five years old, have been kidnapped by Uganda’s anti-government rebel group, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), and forced to serve as child soldiers and sex slaves.
Under the command of LRA leader Joseph Kony, these children have been terrorized into committing the worst atrocities, even killing their own families. Lord’s Children follows three former LRA soldiers who escaped from the bush and have taken refuge in a rehabilitation center.
Wide Angle is with the center’s counselors as they help the physically and emotionally scarred children put their lives back together. Fourteen-year old Jennifer was abducted by the LRA when she was 9 years old, handed a gun and trained to kill. Raped by a rebel soldier, she now fears that she’s HIV positive. Kilama, 13, is rejected by his grandmother, who is fearful of his turbulent past. Homeless, he wanders to the nearby city, like thousands of other children, in constant fear of being re-kidnapped by the rebels. At a young age, Francis witnessed the execution of two boys, killed by machete for not following orders. Terrified of a similar fate, he fled and now hopes to be reunited with his mother. As these children piece their lives together, the LRA continues to carry out attacks in the region. Though the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Kony in 2005, he remains at large, hiding in the jungle of neighboring Congo.
