At twilight in Uganda’s north, ‘the night commuters’, made up of lines of thousands of children, begin the trek along the dusty roads from their family compounds. They are seeking the temporary safety of towns such as Kitgum, Pader or the regional capital Gulu, where they will huddle together for the night in makeshift shelters—church missions, bus stations or decaying warehouses. The latecomers simply sleep on the streets, where they are vulnerable to theft, beatings and sexual abuse from other children and adults, including Ugandan government soldiers.
For Olara Otunnu, winner of the 2005 Sydney Peace Prize, his birthplace of Acholiland in northern Uganda is the worst place on earth to be a child today. Those children who do not make it to the township sanctuaries also face the real danger of being abducted by insurgents of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) into the nightmare world of child soldiers and sex slaves.
In two decades of war, the United Nations estimates that the LRA has captured and enslaved more than 20,000 children, some of them as young as five years old. Those small, unwilling recruits lucky enough to escape bear witness to the horror of LRA indoctrination practices such as being ordered to hack former classmates to death with pangas, as punishment for being too tired to walk any further.
Olara Otunnu will use his $50,000 Sydney Peace Prize to establish a new international foundation to help such children of violence and social devastation. As the former UN Under-Secretary-General and Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, he will also continue to lobby for the full implementation of a UN Security Council Resolution for the ‘naming and shaming’ of groups that brutalise children.
Otunnu has no illusions that these initiatives are more than a small part of what needs to be done to try to save a lost generation of children from the scourge of ethnic war in his homeland. A small, slight man, gentle and measured, he has used public forums in Australia to make a heart-wrenching appeal for Western intervention to put a stop to a conflict ‘far worse than Darfur or the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields’. During the last ten years, Uganda’s national government has responded to the LRA rebels by uprooting and herding 95 per cent of the Acholi population of two million into ‘concentration camps’. In other words, an entire society has become trapped between the