Conferences

In Uganda, since 1988, a new hitherto unknown phenomenon of child birth has been taking place, courtesy of the unfortunate two decade long war orchestrated by the barbaric, cultish Ugandan rebels of the Lords’ Resistance Army (LRA). The LRA orchestrated over 60,000 child and adult abductions on the unprotected communities forcing them to fall in rank as sex slaves, porters and soldiers, often subjecting them to untold levels of sufferings to break their spirits and consolidate allegiance to the rebel’s cause. The LRA have, for the last two years, expanded their cross border bases, continuing to swell its military and sex slave population through ruthlessly harvesting the children of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Southern Sudan and The Central African Republic, where more than 1,000 children have been abducted and subjected to the same situation as Ugandan young girls, perhaps a near-familiar phenomenon befalling the Civilian Darfur population in the hands of the Janjaweed militia of Sudan, except for this latter case, the perpetuators are not kin and kith.

With extremely limited literature and an attempted documentation that started more than ten years into the war, a lot of hard facts remain unknown and unconsolidated, with no known deliberate attempts to feature such in the near future. But perhaps one of the major consequences has been the birth of thousands of children in to the war itself in at least four categories:

• Born of thousands of abducted girls within the LRA encampment – returned or still holed up with the LRA
• Conceived of the LRA and born upon return by abducted girls
• Born of rape within Internally displaced persons camps
• Born of Ugandan military at war fronts

This paper will examine the status of children born of thousands abducted by the LRA against the background of forced relationships with men responsible for their abduction and the complete destruction of whole communities from where the abducted and rebels hail: never before had the various tribes involved confronted with a similar phenomenon. Of importance will be an examination of the extent to which qualitative and quantitative documentation on this category has been undertaken.