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 Periodical article |
 Leiden University catalogue |
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| Title: | The Stories We Must Tell: Ugandan Children and the Atrocities of the Lord's Resistance Army |
| Author: | Ehrenreich, Rosa |
| Year: | 1998 |
| Periodical: | Africa Today |
| Volume: | 45 |
| Issue: | 1 |
| Pages: | 79-102 |
| Language: | English |
| Geographic term: | Uganda |
| Subjects: | African Independent Churches political action child abuse Military, Defense and Arms Law, Human Rights and Violence Politics and Government |
| External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/4187208 |
| Abstract: | During the summer of 1997, the author of this article, a lawyer, spent a short time in Uganda as a consultant for Human Rights Watch, interviewing children who had been abducted by a rebel group called the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) and who had experienced horrible situations. Those children had sometimes been forced to participate in atrocities against fellow citizens. The essay begins by discussing the decade-old conflict in northern Uganda between the government and the LRA, which was initially called the Holy Spirit Movement, under the leadership of Alice Lakwena in 1987. After briefly providing background information on the conflict, the author describes the many contradictory stories she heard during her time in Uganda about the reasons for the conflict's persistence. She discusses the difficulty of assessing the competing narratives, as well as the impossibility of ever getting at the 'truth' about the conflict. She then turns to the stories of children who have survived months or years in rebel captivity, and ends by discussing the ways in which these highly personal narratives force us to insist that some things, at least, are absolute. Notes, ref. |
