Thanks for the replies. Help us to take the jackasses to court.

My birthplace has been labelled as the worst place on earth to be a child today, but it was not always so. My childhood memories are happy ones until my family fled in 1986. For more read the book Child soldiers by China Keitetsi and An Eyewitness Report from the Frontlines of Humanity By Jan Egeland.

In 1998, in chairing the task force of the Acholi religious leaders’ peace initiative, I witnessed first hand an entire society systematically destroyed – physically, emotionally, culturally, socially and economically – in full view of the international community. This human rights’ catastrophe has been sustained for more twenty years. In that time more than half a million people – most of them children and women – have been placed into internment camps – - euphemistically called ‘protected villages’ – - under inhuman and abominable conditions, where despair and disease, over-crowding, infant mortality, hunger and malnutrition, and sexual abuse, cultural and personal humiliation and suicide are rampant; where the lack of sanitary facilities, clean water or clothing are ‘normal conditions’ of life.

A United Nation mission visited the Internally Displaced People (IDP) in Kitgum on 10 November 2003 to investigate the state of the refugee camps. The tragedy of Northern Uganda shocked Jan Egeland the United Nations Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs to the degree that he was prompted to assert ‘Northern Uganda must be one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.’

“When the Holocaust exterminated the Jews in Europe the world said ‘never again.’ When genocide was perpetrated in Rwanda the world said ‘never again.’ The genocide in northern Uganda is happening as the world watches and with full knowledge. Why is there no action? What will it take, and how long will it take, for leaders for western democracies to acknowledge, denounce and take action to end the genocide unfolding in northern Uganda? We must denounce and stop genocide wherever it occurs, regardless of ethnicity or political affiliation of the population being destroyed. The situation is worse than the one in Darfur Sudan. An estimated 1000 people die in these camps of northern Uganda each week. The forced relocation of people in northern Uganda is comparable to a similar policy conducted by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. There is no recent or present situation where all the elements that constitute genocide under the Convention of 1948 have been brought together in such chillingly comprehensive manner as in Northern Uganda today.” Olara Otunnu, former UN Under-Secretary General

‘The atrocities taking place daily are not only the work of the LRA. Government troops have maimed, raped and killed innocent civilians. Soldiers have engaged in scorched-earth tactics and the deliberate spreading of HIV and AIDS, often without punitive consequence. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented cases of tortures, rapes, extra-judicial killings, the burning of granaries, the poisoning of wells and instances of burying people alive.’ Daniella Boston Huffington post, Washington.

Despite these epithets, the people of Northern Uganda, are met with silence. It is abundantly clear that the international community has no desire or interest to end the war or address the grievous human rights’ violations

I support the ICCN rangers – against ALL others who would do them and their families harm and who would destroy Congo’s natural resources for gain so they can continue to wage their ignorant wars. I don’t care which group perpetrated this heinous crime, but they should be hunted down and brought to justice.

s.