Classrooms in Conflict

Abstract

© 2009 World Policy Institute 65 Uganda’s northern districts of Gulu, Kitgum, and Pader are just over 200 kilometers from the country’s bustling international capital of Kampala. The majority of the 800,000 inhabitants of these districts are ethnic Acholi, who make up 4 percent of Uganda’s total population. Traveling north out of Kampala is to experience the divide between rich and poor. The capital’s paved streets lined with air-conditioned shops turn into long stretches of deteriorating roads dotted with thatched huts and corrugated tin roofs. Traffic jams give way to streams of bicycles laden with harvested grass and sorghum. Women and girls sling baskets of fruit over their shoulders, balancing containers of water on their heads while infants cling to their backs. The landscape is a brilliant mix of burnt orange earth and vibrant green trees, of rich arable land and apparent tranquility. But the calm is a mirage. Since 1986, the region has been ravaged by a conflict between the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the government of Uganda. The decades of war have seen some of the worst violence committed against children and adolescents in the world. The LRA professes to fight a spiritual war on behalf of the minority Acholi people, but has been responsible for countless atrocities committed against civilians in northern Uganda, southern Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), including the abduction of thousands of children and adolescents to serve as child soldiers, porters, cooks, and sex slaves. Neither is the Ugandan government innocent in this conflict. The Ugandan People’s Defense Forces (UPDF), which is responsible for providing security for all of the nation’s civilians, has failed spectacularly to do so—and has also committed human rights violations against millions it is sworn to protect, although to a far lesser extent than the LRA. In the course of this long war, schools, families, and communities have been torn apart. Children and youth in northern Uganda have known virtually nothing else but war—a war in which they are a prime target.