Archive of Twitter Posts for Uganda

By Melissa Tong, Researcher
A background and history of the use of child soldiers in Uganda.

By Kate Davey, Director of Research Projects

On October 14, President Obama announced that he was sending one hundred US troops to Uganda to “provide assistance to regional forces that are working toward the removal of Joseph Kony from the battlefield.

Uma Thurman, star of Kill Bill and other award-winning films, will act as a schoolteacher in a film depicting the struggle of a group of girls who were abducted and forced to serve as sex slaves in Uganda in 1996. The Hollywood beauty will star in the drama based on the 1996 incident which saw [...]

“Using counselling sessions, art and acting“, former abductees, child soldiers and child victims of war are being rehabilitated and reintegrated back into their communities in war-torn Uganda. The Children of War Center in Gulu, operated by World Vision Canada, has helped to rehabilitate more than 15,000 children. Many of the children arriving at the center [...]

University of Wyoming professor Susan McKay is in the third phase of a research project studying former girl soldiers in Uganda, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Her findings have been wide-ranging, but her most recent discoveries have been concerned with the “stigma and marginalization” faced by the women, many of them young mothers, attempting to transition [...]

Grace Arach was “abducted by rebels, raped, coerced into marriage, forced to kill” and finally escaped when she was 23 years old from the Lord’s Resistance Army from northern Uganda, one of the worst offenders of using child soldiers. Since then, she has joined Children/Youth Peace Builders (CAP) a local organization in Gulu, Uganda, where [...]

Take a look at “First Kill Your Family: Child Soldiers of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army” – a new book by Peter Eichstaedt on child soldiers and the LRA. From Barnes and Noble: In First Kill Your Family, veteran journalist Peter Eichstaedt goes into the war-torn villages and refugee camps, talking to former child [...]

The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) has been accused of kidnapping and forcibly recruiting tens of thousands of children. However, a new report condemns the government of Uganda for failing to properly rehabilitate these children after their release or escape. According to a new report by Amnesty International thousands of former child soldiers ”remain destitute and [...]

Charles Opira was 10 years old when the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) abducted him as he walked to school in Gulu, northern Uganda, in 2000. He recalls fleeing rebel captivity in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in June: “I was abducted from Atede village in Gulu when I was 10 years old; the rebels [...]