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Civil war in sierra leone
Civil war in sierra leone
Civil war in sierra leone
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“Between 1987 and 2006, at least 20,000 Ugandan children were abducted [and] more than 1.9 million people were displaced from their homes”(Q&A on Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army). The Ugandan civil war began in 1987, when an army of people led by Joseph Kony attempted to overthrow the Ugandan government. Although Kony’s purpose was to turn Uganda into an all Christian country, his methods in doing so are not based on the ten commandments as which he intended. The Civil war in Uganda has been going on for 27 years now and although the violence rates have gone down due to the capturing of one of Kony’s top three commanders, the war continues destroying many lives. “Possibly as many as 500,000 people have been killed in the course of the conflict”(Tasneem Jamal 1). The attempted and continual rebellion of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda against the federal government has led to much destruction in the past, including the death of thousands of innocent people, still affects hundreds of thousands currently, who are living in perpetual fear of death and kidnapping, and will affect millions in the future.
As the civil war in Uganda is ongoing it continues to affect the Ugandan economy and government. Joseph Kony began the war and created the Lord’s Resistance Army. The objective of the Lords Resistance army was to help Kony overthrow the government and President Yoweri Museveni in addition to turning the country Christian. Although all the acts of the Lord’s Resistance Army involved some sort of violence, whether it was kidnapping, rape, and or death. [“The Lord’s Resistance Army] at its height numbered in the thousands” (Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army). The Lord’s Resistance Army hardly h...
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...Jamal, Tasneem. "Uganda." Project Ploughshares. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 May 2014.
"Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army | Human Rights Watch." Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army | Human Rights Watch. N.p., 21 Mar. 2012. Web. 28 Apr. 2014.
Pham, Phuong N., Patrick Vinck, and Eric Stover. "The Lord's Resistance Army and Forced Conscription in Northern Uganda." The Lord's Resistance Army and Forced Conscription in Northern Uganda 30.2 (2008): 409. JSTOR. Web. 28 Apr. 2014.
"Uganda: Child Soldiers at Centre of Mounting Humanitarian Crisis." UN News Center. UN, n.d. Web. 30 Apr. 2014.
"Uganda." Economy: Population, GDP, Inflation, Business, Trade, FDI, Corruption. The Heritage Foundation, n.d. Web. 30 Apr. 2014.
Falkenburg, Luke. "Youth Lost: Ugandan Child Soldiers in the Lord's Resistance Army." Small Wars Journal. N.p., 15 Mar. 2013. Web. 28 Apr. 2014.
There was a war in Sierra Leone, Africa, from 1991 to 2002 where a rebel army stormed through African villages amputating and raping citizens left and right (“Sierra Leone Profile”). Adebunmi Savage, a former citizen of Sierra Leone, describes the reality of this civil war:
Capturing children and turning them into child soldiers is an increasing epidemic in Sierra Leone. Ishmael Beah, author of the memoir A Long Way Gone, speaks of his time as a child soldier. Beah was born in Sierra Leone and at only thirteen years old he was captured by the national army and turned into a “vicious soldier.” (Beah, Bio Ref Bank) During the time of Beah’s childhood, a civil war had erupted between a rebel group known as the Revolutionary United Front and the corrupt Sierra Leone government. It was during this time when the recruitment of child soldiers began in the war. Ishmael Beah recalls that when he was only twelve years old his parents and two brothers were killed by the rebel group and he fled his village. While he and his friends were on a journey for a period of months, Beah was captured by the Sierra Leonean Army. The army brainwashed him, as well as other children, with “various drugs that included amphetamines, marijuana, and brown brown.” (Beah, Bio Ref Bank) The child soldiers were taught to fight viciously and the effects of the drugs forced them to carry out kill orders. Beah was released from the army after three years of fighting and dozens of murders. Ishmael Beah’s memoir of his time as a child soldier expresses the deep struggle between his survival and any gleam of hope for the future.
“Child Soldiers Global Report 2001- Sierra Leone.” refworld. Child Soldiers International, 2001. Web. 4 Dec. 2013.
...be seen as an entity that promotes vile results. However, it is imperative to understand that globalization is multilayered and difficult to fully understand. In the case of child soldiers, globalization has played a pertinent role in unifying international organizations in hopes of finding a solution to this “phenomenon”. On the other hand, although certain international organizations such as United Nations have had a prominent role in advocating against child soldiery, for the following reasons, its attempts are insufficient: it lacks the ability to enforce sanctions established within the international community and it does not do enough to recognize the political, social and economic inequalities that are prevalent in most of these fragile states. Therefore, child soldiery, cannot be eradicated until these issues are dealt with on a collective global scale.
Zack-Williams, A.B. (2001). Child Soldiers in the Civil War in Sierra Leone. Review of African Political Economy, 28 (87), 73–82.
Raffaele, Paul. "Uganda: The Horror." Smithsonian (Vol. 35, No. 11). Feb. 2005: 90-99. SIRS Issues
For decades, Uganda’s economy has suffered through disappointing economic policies and instabilities. These setbacks have been put forth by a chronically unreliable government, leaving it as one of the world’s poorest countries. Uganda’s weak infrastructure and corrupt government are two of the primary constraints against a continuation of economic growth. Uganda has ongoing military involvement in the War on Congo, wrongly taking money from the already deprived country and into the war. Many villages in Uganda also have to waste their precious money and time in pursuit of hiding places. They are faced with a group known as, The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). LRA is infamous for their twenty years of massacre and slaughter in Uganda, causing an estimated 1.5 million internally displayed persons. Several people are questioning why the LRA is still terrorizing the country and criticizing the government’s commitment to putting an end this horrific group. The Inspector General of Government (IGG) ...
The acts of violence that were performed by rebels in Africa were horrific. Adults and children were murdered, mutilated, tortured, and raped. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone performed despicable acts of cutting off a people's body parts with machetes to instill fear in the community. If you were working in the diamond mines and not performing up to the standards of the rebels you would lose a body part as punishment. Rebels would continue to do this from one village to another in order “to take control of the mines in the area” (Hoyt). It is estimated that in Sierra Leone that over 20,000 people suffered mutilation. The acts that the rebels performed to these innocent victims was clearly a violation to their human rights. The RUF collected 125 million a year to fund their war on the government and the people of Sierra Leone.
Child soldier is a worldwide issue, but it became most critical in the Africa. Child soldiers are any children under the age of 18 who are recruited by some rebel groups and used as fighters, cooks, messengers, human shields and suicide bombers, some of them even under the aged 10 when they are forced to serve. Physically vulnerable and easily intimidated, children typically make obedient soldiers. Most of them are abducted or recruited by force, and often compelled to follow orders under threat of death. As society breaks down during conflict, leaving children no access to school, driving them from their homes, or separating them from family members, many children feel that rebel groups become their best chance for survival. Others seek escape from poverty or join military forces to avenge family members who have been killed by the war. Sometimes they even forced to commit atrocities against their own family (britjob p 4 ). The horrible and tragic fate of many unfortunate children is set on path of war murders and suffering, more nations should help to prevent these tragedies and to help stop the suffering of these poor, unfortunate an innocent children.
Taylor, Rupert. “The Plight of Child Soldiers.” Suite 101. Media Inc., 11 May 2009. Web. 15 Feb. 2011. .
These are the words of a 15-year-old girl in Uganda. Like her, there are an estimated 300,000 children under the age of eighteen who are serving as child soldiers in about thirty-six conflict zones (Shaikh). Life on the front lines often brings children face to face with the horrors of war. Too many children have personally experienced or witnessed physical violence, including executions, death squad killings, disappearances, torture, arrest, sexual abuse, bombings, forced displacement, destruction of home, and massacres. Over the past ten years, more than two million children have been killed, five million disabled, twelve million left homeless, one million orphaned or separated from their parents, and ten million psychologically traumatized (Unicef, “Children in War”). They have been robbed of their childhood and forced to become part of unwanted conflicts. In African countries, such as Chad, this problem is increasingly becoming a global issue that needs to be solved immediately. However, there are other countries, such as Sierra Leone, where the problem has been effectively resolved. Although the use of child soldiers will never completely diminish, it has been proven in Sierra Leone that Unicef's disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration program will lessen the amount of child soldiers in Chad and prevent their use in the future.
“Darfur Genocide.” World Without Genocide. William Mitchell School of Law, n.d. Web. 16 April 2014. .
Wells, Karen C.. "Children and youth at war." Childhood in a global perspective. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009. 152. Print.
The overriding challenge Uganda faces today is the curse of poverty. Poverty, ‘the lack of something”(“Poverty.”), something can be materials, knowledge, or anything one justifies as necessary to living. Associated with poverty is the question of what causes poverty and how to stop poverty? The poverty rate in Uganda has declined from the year 2002 from the year 2009, which shows the percent of residents living in poverty has decreasing. Yet, the year is 2014 and the poverty rate could have drastically changed over the course of five years. One could assume the poverty rate would continue to decrease, which would be astounding and beneficial, but does poverty ever decrease enough to an acceptable level or even nonexistence? Poverty is a complex issue that continues to puzzle people from all across the globe. Poverty could possible be a question that is never truly answered.
Political instability and the menace of conflict is still a powerful deterrent to economic growth and poverty reduction. The assassination of the presidents of Burundi and Rwanda in 1993 sparked an ethnic clash and genocide in R...