For all that the Sudan gets little attention these days, there is yet another horror in Africa that we need to be aware of. A rebel group called the Lord’s Resistance Army has been operating in Uganda for some time, perhaps with some support from the Sudan. But in the past year LRA has launched such a savage assault on Uganda’s people that 1.6 million people have been displaced. I follow the news much more than most people, and I had no idea this was going on until I caught this editorial in the Washington Post today.
These rebels are exceptionally brutal too, and the worst is that they deliberately target children. 20,000 children have been kidnapped and forced into lives of servitude, sexual slavery, and brutality of terrible kinds.
This is another area where even a small amount of U.S. attention and some number of U.N. forces could have changed the tragic destiny of so many. But we’re too busy with our wars of convenience to even notice.