Guest Op/Ed column by Morris Komakech, well-known Acholi writer and political commentator now based in Canada. Morris is participating in the Gulu Walk in Toronto this month, which is supported by Uganda-CAN. Contact Morris at Mordust_26@yahoo.ca -

As I participate in Gulu walk in Toronto, I begin to think about these resilient Acholi children who have to commute for life every night when they think about sleeping. A lot has been written about Northern Uganda but still a lot of things have not been done both at home and abroad. To improve the situation in the eye of the ordinary person, the Kony war is still portrayed as an Acholi insurrection against the NRM regime as insinuated by the Government, or a terrorist incursion from Sudan, thus the little value pegged on it.

To the Children of Acholi doing night commuting, as we trek the streets of Toronto, we wish to inform you that your footsteps have sent loud echo for the world to hear.

I recall in early nineties when the insurgents were very common around town, they came wearing brand new uniforms like that of the government soldiers and that confused the local people a lot. Then the National Resistance Army (NRA) would get hit and all they could do was to turn around and poke at the population claiming that the people are supporting the rebels by concealing their whereabouts. Acholi people wept with tears of frustration, fear and forced guilt, and they got caught in between trigger happy dogs of war; men and children in military fatigue carrying AK-47 and all sorts of ugly assault riffles.

LRA sneaked in with fury and chopped off the hands of the locals that would participate in fighting. LRA then warned Acholi not to cooperate with Government. Thereafter, government again started bickering and threatening the population with arrests and forcing them to cooperate against the LRA. This time around, since most men and women were amputated in the hand, the NRA asked them to ululate or ride on their old bicycles to report whenever the rebels advanced.

This time round LRA returned with new tactics, they cut off lips that ululated, sometimes locked lips with rusty padlocks and they issued a ban on riding a bicycle. Whoever was caught riding a bicycle would be amputated with a machete without any anesthesia. A lot of people lost their legs; women got their labia locked with padlocks. All these inhuman treatment of Acholi went unnoticed and the life of those who endeared to succumb to the demands of NRA shall remain in vain.

The war raged on. Then NRA said that the people were feeding the rebels. To cut off food supply, the people needed confinement in large concentration camps that they ordained Internally Displaced Peoples’ camps (IDP) where military detaches were constructed at the heart of the camp and huts of civilians constructed at the periphery so that the civilian where actually protecting the soldiers. Abduction of the population ensured unabated.

Then came the sacrifice of the Acholi children. In other wars around the world; Angola, Sierra Leone, Haiti and so forth children have largely been victims of circumstances, but in northern Uganda, they are targets. Because they are not fully protected, LRA comes and abducts as many as available and travel with them all the way to Sudan, a distance of well over 500km without getting intercepted by well equipped NRA. When the children are indoctrinated in Sudan and returned as rebels to hack to death the poor civilians, NRA shoots at them indiscriminately killing these poor souls.

It is at this intersection of horror where Acholi are juxtaposed, that I find the country and the international community being unfair to blind and deafen themselves of the suffering and systematic extermination of my people. It would help if we all re-examined our thoughts and compassion about the ugly state of events in Northern Uganda. I strongly believe that the Ugandan government has the ultimate link to exterminate LRA and I challenge the authority to use their friendship with SPLA to achieve this end.

The Ugandan newspaper, The New Vision, yesterday reports that "25% of children of primary school-going age in northern Uganda are out of school because of the Kony war," according to a UNICEF report.

The report further says 60% of the 1,200 primary schools in northern districts have been displaced by the war. Read the article here.

Two Canadians are refusing to be silent in the face of the plight of children in Uganda's two-decade war. They are walking nightly 12.5 kilometers to sleep in the streets of Toronto just as the thousands of child "night commuters" are forced to do in northern Uganda. They are asking for people to walk with them and sign their petition. Visit their website for more information. We hope Uganda-CAN can link with them and start walking with them as we work to give coverage and face to the unnecessary human suffering in Uganda.

Today, the British Herald is running a piece on the "night terror" faced by children in northern Uganda. Lucy Bannerman writes, "Even in the midst of this cruelty, one practice – standard for all new recruits – stands out. One 12-year-old girl, who had been abducted from a remote village, had tried to escape. When she was found, the rebels beat the pregnant woman who had been hiding her and left her for dead. The Aboke girls were then ordered to 'finish off' the frightened child. Their first, hesitant taps on her legs infuriated their captors, who ordered them into a line. One by one, the schoolgirls were forced to hit the girl until she died."

Witnessing the experience of the children "night commuters" forced to walk miles to sleep gridlocked in tents guarded by soldiers out of fear of abduction is horrifying. Two months ago, I visited Noah's Ark, a center for such children -

When you look at Noah’s Ark during the day, you see barbed-wire fences, old dusty tents and dilapidated sheds. It looks like the deserted relics of a Nazi concentration camp during the Holocaust. And yet when I returned that night on bicycle, I found it overcrowded with more than 2,000 children wearing ripped, dirty clothes and faces wrought by fear. As I looked upon the masses and masses of children, ranging in age from a few months old to seventeen, I was about to cry.

Noah’s Ark is a center for children who “commute” to town at night from the rural villages and internally-displaced peoples camps to get security from the Lord’s Resistance Army, which has abducted more than 25,000 children over the last decade. These children walk miles every night and every morning to the avoid the unknown of the night. They sleep in the dusty tents on the dirt floor with torn blankets, gridlocked together like Africans on a slave ship across the Middle Passage.

Can you imagine? These children as young as one-year old have to walk miles in the late afternoon into town where they sleep inside barbed wired fences, overcrowded into tents. At the break of dawn, they march back to their villages. And they do this everyday. Every single day. Can you imagine living such a life dictated by fear and poverty? Can you imagine living such a life as a three-year old? It is abominable. And the numbers in these "night commuter" centers are increasing due to more attacks from the LRA and greater insecurity.

After we visited the tents that night, we started to walk back to the entrance of Noah’s Ark. As we moved up the hill, the children rushed past us to secure their spots for sleep. It was an emotional moment - seemingly endless waves of little malnourished, fear-ridden, cute children walking past us. And then the kids choir in the camp, which had been practicising in the distance, started singing. We could only make out one word in their song: peace.

The story of the "night commuters" of northern Uganda is one of the most moving. Thousands of children walk miles each night from their rural homes into towns just to sleep without fear of abduction. Read an article from yesterday's UK Tablet newspaper about the "night commuters." Also, see photos of the horrifying journey of these children at the BBC online.