Written by Kylie Akins
When Jacob was 12 years old, he and his brother were abducted. He was given a gun and made a soldier for a cause he did not understand and promised death if he fled from the army. When their abductors caught Jacob’s brother attempting to escape, he could only watch as they slit his brother’s neck with a machete.
“I saw,” Jacob said. “I try to cry, but they said that when I cry, they are going to kill me.”
Today, now free from his kidnappers, Jacob lives in fear, wondering if they might find him and kill him. He will never experience the comfort of security that most children enjoy.
For 23 years, the Lord’s Resistance Army, Ugandan rebels lead by Joseph Kony, has utilized child abduction to form an army against their government and terrorize neighboring countries. In 2005, three U.S. filmmakers formed an organization called Invisible Children to raise awareness and inspire action on behalf of the abducted children.
Invisible Children’s founders, Jason Russell, Bobby Bailey and Laren Poole, first encountered the LRA on a trip to Africa in 2003. In the documentary produced during this visit they told stories, including Jacob’s, and expressed their shock concerning the situations they saw there.
During the past 20 years, approximately 30,000 children have been abducted by the LRA, with about 3,000 captive child soldiers in the current army. Children traveling from their homes into villages to hide, packing into the basements of large buildings or abandoned structure to prevent being abducted by the LRA, known as night commuting, was a common occurrence they saw in Uganda.
These children who are abducted into the LRA are forced to commit acts of violence without hesitation. In the Invisible Children documentary, International Criminal Court’s lead prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, spoke of a boy and the violence he was forced to commit when he was a member of the LRA. Once the boy was made to throw a baby in a river simply because the mother was walking too slowly. He burned a family in their home and murdered many more during his captive service.
“They transformed this beautiful guy into a monster, and of course something cannot return,” Moreno-Ocampo said in the documentary. “Something cannot go back to normal.”
Since Invisible Children’s founding, it has initiated programs that have attempted to spark the government’s involvement in a solution to Kony’s violence. On April 25, the Rescue Event sponsored by Invisible Children will be held in 100 major cities across the world to raise awareness and continue to encourage global government to pursue a solution to the Ugandan crisis.
Harding students have become aware of this movement and now form a large majority of the participants in the Little Rock event, even taking responsibility for the organization of the gathering. The activities involved in the Rescue Event will symbolically represent the abduction of child soldiers.
The first meeting site will be where the students are “abducted” and leave behind pictures, marking themselves as “missing” people. They will then walk to the “LRA camp,” a site a mile to three miles away, where they will stay for the night until they are “rescued.” To be rescued, two qualifications must be met: coverage by an approved media outlet and attendance of a pre-determined cultural or political leader.
Freshman Kayla Ross became a major organizer for the Invisible Children movement on campus in early March and has now been given the responsibility for the entire Little Rock Rescue Event. Ross said Christians have a responsibility given by Scriptures to the weak and abused.
“A lot of that is overlooked until it’s too late, and so many people have died,” Ross said. “I think people forget that we live in the same world. Invisible Children acts on the power of the people to bring awareness. They realized the only way they could bring recognition to what was going on in Uganda is to use the people.”
Ross and others involved with Invisible Children said they hope the Rescue Event will bring much-needed attention to the plight of child soldiers.
“It’s like we’ve failed the children because we are there to protect the children, and we didn’t,” Angelina Atyam, a mother of an abducted child, said in the Invisible Children documentary. “Every minute that ticks away, a child is dying; a child is being injured; a child is starving to death. I want to see their faces and know our children are alive.”
