Can you imagine not seeing your parents and being afraid to fall asleep? Can you imagine closing your eyes every night thinking “what if he kidnaps me?” or “what’s going to happen to my parents?” Innocent people, especially adolescents, have to sleep at their school, because an atrocious man named Kony targets children. In the middle of the night, he would get his "soldiers" to take these kids away from their parents leaving what I would imagine to be a horrific discovery. To wake up and have your child gone, knowing they have probably been taken away to be forced to lead a life of violence and pain.
The entire world should raise awareness about a Ugandan man named Joseph Kony who kidnaps children and abuses them physically until their faces are so deformed that no one can recognize them. This dangerous man forces many young boys to become soldiers of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Girls abducted by them also do “military training,” but are forced to become “wives” or sexual slaves of LRA fighters. Sometimes they are even being raped from the LRA soldiers. Children are often forced to kill adults or other children who fail to obey the army’s strict rules or who try to escape.
This menacing man has an army called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and has been running this campaign for 20 years. The LRA abducts children because they're easier to manipulate than adults. At least 60,000 Ugandan children have been abducted. The LRA once had thousands of soldiers but now it is estimated to have 150 - 300 armed soldiers. Although it’s a small number of soldiers, they’ve proven to be capable of starting and successfully completing horrific attacks. The army made 1.9 million people evacuate from their homes to camps and ten thousands of Ugandan civilians died. The LRA were forced by the government to leave Uganda in 2005.
Kony 2012 is an awareness campaign. People from all over the world began to notice and ask “Who was Kony?”, “What is he doing?”, “Why?”, “Where is this happening?” etc. A movie came out in 2012 called “Kony 2012” that made a community of people support and help the Ugandan people. When people started to realize what was going on in Uganda, 3.7 million people pledged their support for efforts to arrest Kony. We must all support this cause to keep it going. Our nation can make a difference. I know it can. So lets work together.
In 2008, Joseph Kony was going to sign a deal with the U.S but he wanted the international criminal court to drop the arrest warrant of $5 million. (He was going to give himself up.) All of this would of been over if he would’ve signed the deal. Kony is currently in Central African Republic! Since the U.S knows what the LRA are capable of doing, they’re not exactly sure what to do. The U.S should send their military out on a secret search for him without having to kill the young soldiers of Kony's militia, just like they did with Osama Bin Laden.
Imagine if you were this child living in fear of being captured and slowly tortured to death. What would you do if your child was in this position? Or if you were in this position?