Gulu Uganda

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Gulu is the birthplace of prominent poet Okot p'Bitek. It has been the location of much of the insurgent fighting by the Lord's Resistance Army and was the birthplace of both Alice Auma and Joseph Kony. Over 90% of the population has been displaced, mostly into camps clustered around towns and trading centers. To avoid abduction by the LRA thousands of children travel from rural areas to seek refuge in towns every night. However due to the improving security situation the number of 'night commuters' fleeing every night in the district has reduced from around 25,000 in 2004 to 4000 in 2006
The years since 1989 have been war ridden, with many attacks by the LRA. However, since the spring of 2007, there has been relative peace since Joseph Kony, the leader of the LRA, moved to Garamba National Forest, in northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo, as reported in the press.

The war in northern Uganda is Africa's longest running war. For more than 20 years, the Acholi people of northern Uganda have not known peace but have seen the security, economy and morality of their homelands erode year after year. At the end of 2003, Jan Egeland, the United Nations undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, told the BBC: "I cannot find any other part of the world that is having an emergency on the scale of Uganda that is getting so little international attention."
The war began largely as one of a series of uprisings against President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni's National Resistance Movement (NRM) and followed in a long series of attempts to seize power by force in Uganda. Since the late 1980's the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), professing a spiritual war against the Ugandan government, seem to have lost any real political aspirations and has preyed upon civilians.

The LRA's principal means of recruiting its forces has been the abduction of children; about 90% of the recruits are children. The LRA is composed of about 3,000 abducted children controlled by a core group of 150-200 officers led by Joseph Kony, about whom little is known with certainty, although he apparently guides the LRA with a kind of apocalyptic mysticism grounded in the Bible. Under Kony's command, LRA forces have been responsible for tens of thousands of rapes, assaults and killings of unarmed civilians. An estimated 25,000 to 30,000 children have been abducted over the years and forced to witness and commit atrocities during the conflict.