Flight of the Child Soldiers

By ZP Heller, AlterNet. Posted May 19, 2006.

Every night in northern Uganda, thousands of children trek from their bush villages to cities in search of refuge. If they stay at home, they risk being kidnapped, abused and forced to fight in the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a rebel group led by Joseph Kony that has abducted more than 30,000 children and displaced 1.6 million people in the past 20 years.

Most of the world has failed to notice this harrowing situation. Now it's the subject of a powerful new documentary called "Journey Into Sunset", which recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Directed by Rick Wilkinson and starring Don Cheadle, the film chronicles the plight of these brave children, also known as "night commuters."

Since 1987, the Lord's Resistance Army has terrorized the Acholi people of northern Uganda in an attempt to create an "ethnically pure" state, based on Kony's distorted interpretation of the Old Testament. Despite the Ugandan military's best counter-efforts -- and an investigation by the International Criminal Court -- the LRA's brutality has recently spread into eastern Congo and southern Sudan, where Kony moved his training camps.

"Journey Into Sunset" follows actor Don Cheadle, his wife and their two daughters through overcrowded urban shelters like Noah's Ark, where between 3,000 and 4,000 children sleep every night to avoid the LRA. The film is filled with haunting images of night commuters, ages 5-16, crammed into congested tents in cities plagued by AIDS and malaria. Cheadle conducts chilling interviews with children fortunate enough to have escaped the LRA's clutches. Clearly affected by post-traumatic shock, these kids recount -- in lurid detail -- how the LRA brainwashed them, then trained them to murder their own family members and friends.

Cheadle became closely acquainted with the region last year as a correspondent for "Nightline," reporting from the Sudan. It was there, during his visits to Internally Displaced Persons camps, that he decided his family needed to see what was happening around him. "Journey Into Sunset" is all the more poignant because it's told through the eyes of a contemporary American family, witnessing the horrors of life in northern Uganda.

The day after the premiere of "Journey Into Sunset," I discussed the film with director Rick Wilkinson in Manhattan.

Zack Pelta-Heller: How did you become aware of the "night commuters?"

Rick Wilkinson: I had never heard of them, actually. Don and his family had been invited to Kampala, Uganda, for a fundraiser screening of "Hotel Rwanda" to raise money for the night commuters. One of the guys from an NGO called the International Crisis Group asked if I wanted to do another story. But when Nightline couldn't come up with the money, we had to find someone on the outside to finance the travel and the shoot.

I ended up doing a Nightline piece out of that material anyway, but I really wanted to create a longer version. This is an important story, one people need to know about.

ZPH: The shocking predicament of night commuters has been going on for nearly 20 years. Why hasn't more attention been brought to this issue before now?

RW: We haven't heard about it because it's not something where you're looking at a starving baby; it's not something where you're watching a dead body; it's not dramatic enough to grab our attention. There's so much stuff going on that we don't even hear about.

ZPH: The United Nations called this crisis one of the worst to afflict children around the world.

Zack Pelta-Heller is a graduate student at The New School and a regular contributor to AlterNet.

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