While all of us blog on crudely, quaintly, coldly concerning affairs of state and culture, Uganda’s northern section continues since ‘88 to engage in rebellion and to prey on village children near the city of Gulu, according to Emily Wax of the Washington Post Foreign News Service.

While we quibble over taxes, welfare and a presidential election, parents in villages have to line up their children at dusk and send them off to Gulu, heavily fortified, to spend the night in relatively safe encampments protected by the government and assisted by UNICEF.

While we get all upset over WMD that doesn’t exist and the “axis of evil,” in the dark continent untold horrors reign. You see, the rebel raids on the villages are for the express purpose of kidnaping children to fill their fighting ranks, or porter their supplies, and the girls to be sex slaves. Since 1996 thirty-four thousand children have been abducted. There have been so many rapes of children that the girls marching each night at Gulu chant in English: “Hear us now: there are no more virgins in Gulu.”

We shouldn’t be surprised since our perception of these “aborigines” is no different from the still gnawing perception of old concerning native Americans and African Americans. Currently, witness our coolness toward Haiti because of perceived inborn deficiency of its citizens incapable of democratizing.

Preemptive strikes by the UN on such sick nations in perennial turmoil, are surely more justified than our raid on Iraq.

Copyright © 2004 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: February 28, 2004.