Christianity Today has run an article on what U.N. officials have called “one of the worst human-rights crises of the past century.” The article is titled “Deliver Us from Kony” and is about the butchery and inhumanity of a guerilla paramilitary group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda. The leader of the LRA is Joseph Kony.
The worst of the LRA’s crimes have been perpetrated against children, whom the LRA routinely kidnaps and forces to serve in their ranks.
Perhaps the greatest atrocity is teaching these children that they spread this carnage by the power of the Holy Spirit to purify the “unrepentant,” twisting Christianity into a religion of horror to their victims. It is spiritual warfare at its very worst, and it could not be more satanic. . .
[Warning: The rest of this section contains graphic descriptions of brutality.]
Under threat of death, LRA child soldiers attack villages, shooting and cutting off people’s lips, ears, hands, feet, or breasts, at times force-feeding the severed body parts to victims’ families. Some cut open the bellies of pregnant women and tear their babies out. Men and women are gang-raped. As a warning to those who might report them to Ugandan authorities, they bore holes in the lips of victims and padlock them shut. Victims are burned alive or beaten to death with machetes and clubs. The murderous task is considered properly executed only when the victim is mutilated beyond recognition and his or her blood spatters the killer’s clothing.
CT includes a brief section on what American Christians can do to bring an end to this conflict. What all of us can and should do is pray.
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