20 October 2005
by Daniel Wallis

Kampala, Uganda: Thousands of people around the world will walk this weekend in solidarity with Uganda's "night commuter" children who trudge into towns every sunset to avoid kidnap by Africa's most sinister rebel group.

In a campaign organized by two Canadians, people in 47 cities from Beijing to Boston will symbolically recreate the Ugandan children's nightly trek by walking into their town-centres on Saturday night, sleeping rough and returning at first light.

Every sunset in northern Uganda -- a region devastated by two decades of conflict -- thousands of ragged children trudge into towns rather than risk sleeping at home and being kidnapped by the notoriously brutal Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels.

The lucky ones clutch blankets, most are barefoot.

They all have good reason to be afraid.

The cult-like movement has already snatched more than 20,000 youngsters for use as fighters and sex slaves in a rebellion that has hit the remote region's children hardest.

Almost every child captured by the LRA is forced to kill or maim using clubs or machetes, binding them to the rebels through guilt and fear. Sometimes, the victims are their own families.

The United Nations says the conflict in northern Uganda, which pits government troops against the LRA, has uprooted 1.6 million people and caused one of the world's most neglected humanitarian disasters.

Canadians Adrian Bradbury, 35, and Kieran Hayward, 30, hope to change that.

They know it is not possible to recreate the terror of the night commuters in northern Uganda, which former UNICEF chief Carol Bellamy described as "pretty much the worst place on earth to be a child".

But they want to make people stop and think about it.

"In my neighbourhood, if a 5-year-old kid was trapped under a car in need of help everyone would come out immediately," Bradbury told Reuters on Thursday from Toronto.

"We all created the United Nations for exactly this kind of situation, but so far they have failed to act. The children of northern Uganda are that kid under the car."

In July, the pair held a first local "GuluWalk", named after the main town in northern Uganda, 350 km (217 miles) north of Kampala, which receives more than 10,000 child commuters every evening. For 31 nights, in all weather, they walked 12.5 km (8 miles) into downtown Toronto from Bradbury's home.

They slept in the open near city hall, usually for no more than four hours, then trekked home, covering a total of 775 km (485 miles) in 154 hours.

As their unusual efforts drew attention from local media, more and more members of public turned out to join them.

Now word has spread to 47 cities as diverse as Coventry in England, the Ugandan capital of Kampala, Perth in Australia and Pittsburgh in the United States, where activists will hold the world's first coordinated "GuluWalks" on Saturday night.

Bradbury, a father of two, hopes the small sacrifice of thousands of people, many of them in wealthy nations, will lead to more help for the most desperate in northern Uganda.

"For Uganda's children this is a humanitarian emergency that needs greater support and assistance on the ground now," he said. "Our message is there is no real answer except peace."