By Inna Lazareva
AWACH, Uganda, May 9 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – As a young boy chasing chickens on his parents’ farm in northern Uganda, Louis Lakor dreamed of becoming a teacher. But when he finally set foot in a local primary school, aged seven, it was as an armed killer.
Abducted in a night raid, Lakor was forced to become a child soldier with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebel group, which terrorised northern Uganda for nearly two decades before being driven out of the country by a military offensive in 2005.
Clutching a gun handed to him by his kidnappers, Lakor was ordered to “shoot everything you see”. He did.
“Otherwise they would have killed me,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation some 20 years later, looking out on the lush countryside near his home village of Awach, about 60 km (37 miles) south of Uganda’s border with South Sudan.
