KAMPALA (AlertNet) - Six years after Ugandan rebels torched her home in an attack that killed dozens of people, Mildred Akello and her only surviving daughter, Evelyn, are still haunted by the terror of that night.
Akello suffered burns on over 70 percent of her body. Despite several operations, the scars remain etched on her skin restricting her movements so that she is barely able to dig in
the fields or wash her clothes.
"I don't sleep. Every day and night, I still feel and hear the fire burning," said Akello, who lost three children when Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) rebels attacked her grass thatched home in northern Uganda in February 2004.
"I have spent the last four years trying to treat the burns Evelyn and I suffered when we were attacked in Abiya. We don't have any source of income not even school fees for Evelyn," she
told AlertNet in the Ugandan capital.
Akello told her story as delegates started arriving this weekend in Kampala for a conference to review the activities of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which indicted LRA leader Joseph Kony in 2005 for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Despite the indictment, justice remains elusive for thousands of victims of the LRA's two-decade insurgency because Kony is still in hiding.
"Since we were attacked, we have not heard anything about those who killed my children,," Akello said.
"We want the international community to make sure that those who attacked us answer for these crimes, we want them to be punished for this," she added.
Kony, a self-styled prophet, has said he will surrender only if the ICC warrants are withdrawn.
His fighters gained notoriety for mutilating their victims, attacking civilians and abducting children for use as soldiers, sex slaves and porters. The conflict started in northern Uganda
but later spilled into south Sudan, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic.
"We fear that he might come back any time. We want at this conference to be assured that he will be taken away for good," Akello said.
Delegates from 111 member states will seek to give the ICC extra powers to prosecute crimes of state aggression during the 10-day conference in Kampala. It is one of four grave crimes over which the ICC has jurisdiction but one which it is yet to tackle, in part because of political sensitivities.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
