At the general assembly of the "Special Session on Child Soldiers in Armed Conflicts" I spoke to about 500 people including government officials, NGO's, Kofi Annan -The General Secretary of UN, Olara Otunnu -The General Secretary for Children and Armed Conflicts.
Queen Sylvia of Sweeden was very moved, and she stood up as every other in the audience when I had spoken my last word. She too has the right of children as her biggest concern.
Some time later that day at the other congress "Special session on Children" Graça Machel spoke. A fact she have included in her book stresses that at any given moment in time there is at least 300.000 (three hundred thousand) Child soldiers in the world!
During her time in the NRA, Keitetsi was subject to severe training, brutal bush fighting, and other abuses, including repeated rape, which resulted in the birth of her son in 1991—when Keitetsi was only 14.
“I can stand here and tell you but you’ll never know how I feel inside. It’s like I have lived 100 years, because I have never been allowed to think as my age,” she said.
“We were told that the gun was our mother, is our friend, is our everything,” she said in the documentary.
At 17, Keitetsi refused to sleep with a general. After he accused her of stealing arms and threatened her with sexual abuse and torture, she tried unsuccessfully to flee through Kenya. She instead fled across the continent to South Africa, where she was abducted by the Ugandan secret service, beaten and tortured.
After six months there, she managed to escape and a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in South Africa placed her in Denmark.
“First love I got is from Europe, from Denmark,” she said.
“We were told that we were fighting for freedom and to end injustice and tribalism,” she said. “When we took over, everyone was fighting for riches. They forget everything we were in the bush for.”
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"With a gun you just needed to open the safety, cock the gun, use this finger and they are dead.
Made a sex Slave by Museveni’s Army
"You don't need a big body, you don't need power, just the gun. This finger puts blood on your hand."
Nearly every evening an officer would come and order you to report to his place, typically at 9pm," she says.
"I would spend the whole day thinking about 9pm and wishing time would stand still."
"The NRA gave us weapons, made us fight their war, made us hate, kill, torture, and made us their girlfriends: we had no choice."
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"When I was 14 years old, I gave birth to my son, and when I was 15 years old, I couldn't count how many commanders had already used my body," she says.
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Yoweri Museveni abducted China Keitetsi in 1984 aged eight. She was subsequently recruited as a child soldier in the National Resistance Army (NRA) to fight against the regime of Milton Obote, then president of Uganda.
From the age of eight until her escape from the army aged seventeen, China Keitetsi experienced the harsh realities of a child forced to fight in a conflict in which captives taken by the NRA were tortured and maimed. China says she has killed so many people that she has lost track of the number. When the NRA aged eight-recruited China, she was so small that she was unable to carry a gun.
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