During the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of thousands of Ugandans were killed in state-sponsored violence by the successive dictatorships of Idi Amin and Milton Obote. Since President Yuweri Musevini came to power in 1986, democracy has been introduced and human rights have improved for much of the country and population. However, a sub-regional conflict in northern Uganda has caused great human rights abuses of the Acholi people. War has been raging there for over 20 years and the Acholi have been dislocated and marginalized. Only 2% of the national budget is spent in the north and of that 99% goes to the army (UPDF). The genesis of this conflict has been a proxy war between Sudan and Uganda. The government of Sudan, believing that Uganda had funded the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), fighting for independence for South Sudan, provided funding to the Uganda rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The LRA is headed by the cultist Christian leader Joseph Konye who is under indictment by the International Criminal Court. As a result of decades of violence, 1.8 million people are living in Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps and thousands have been killed. Jan Engelund of the UN called this emergency “a near genocide." Over 30,000 children have been abducted: boys as child soldiers and girls as soldiers and sex slaves. The kidnapping of children has been so widespread that a generation of village children have spent their childhoods away from their families living in protective shelters in the towns and are known as “night commuters."
Despite a cease-fire in 2008, there has been no permanent solution to the threat by Kony and his guerillas to the Acholi people.