Mr. SMITH of New Jersey. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.
Mr. Speaker, having personally visited Uganda in April 2006, I chaired a hearing on the endangered children of northern Uganda for the Subcommittee on Africa, Global Human Rights and International Operations. We heard from a number of witnesses and we raised it and continue to raise it with the administration.
But one of our witnesses was a particularly noteworthy person, Grace Akallo. Grace is, or was, a child soldier, an abducted young girl, who was totally mistreated by the Lord's Resistance Army. She was turned into a child soldier. And just a couple of days ago, announced her new book called "Child Soldier'' which makes chilling reading for anybody who wants to know what really goes on in northern Uganda, and how crazed Joseph Kony and his people are; and how, as the distinguished gentleman said just a moment ago, they turn girls into sex slaves and killers and the young men into killing machines. It is a terrible, horrible indictment on how low the individual can sink to.
And Joseph Kony, as we all know, has been indicted by the International Criminal Court for serious crimes against humanity. And, regrettably, this killing continues to go on.
I urge Members to read the book. It is an awakening not just on how she suffered, but also how a person when surrounded by people who love her and give her the kind of support that any individual like herself needs to get, how they can come back, the resiliency of the human spirit. She is a soft-spoken, poised, gentle, lovely young woman who has a great future, but she has been through a nightmare. We ought to keep her and her friends in our prayers.
She also pointed out just last week in a meeting that we had announcing her book that she cries out and prays every day for her friends, many of whom she does not know what happened to them. They are still there, she thinks. They may be dead. But she has no idea. I think that puts additional impetus on us to do more, to save these children, this lost generation.
Mr. Speaker, over the last 20 years as many as 1.5 million persons, an estimated 90 percent of the population of the Acholi area in northern Uganda have been forced into internally displaced camps as a result of the violence between the Lord's Resistance Army and the Government of Uganda. Nearly half of these internally displaced persons are children under the age of 15, people like Grace Akallo.
One quarter of the children in northern Uganda over 10 years of age have lost one or more parents. About a quarter of a million children receive no education at all. The fact that 60 percent of the schools in northern Uganda no longer function is directly attributable to the war. I point out that those that do function do so in a very meager way.
Because of the war in the north, Uganda has developed a lost generation that has grown up in dire circumstances with fear and deprivation as their constant companions. Nearly half of the children in one town are stunted from malnutrition. They are likely to never recover.
The latest 2006 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices summarized in a chilling fashion the horror that has been perpetrated on the people of northern Uganda, particularly by the head of the Lord's Resistance Army, Joseph Kony. It states that "at the height of the war, the LRA, led by Joseph Kony, committed serious abuses and atrocities, including abduction, rape and the killing of civilians. The LRA used children as soldiers, held children and others in slave-like conditions, and subjected female captives to rape and other forms of severe sexual exploitation.''
This resolution tries to put additional focus, additional girth, behind the effort to finally find a negotiated solution to this ongoing killing fields, and we all hope and pray this will have at least a happier ending than thus far.
Again, I urge Members to read the book by Grace Akallo, "Girl Soldier.''
