Interesting article in NY Times magazine about a rebel group that kidnaps children and uses cultic brainwashing techniques to turn them into killers. One of the most notable techniques was that commanders would force newly kidnapped children to kill someone else, thus solidifying their bond to the rebel group and process them away from their previous life. Some of the other cultic aspects: complete control of all parts of their phyisical life, extensive use of physical punishment in order to modify behavior and rigid rules to the point where the kidnapped children cannot make decisions for themselves.

[www.nytimes.com]

Charlotte, Grace, Janet and Caroline Come Home

By MELANIE THERNSTROM
Published: May 8, 2005

The rebels have ruined northern Uganda. No one wanted to look out the car window on the three-hour journey northwest from Lira to Gulu near the Sudanese border. Charlotte Awino leaned her cheek on the glass and closed her eyes against the abandoned homesteads and fallow farmland that once provided most of the country's cassava, millet and beans. After 18 years of civil war, more than 1.5 million inhabitants have fled to plastic-sheeted internment camps, preferring to risk slow death by disease and malnutrition rather than to wake in their beds one night to discover the rebels have arrived. The rebels are the Lord's Resistance Army (L.R.A.), which massacres or mutilates villagers -- cutting off their noses, ears and genitals -- and kidnaps their children, turning them into killers who then become kidnappers themselves.