In the short term, Amin left Uganda in turmoil, a succession of unstable governments through 1979-80, and ultimately the return of Milton Obote following the rigged election of 1980. Civil war erupted in the early 1980s, and the regime popularly known as ‘Obote II’ involved more death and destruction than the whole of Amin’s tenure. Obote was overthrown for the second and last time in 1985

When Yoweri Museveni seized power in Uganda in 1986 and became president, some Acholis revolted. A relative of Kony’s, spirit medium Alice Lakwena, led a rebel group called the Holy Spirit Movement, which was defeated in October 1987 by government troops as it advanced on Kampala, Kony joined another faction and in 1987 proclaimed himself a prophet for the Acholi people and took charge of the Holy Spirit Movement, which would eventually become the LRA. In its early years, Kony, armed with prophecies that he said he received from spirits who came to him in dreams, ordered the LRA to attack villages, murdering, raping, and mutilating in a campaign of intimidation that displaced some two million people. Children were abducted and brainwashed into becoming soldiers and slaves. Kony convinced them that holy water made them bulletproof. Children who resisted or tried to escape were beaten to death by their peers. By 1996, the government began setting up secure camps. Children living in villages in northern Uganda became known as “night commuters,” walking miles every evening to the relative safety of the camps or towns in hopes of avoiding abduction. So, for nearly twenty years, the people of Northern Uganda were terrorized by an unspeakably brutal war; many of his soldiers were child victims, whom he abducted and then forced to kill even their families and closest friends