Twelve students, two professors and a baby came out Saturday at noon for the first annual GuluWalk, hosted by the University of Tennessee chapter of Amnesty International, to promote awareness of a two-decade-long war in the east-African country of Uganda.

Amnesty International started its walk in Humanities Plaza, carrying an Amnesty International banner and signs shaped like feet. One sign had six toes spelling U-G-A-N-D-A, while the bottom read: “Ask how you can help.”

They meandered through orange and crimson crowds tailgating for the UT-Alabama game. Their march took them through Circle Park, by Neyland Stadium, down Cumberland Avenue and ended at Market Square.

The Lord’s Resistance Army, a guerilla group led by the secretive and elusive Joseph Kony, abducts children at night and forces them to be soldiers and sex slaves. They have abducted about 20,000 children, some as young as eight years old. Every night, thousands of children flee from their rural homes to cities such as Gulu for protection, some traveling as far as 10 miles by foot.

“This is being labeled as one of the most neglected humanitarian crises in the world,” Rosalind Hackett, a professor of religious studies, said. “It’s not just the children (and) the abductions, it’s the camps. Two million people are in camps in Northern Uganda.”

Hackett said many children have no lives outside these locations, also known as Internally Displaced Persons Camps.

These camps have become incubators for disease, murder, rape and suicide.

“More people have died in these camps than in actual rebel attacks. At one point, about 1,000 people were dying a week. More than in Iraq,” she said. “They’re dying of disease and violence. Education is being utterly disrupted. There is no family home life. It’s the children, particularly, who have been affected. Think of the psychological trauma.”

Joseph Kony has led the Resistance Army since 1988, after taking control from his cousin, Alice Lakwena. Kony considers himself a prophet and a mystic.

“He [Kony] uses children, who are more malleable, to advance his military action,” Hackett said.

The army is waging open conflict against the Ugandan government, led by President Yoweri Museveni. The resistance army is made up by fewer than 1,000 adult soldiers while the rest are young children forced to fight.

“The fact that so few people can sustain a rebellion against a developing nation for over two decades is testament to the sheer negligence of the international community, allowing this conflict to go unresolved for so long,” said Chris Martin, representative of Amnesty International UT.

Currently peace talks are being held in Juba, Sudan. But the country, which is steeped in its own humanitarian crisis in Darfur, has little bargaining power to broker peace.

“The government of Uganda is not doing anything to protect these children. The U.S. needs to push the U.N. to take action,” said Nina Dobratz, president of Amnesty International UT.

According to one member of the group, Washington involvement appears distant from the crisis.

“The U.S. government has given little attention to this crisis in Uganda. Some of these students went up to Washington, D.C. last week to a forum on this crisis,” said Lindsay McClain, a freshman and member of Amnesty International UT. “They went to Senator (Bill) Frist’s and Senator (Lamar) Alexander’s offices, but their staffers kept saying, ‘Darfur, Darfur, Darfur.’ They kept confusing the two. They’re neighbors but they’re different.”

The peace talks are making some headway.

“People are slowly leaving the IDPs to return home. But some of them have been gone for years, and don’t know what to expect,” Hackett said.

Interest in Uganda is growing.

“The attention is there now,” said Johanna Stiebert, a professor of religious studies and faculty adviser of UT’s Amnesty International. “There is far more coverage in the mainstream press.”

Oprah Winfrey has even covered the abductions, she said.

“Our aim is that the GuluWalk will become an annual event in Knoxville — that it will become bigger and better and raise more money until no more GuluWalks are needed because the war in Uganda will finally be a thing of the past,” Stiebert said.