LONDON (AlertNet) - Rebel fighters, kidnapped children, mutilation -- war zones are no joke, so when comedy writer Jane Bussmann embarked on an account of conflict-torn northern Uganda she had one rule: all the laughs would be at her expense.

"The Worst Date Ever: War Crimes, Hollywood Heart-throbs and Other Abominations" starts off in Tinseltown where Bussmann is getting more and more jaded with having to ask celebrities what they wear and making up quotes for magazine articles for a living.

Bussmann knows it's time to defect when, in the middle of interviewing actor Ashton Kutcher, she wonders if there is a way of killing herself that wouldn't upset her Mum.

Much better to join the ranks of the "Useful People", she decides. It's while flipping through the pages of Vanity Fair that Bussmann comes across a photo of the archetypal Useful Person John Prendergast, a U.S. State Department special advisor during the Bill Clinton years, who has carved out a career trying to broker peace in Africa's hotspots.

It's crush at first sight: "It had occurred to me he was also extremely attractive. For purely journalistic reasons, I spent about forty-eight hours straight Googling him".

Inspired, Bussman embarks on a quest to impress the peacemaker and a date is set in Uganda where Prendergast is involved in efforts to end a two-decade rebellion by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), led by former altar boy, Joseph Kony.

When Prendergast fails to show, Bussmann decides to investigate a war that has devastated Uganda's northern Acholi community, seen tens of thousands of its children snatched by Kony's henchmen to serve as soldiers and "wives", and sent 1.6 million people into miserable camps, a brown smear of mud huts, where they live on hand-outs because they cannot farm freely.

The result is a look that’s heavy on withering satire, sarcasm and black humour at one of Africa’s longest running conflicts.

Bussmann asks why President Yoweri Museveni, who receives hundreds of millions in budget support from Britain and the United States ("probably as a thank-you present for not being Robert Mugabe"), is unable to stop Kony, despite having a fleet of attack helicopters and 40,000 soldiers at his disposal.

Interviewing the government's former chief mediator in talks with the LRA and the priests who acted as go-betweens in the conflict, Bussmann reveals a string of deliberately frustrated peace initiatives.

She observes army colonels who have a commercial stake in the war, and meets relief workers who make her question whether the humanitarian industry has helped prolong the crisis. One aid worker, "a lumpen woman who looked like it would take 400,000 million volts of electricity to trigger an original thought, let alone save a refugee".

Although the book, loaded with one-liners and gallows humour, is so funny you almost feel guilty laughing, some of the most poignant moments are Bussmann's encounters with displaced families and young women who had been abducted, handed over to LRA commanders, raped and impregnated.

She drops the gags as anger sets in.

Travelling to the camps where uprooted Acholis are placed, Bussman discovers that sex is traded for food – in desperation hungry families are sending their girls, some as young as 11, to sleep with soldiers for the price of some porridge.

She tells the story of Sister Rachele Fassera, the deputy head of a girls' boarding school, who in 1996 set off into the bush with a young geography teacher, John Bosco Ocen, to rescue 139 girls kidnapped by the LRA. She returned with 109. "Lets hand the army the entire ball of slack and say they're only human - they were too scared to face the rebels and save the girls. That's cool too," Bussman writes. "But at that point, it's a little unsporting to call yourself an army. Call yourself a group of similarly attired young men sitting in a nearby building who happen to have some weapons and ammunition they won't be using."

Read our Q+A with Jane Bussmann

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