JANUARY 1998 COVER STORY UGANDA
Thousands of Ugandan teenagers are being forcibly abducted and delivered into captivity and suffering by the rebels of the Lord's Resistance Army, who operate at will in the north of the country. As an international campaign is mounted to reveal the children's plight, we let some of them tell their stories in their own words. Report by Alan Rake.
A 15-year-old girl who had been forcibly abducted from her home on 26 December 1996 made this plea to Amnesty International: "I would like to give you a message. Please do your best to tell the world what is happening to us, the children, so that other children don't have to pass through this violence."
We cannot give the girl's name because her life might be in danger in a revenge killing. The LRA often hunts down those who escape and takes its revenge on them and their families. After she had been captured by guerrillas of the Lord's Resistance Army, they forced her to kill a boy who tried to escape. She had seen another boy hacked to death for not raising the alarm when a friend ran away. She was beaten when she dropped a water container and ran for cover under gunfire.
She received 35 days military training and was sent to fight the Uganda Peoples' Defence Forces (UPDF).
So sickening has been the abuse of children by the LRA that international human rights organisations are mounting a worldwide campaign to bring it to the notice of all governments, particularly the Sudanese regime that arms, trains and supports the LRA, in its war against Joseph Garang's Sudan Peoples Liberation Army.
Amnesty International in Britain has been joined by Human Rights Watch in the USA and by the United Nations Childrens' Fund (UNICEF). They are all drawing attention to what is happening to a whole generation of northern Ugandan children. Since 1995, up to 8,000 children, some as young as 11-years old, have been abducted by the LRA and forced to become child soldiers. Most of those abducted are between 13 and 16 years old. Younger children are left behind because they are not strong enough to carry weapons or heavy loads.
Children are beaten, murdered and forced to become combatants. Girls are raped and used as sexual slaves by more senior soldiers. Children are forced to beat and kill other children who try to escape. Even when they do get away and return home, they are treated as social outcasts.
Here some of the children involved in the traumatic nightmare tell their stories. Only their names are assumed.
Beatrice's story Beatrice was 14 years old when she was abducted in February 1997. She tells her story in her own words:
"I had gone to the garden to collect tomatoes at around eight in the morning. Suddenly I was surrounded by 50 rebels. They started picking tomatoes and eating them. They seized me and started beating me terribly. They wanted me to walk them to my home but I refused. Finally they forced me. There they killed my mother.
They made me go, leaving behind my little brother and two little sisters. They are still very young. I told them they were too young to fend for themselves. So they beat me until I became unconscious."
Capture of the Catholic schoolgirls A case which made world headlines was the kidnapping of 139 girls from the Catholic, St Mary's School, Aboke in Apac district. More than 100 girls were rescued by the Catholic sisters, particularly Sister Rachele, who chased the LRA guerrillas and made them release most of the girls. But not all.
Here is the story of a 17-year-old whom we will call Rose.
"I was sleeping in the dormitory. I did not hear when they first came. Only when they started banging on the door. We all hid under our beds. They told us to open the door. They threatened to bomb the dormitory. But none of us opened the door, so they broke open the window. They tied us up in groups of five and they forced us out.
"We walked, walked, walked. We reached a corner and we sat. The rebels started looting and capturing people in Aboke. Then we started moving again.
"Then Sister Rachele arrived. It was about mid-day. We all cried when we saw her. We kept on moving. An airplane came. The rebels told us to remove our white shirts and told Sister Rachele to take off her veil. We took cover. The plane was shooting but far from us. Later there was an UPDF ambush. We hid in the bush. The plane came back but did not see us."
Sister Rachele, by sheer force of personality and argument persuaded the rebels to let over 100 of the girls go. But they insisted on selecting 30 of the most beautiful girls to become "wives of the commanders."
Grace, a 17-year old, takes up the story: "They started choosing girls. If you were chosen, they told you to stand up. They chose me...Now Sister was there with the commander. He said, 'these are the girls we have chosen'.
"Sister Rachele could not do anything. She started crying. She said they should take her and release all the girls. But they refused. Sister pleaded for us. We started to cry but we could not do anything...They started getting some sticks to beat us.
"Sister came back and knelt before a man called L.O. He said you don't have to kneel before me beause I am not God. Sister was pleading for more girls to be set free. We started praying but when Sister left, the commander ordered the rebels to come and beat us. They started beating us, beating us, beating us. And then the commander told them to jump on our chests with their boots and they jumped." Months later Grace escaped to tell this story.
Rule of terror The LRA forces children to undergo initiation ceremonies, shortly after capture, to terrorise them and break down their resistance.
One 15-year-old boy from Gulu district called John said: "They arrested a boy called Oyet who had tried to raise the alarm. They tied him and stabbed him in the back. That night they clapped hands to wake us up. They placed a mat on the floor with three lamps and brought in Oyet. The commander told us to hit Oyet three times and then kill him. All the new recruits surrounded the mat.
"Then the commander picked one boy. The boy made a small noise because he did not want to be picked. The commander got angry and called for a panga. They started beating the boy until he was spitting blood and could not cry any more...The commander chose another boy. He was given an axe and told to hit Oyet once. He was then told to hand over the axe to another boy who hit Oyet a second time. I was given the axe next. I hit Oyet a third time. I know it is my blow that sent him home (killed him)".
George tells how he was one of a group forced to kill a girl: "One of the village girls tried to escape three times. The first time they forgave her. The second time they tied her to a tree and beat her. The third time they called us. They had already beaten her with stones and sticks until she died. We had to do it. The rebels also killed a man in the house where she had been hiding. The commander said, 'If one of you tries to escape, I'll kill all of you'. The rebels were told to cane us, 15 strokes each."
UNICEF tells of one girl who tried to escape but was caught by the rebels. The girl was brought before her friends who were told to stamp on her till she died. One 17-year-old witness said, "If we did not kill the girl, we were going to be shot. We prayed for the girl in our hearts, silently and asked God to pardon us and forgive us because it was not our will to kill her."
Sexual slavery Girls and women are forced to carry out normal domestic duties for the commanders. If the rules are not followed, the head of the family has the power to punish, often by beating or caning.
Cooking has to be carried out quicky and yet without making smoke. "If you cook too slowly the commander beats you. If you show smoke they kill you," said one girl.
The girls are also forced to provide sexual services for their "husbands". They are effectively held as sexual slaves, often raped by the commanders. "If you refuse you can be killed," said one girl. "I saw one wife being killed by her husband."
If a husband gets tired of one girl she is given to someone else. Within a year most girls have had many "husbands". Almost every girl who escapes has been found to have syphilis or other sexually transmitted diseases.
Every girl has full military training in Sudan where the LRA has its camps. She must be prepared to go into battle and fight alongside the boys. Sometimes the teenagers get only a couple of weeks training before being sent into battle against regular Ugandan soldiers or members of John Garang's battle-hardened Sudan Peoples' Liberation Army.
The recruits are not allowed to lie down when firing. They have to stand up and shoot from the hip. Their lives are considered to be relatively unimportant.
One boy says that he found himself in the middle of an engagement a few days after he had been captured.
"We were told that four lines of Ugandan soldiers were coming towards us. But we did not have any guns. The commander told us, "even if you don't have a gun, you must go and take part in the fight by making a noise. I was picked to be among the boys to make a noise. When the fight began we started shrieking. We were caned if we did not shriek."
Starved to death Small children are forced to carry heavy loads when the guerrillas are on the move. Children report that death from exhaustion, hunger or thirst while on the move is common. One child told how she saw several of her friends die of thirst. Another explained that they were warned not to drop anything that they were carrying or they would be killed. One woman fell over in a river and lost everything. She pleaded with the commander to spare her but he ordered two men to bayonet her to death. "Even if you drop one biscuit you can be killed, " said John.
Confused ideology The rebels call Joseph Kony their commander, and say that the Holy Spirit speaks to him and tells him what to do. Kony says he is a relative and the spiritual successor of the Acholi prophetess Alice Lakwena, who claimed to be possessed by the Holy Spirit. Lakwena said that her soldiers were invincible. She told them they could not be killed by bullets if they rubbed their bodies in Shea butter oil. But when she marched on Kampala in 1987 her troops were mowed down. Thousands were killed and she fled to Kenya.
After her death, Kony claims to have taken over her magical powers but his ideology is as confused as Lakwena's.
One 15-year-old boy, Charles said that he frequently had to work in Kony's hut. "He told us that the Holy Spirit protected him. If a captive had bad feelings against Kony, he would be told by the Holy Spirit and would kill him. The Spirit would also tell him if anyone was planning to escape...I don't know about the Holy Spirit, but in Kony's hut I saw strange animals, snakes, turtles, chameleons. I believe he used them to communicate with the spirits.
One of his victims, an abducted girl called Stella, worked out the ideological confusion for herself: "Sometimes they behaved like Muslims, sometimes like Catholics, sometimes like Protestants. They say they will overthrow the government within three years. They say they want Uganda to become a paradise.
"I said if you want a paradise, why are you killing people in northern Uganda? The government is down south in Kampala, so how can you defeat the government by killing people here?"
"They said, 'Be patient.'
"I said. 'People of northern Uganda would not refuse to follow you if what you did was truly right.'
"He replied, 'You are joking with the Holy Spirit. You don't know what you are doing. We are pretending we are bad, but we will be the first to enter God's Kingdom. One day you will believe us and see that we are God's people."
Thousands of abused Ugandan children will never be convinced.
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