On a Hiding to Nothing
Damon Galgut reports from Uganda
For 18 years, a rebel army has been terrorising Uganda's innocents. Every night, thousands head for the safety of refugee camps. But what horrors wil tomorrow bring? Malnutrition? Abduction? Murder?
(Real names changed)
Sam Odang is battling with his demons. He is only 20, with an open, shiny face, but when I start talking to him his expression clouds over. He gets the hooded, hunted look I have started to recognise.
Sam was abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) from his home in northern Uganda, along with his parents and seven others, in 1999. Soon after, he was forced to hack his mother and father to death with a machete. It was like a terrible dream, he says, from which he couldn’t wake up. On the long walk to the LRA camp in Sudan, he helped kill another four people. That was just the start. He had a month’s training, and then was given a gun and sent back to Uganda. They were a group of 100, under one commander, which then split into smaller groups with different functions. He had the job of killing. He killed soldiers, he killed civilians. He has, he says, killed ‘many people.’
I press him, as gently as I can, on how many exactly. He only repeats it again – ‘many’ – and shakes his head.
In September 2003 he decided to escape; he’d heard of an amnesty on the radio. The LRA trusted him by then, so it wasn’t hard to get away. He buried his gun and gave himself up.
When he came back to his village, it was all right at first. But then the bad dreams came – dreams of shooting and killing, of endless running through the bush. There is a traditional ritual of return, in which a goat or chicken is slaughtered, but at first his village didn’t perform this ritual for him. Then they did, and he felt a bit better. After 6 months he came for counselling at the clinic run by Médecins sans Frontières in Aromo camp, but the nightmares and flashbacks continued. His counselor gave him a small job – weighing and measuring the babies that come in to the clinic – and it’s been good for him. But he’s still tormented and he’s scared he may be abducted again; he would be killed immediately for having run away.
When I ask him how he feels about the future he shakes his head. All he wants, he says, is somebody to help him by taking the bad dreams away.
It would be nice to report that Sam’s story is an aberration, a sick twist of fate that happened only to him. But the truth is that his experience is a common one. Aside from a core group of perhaps 200 commanders, the LRA is made up entirely of kidnapped children, who are used as porters and soldiers. Many of the girls, if they’re not turned into fighters, are given as sex slaves to the commanders, who accumulate harems of ‘wives’ to minister to them. Without exception, the abducted children witness acts of hideous violence, and most are forced to participate in them. Very often they are made to kill members of their own family or their friends. It is the LRA’s way of inducting them into the movement, of making it impossible to return. Attempted escape is punishable by death, usually at the hands of a new ‘recruit’ who has recently been captured.
Yet many of the children do escape, sometimes after years. The Rachele centre in Lira town is a safe haven, a place of rehabilitation for some of these children. There are 130 of them at the moment, down from a high of 350. Most will stay for an average of 2 months, but some will stay much longer, and a few, who have no families to return to, will be here indefinitely.
Some of these children are playing in the dusty yard when we arrive, laughing and shouting and running. Their clothes are ragged, their feet bare – but that is not unusual in Africa. They look like any normal, happy group of kids. But every one of them has a story, and not one of the stories is good.
Simon* is a shy, good-looking boy of 19, resting on crutches, his one leg horribly swollen and discoloured. He talks softly, looking down, never meeting my eyes. He tells me he was abducted by a group of rebels 3 years ago, along with 7 other children from his village. Like Sam, he was sent up to a camp in Sudan for military training, but a month later the Ugandan army (UPDF) bombed the camp, sending them back over the border. Simon took part in food raids, attacks on civilians and the abduction of other children.
For a long time he was too scared to escape, until he was wounded in an army ambush, his leg badly shot up. Then he decided he had nothing to lose and, one night, when he was on guard duty, a little way off from the others, he sneaked away. He hid his gun and gave himself up to the army. He had been told the UPDF would kill him, but instead they brought him here.
Then there is Linda*, who was abducted in 1996, when she was 12 years old. She was given as a ‘wife’ to one of the LRA commanders and had a child by him, one month ago. She smiles and looks down at her baby with love, though she says she never wants to see the father again. Many of the girls in the yard – all children themselves - are carrying babies, the product of LRA rape.
This savage insurgency has dragged on now for 18 years. The LRA cannot possibly win, yet their campaign has been brutally effective: 1.6 million people displaced from their homes, more than 80% of the local population, and 100 000 killed. More than 20 000 children have been stolen.
So much slaughter and terror – to what end? It is sometimes hard to tell. Aside from a desire to overthrow the Ugandan government, Joseph Kony, the leader of the LRA, says he wants to establish a country based on the Ten Commandments. Number six, apparently, doesn’t apply to him. And he has added some novel ones of his own: thou shalt not ride a bicycle, for example – a sin punishable by amputation. Thou shalt not breed pigs – punishable by death. He claims to receive instruction from the Holy Ghost, as well as various animist spirits. There is, in truth, nothing Christian about Kony, unless it is an old testament view of purgation through violence, with himself cast in the role of God.
It is tempting, even consoling, to dismiss him as a madman. But there is a diabolical logic to this lunacy. An army made up of abducted children can be endlessly replenished. Children are pliant and vulnerable, easily controlled. And an army with no willing recruits cannot be infiltrated.