Girls face inhuman treatment when pressed into service in the Congo's incessant warfare. Uma Thurman will soon star in "Girl Soldier" - Hollywood's film attempt to recount the horror.
St. Mary’s, Aboke, in northern Uganda, is a typical boarding-school for girls established by religious sisters in Central Africa; it might never have been heard of were it not for Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group that has been terrorizing northern Uganda, and now Congo and South Sudan, for the past twenty-odd years. One night in 1996 the rebel army crept up on the school dormitories and abducted about 150 girls, herding them into the forest. A brave Italian sister, assisted by one of the male staff, went in pursuit, offered her life for the girls to be set at liberty, and managed to have over one hundred released. A few others had managed to escape in the confusion, while some thirty were captured.
The last one to get away was Catherine Ajok, who fled into the Congo forest in December 2008 when Ugandan army soldiers tried to destroy Kony’s base, where she was held. For several weeks, clinging to her child, she endured tropical rain, hunger and wild animals, and was eventually rescued by Congolese soldiers and handed over to the Ugandan army and flown back to Entebbe and her parents.
The story of the Aboke girls is heart-rending, one of the many of this insurgency, and it is now to be filmed by Hollywood director, Will Raee, starring Uma Thurmann as the intrepid Sister Rachele. The account follows the book written by another former abductee, Grace Akello, and published as “Girl Soldier”; Grace was fifteen at the time. The Aboke story ended more or less well. Many other stories did not.
If the team making this film, or any other film or publication on the LRA war, want to do justice to what really happened, they cannot fail to ask why the insurgency wasn’t crushed earlier, and why the rebel leaders have been allowed to roam around at will for so long. Fingers should not be pointed only at the Ugandan authorities –although they have tough questions to answer- but the international community too.
They must also attempt to reflect the collective tragedy of a whole people, the people of northern Uganda: the Acholi, Kony’s own people whom he is trying to punish for not supporting him sufficiently; and their neighbors, the Langi who Kony drew into the fray. Aboke is in fact in Langi territory. One of the last massacres of the war was not far from Aboke, at Barlonyo where the rebels attacked a displacement camp just after sunset one evening and killed three hundred people, according to the locals. The official numbers of dead is about half that, as inscribed on the crumbling, neglected monument built to honor the victims. The camp is still there, desolate, wretched, home to a few men who find consolation in drink, mothers trying hard to cope, and naked children with ring-worm and distended bellies.
The LRA war is one more among the forgotten wars of central Africa. And with it came an equally overlooked humanitarian catastrophe. At the peak of the fighting nearly two million were confined to internal displacement camps: partly for their own security, and partly to prevent some of them “collaborating with the rebels”. Over the past two years the camps have been gradually emptying, but several thousands still languish there. Either they are afraid or too unmotivated to move out; or they have nowhere to go and nothing to go back to, their land having been taken or now the object of dispute after twenty years of civil disruption.
The camps are squalid. The World Food Program has done a good job, in tough circumstances, by managing to keep people from starving to death. They are turning off the taps now, however. Mothers of households sit in the dust and smoke and ashes of the never-dying fires, trying to keep their families from falling apart. Young men, many of them born in the camps, are drunk by mid-morning. Many of those who moved out don’t want to go back to the village; they operate boda-bodas (motor-cycle taxis) in Gulu and the trading centers that are now coming back to life. A whole family sleeps in the same dirty, lice-filled hut: parents, teenagers, children, boys and girls, thereby over-turning strongly-held traditions whereby the sexes and generations are separated carefully for certain ceremonies and functions. In some camps the children have been lucky and have benefited from basic schooling, and Church pastors and catechists have tried to keep the people’s faith alive.
Virtually every family has been affected. The eldest son of a family I know near Gulu was abducted three times and escaped every time. He was among the few incredibly lucky ones. The family could afford to send the remaining sons to boarding schools near Kampala for safety. One of the sons of their neighbor was kidnapped and has never been heard of since.
I have spoken with a cross-section of people from the Acholi and Langi areas: former child soldiers, counselors, catechists and teachers who worked in the camps and pastors.
One young man I interviewed was abducted twice and escaped both times; he was unlucky enough to be related to one of the wives of Kony. He was ready to talk about it and as he mentioned the horrendous things he witnessed, was forced to do or be killed if he didn’t, my mind opened to the utter depravity of human malice. He was with the rebels for a total of four years.
Another young man, in his late teens, was abducted for only a few days, but experienced enough to turn his mind. Some weeks later I heard he had been burnt to death: suicide was suspected. A catechist who was abducted with his parish priest from a remote mission managed to run away after eighteen months; the priest was released straightaway. His escape, he told me, meant gambling with his life, literally. If the LRA soldiers caught him he would be killed slowly and cruelly, or shot in the back. If, when he returned to safety, the people who he met first didn’t recognize him or believe his story, but suspected he was a rebel in disguise, testing the waters for an attack, they would kill him too. He was, luckily, recognized by the local pastor and welcomed back to safety.
Women had it harder than men. In a school for child-mothers run by an American non-governmental organization near Gulu, I interviewed a young mother who had been carefully selected and accompanied by the matron who translated for me. Her baby in her lap, the girl told us her story serenely and factually, but she was extraordinary. Most of the girls there undergo terrible ordeals during rehabilitation: nightmares, hysteria, and unpredictable behavior.
The nuns and lay-people who provide counseling for the many victims do heroic work, and from their stories one gets some faint idea of the suffering and the trauma the abducted have gone through to be turned into zombies and brutes: “kill or be killed”, they are ordered. “Here’s the machete!” Or, “bite her to death!” they are told. Many in the villages were mutilated –ears, nose or lips cut off-, on suspicion of “informing”.
Now the reconstruction of the region has started and life is returning to a certain normality, but it will take twenty or thirty years –no-one knows how long for sure- for the people to emotionally and psychologically recover. It is a pity the international media and most aid organizations came in after much of the damage had been done. The dead have been buried or left in the forests. It is many of the living who have to come to terms with the terrible memories that will haunt them forever. Fortunately the Acholi and Langi are resilient, practical and tough, and realize that the best is to get on with life, and patch up the past as best they can. If Uma Thurmann and Will Raee manage to capture this sense of tragedy and humiliation, as well as the hope, they will have done Ugandans a worthwhile service.
Martyn Drakard is a freelance writer based in Kenya.
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