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 afterwards, 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, 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 — "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.
Back in his village, it was all right at first. Then the bad dreams came — of shooting and killing, of endless running through the bush. After six months he came for counselling at the Médecins Sans Frontières clinic in Aromo, but the nightmares and flashbacks continued. His counsellor gave him a small job, weighing and measuring the babies that come into the clinic. It's been good for him. But he's tormented and is scared he may be abducted again; he would be killed immediately for having run away.
It would be nice to report that Sam's story is an aberration. 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". The children witness acts of hideous violence; most are forced to participate in them. Often they are made to kill members of their family or their friends. It's the LRA's way of inducting them, making it impossible to return. Attempted escape is punishable by death, usually at the hands of a new "recruit" who has been recently captured.
Yet many do escape, sometimes after years. The Rachele centre in Lira town is a safe haven, a place of rehabilitation. There are 130 children here now, down from a high of 350. Most stay for about two months — those who have no families to return to will be here indefinitely. Each 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, never meeting my eyes. He tells me he was abducted by rebels three years ago, along with seven other children from his village. Like Sam, he was sent to a camp in Sudan for military training. 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. He decided he had nothing to lose, and one night when he was on guard duty he sneaked away. He gave himself up to the Ugandan army (UPDF). 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 and given as a "wife" to an LRA commander. She had a child by him a month ago. She looks at her baby with love, but 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 for 18 years. The LRA cannot possibly win, yet their campaign has been brutally effective: 1.6m people displaced from their homes, more than 80% of the local population, and 100,000 killed. Over 20,000 children have been stolen.
So much slaughter and terror — to what end? Aside from a desire to overthrow the Ugandan government, Joseph Kony, 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 bike, 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 to dismiss him as a madman. But there is a diabolical logic to this lunacy. An army of abducted children can be endlessly replenished; children are pliant and vulnerable; and an army with no willing recruits cannot be infiltrated.
At the same time, his methods are self-defeating. Kony is from the Acholi, a northern people who have long been at odds with the centre of power down south in Kampala. This is a schism with deep historical roots, going back at least as far as colonial times. But the current war grew out of a series of insurgencies that started in 1986 when President Museveni reneged on a power-sharing deal with General Tito Okello, an Acholi. Pushed from power, remnants of Okello's army joined in Sudan with some Acholi politicians and ex-Idi Amin soldiers to form the Uganda People's Democratic Army (UPDA). The new regime in Kampala managed to neutralise the threat with a peace deal, but another rebellion took shape in the form of the Holy Spirit Movement (HSM) of Alice Auma "Lakwena". With massive popular support, the HSM swept southwards almost to the capital but was militarily defeated. Lakwena's father tried to rouse the movement, using terror tactics against children for the first time, but the momentum of revolt had run out. In the vacuum that followed, Kony — a former UPDA commander who had also tried to take over the HSM — stepped in.
Among the Acholi there is a general mistrust and resentment of the Museveni government, and the feeling appears to be mutual. It is a situation, you might think, ripe with revolutionary potential; and yet Kony has blown it. He claims to be fighting for the Acholi people, but since 1991, when some civilian militias were raised against him, they have become his victims. They must be punished, he says, for turning against him. So it is their children he steals, their homes he burns, their lives he destroys.
