FIRST the rebels tied Geofrey Obita’s hands behind his back so tightly that he could barely move his fingers.

Then, telling the 16-year-old schoolboy not to scream, they sliced off his ears. Then they pushed him down to the ground and cut off what they could of his lips.

“They were all over me, stamping, pushing, cutting. I could not move, I could barely breathe,” he told The Times in a barely audible whisper from his hospital bed in the small impoverished northern Ugandan town of Kitgum.

Yet the child soldiers of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), one of Africa’s most-feared rebel groups, were far from finished. They pinned the boy’s arms to the ground and took it in turns to hack off all his fingers and both thumbs.

They stuffed the body parts into his pockets, wrapped his severed ears around a letter and, after briefly parading him in front of a group of other terrified abducted children, told him to report to the Ugandan Army.

Another terrified child, snatched in the early morning rebel raid on the tiny hamlet of Mucwini outside Kitgum,had denounced Geofrey, saying that he wanted to join government militias being formed to protect Uganda’s northern villages from a renewed and ferocious rebel onslaught that has brought the entire region to a standstill. But it was a lie, uttered in panic to deflect attention from himself.

Geofrey was just a schoolboy from a poor family hoping to pass exams this summer so that he could move into what Ugandans call “secondary”, the final years of school. His father is dead, his two sisters left home long ago. He looked after his elderly mother and was sweeping her compound when he was taken.

He showed the rebels his student ID card, but to no avail; many of them were abducted long ago or even were born into rebel captivity and cannot read or write. Even if they could, they would not have been interested: they needed a victim.

“This one we are going to kill,” they told the group of about 20 other abductees. Instead, after an agonising four-hour wait, they decided to use him to deliver a macabre warning to government soldiers not to hunt them down.

Geofrey has few possessions, but one of his most cherished is a notebook-sized transistor radio, lying on the table beside his hospital bed. “I wanted to be a car mechanic. Now, I have no hope. I cannot even turn the pages of my school book,” he whispered through his disfigured mouth and stared helplessly at the radio’s tuning knob, smaller than his swollen finger stumps.

One of the LRA’s tactics is to terrify abducted children and then quickly to involve them in their atrocities. By so doing, they bind the children into the group and reduce the risk of them trying to escape.

“They feel guilt and fear, and then there is no way out. The commanders tell them they will be killed if they go back,” said Father Carlos Rodriguez Soto, a Spanish missionary and one of the few people to have met senior rebel commanders face to face.

Verified reports abound of children being forced to kill other abductees who try to escape, of horrific mutilations, from castrations to boiling people alive. Some are even forced to cook and eat human flesh.

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