Forced to Be Killers, Ugandan Youths Struggle for Normal Life

Grace Aleng gave birth on the open ground to a girl fathered by one of her rebel abductors.

Then she was forced to rejoin the terror campaign being waged by the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda.

“I picked up a gun and strapped the baby on my back,” the emaciated 18-year-old recalled while nursing her scrawny baby. “But we were defeated by government forces, and I found a way to escape.”

Aleng is one of two dozen teen-age girls forced by the rebels to become sex slaves--and killers--who have found refuge in this camp in the bush 135 miles north of Kampala, the capital.

Doris Akany, another teenager who bore a rebel’s child, said the kidnapped girls were distributed among the fighters.

“I hated and still hate the man to whom I was given,” she said. “He already had five women. He used to beat us, and other fighters would whip us.”

Child soldiers--both abductees and volunteers--are serving in 32 conflicts around the world, most of them in Africa, according to a report in late November by the Swedish chapter of the humanitarian group Save the Children.

Armies and rebel groups use child soldiers to clear land mines, to spy and to conduct dangerous missions that older soldiers want to avoid.

Boys hardly bigger than their AK-47 assault rifles filled the ranks of rebel movements in the West African nations of Liberia and Sierra Leone. Some were orphans with no place to go; others were dragooned into service.

These days many child soldiers are involved in fighting in Uganda in East Africa. Researchers from several human rights groups figure about half the estimated 3,000 to 4,000 guerrillas in the Lord’s Resistance Army are abducted children and teenagers.

During a mid-December visit to the northern town of Gulu, in the heart of the Uganda rebellion, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright listened to traumatized children tell of killings, beatings and rape.

“Those who are responsible for this terrorism--the Lord’s Resistance Army--and their Sudanese backers destroy villages,” she said. “They abduct and enslave children too young to know what death is. And they have massacred thousands of men, women and children.”

Regional analysts say the government of neighboring Sudan supports the Lord’s Resistance Army in retaliation for the Ugandan regime’s support of Sudanese rebels fighting in southern Sudan.

About 200 young people who escaped lives as soldiers are being treated at the Kiroko camp, and 342 more are at the camp near Gulu visited by Albright. Both are run by the private aid organization World Vision International.

Aid workers say about 2,600 children in all have passed through the Kiroko camp since it was set up in 1995.

Those who escape are no longer children. Their experience has transformed them into haunted souls who wake up from nightmares, calling out the names of people they killed in the name of Jesus.

“Commanders were telling us that we were fighting in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, but they were not behaving like Christians,” said Richard Okello, 19. “They were always putting on rosaries and praying whenever they were planning a battle.”

The Lord’s Resistance Army was founded in late 1986 by spirit medium Alice Auma Lakawena. It attracted support from the northern Acholi people in reaction to the victory of southerner Yoweri Museveni and his National Resistance Army over Acholi forces, who had more or less controlled Uganda since independence in 1963.

Their worst fears came true in August 1987 when Museveni’s army and Karamojong cattle rustlers made off with nearly all the 285,000 head of cattle in Kitgum and Gulu regions--the mainstay of Acholi wealth and culture.

Lakawena’s forces were defeated in November 1987, but Joseph Kony, her cousin, who also claims to be a spirit medium, carried on the battle.

The Lord’s Resistance Army appears to have no coherent program other than to avenge wrongs done to Acholis by southerners.

Museveni, who was elected president a decade after he seized power in 1986, is highly regarded by Western donor countries and international lending agencies for turning Uganda’s economy around and permitting a relatively open society to develop.

But the north, partly because of the rebellion, remains backward.

Whatever the ideology of the conflict, Charles Watmond, director of the Kiroko camp, says the young people who have escaped from Kony’s army are seriously traumatized.

“At night, they dream loudly, uttering the names of people they have killed, and sing battle songs,” he said. “They feel they are sub-human. They are gloomy, suspicious, revengeful and unforgiving.”

The camp consists of a half-dozen mud and wattle dormitory huts in the middle of the grassy savanna. It provides medical care, food and psychotherapy.

Counselor Antony Oboma said one youth had participated in an attack on a bus. He was told to set fire to the vehicle with 13 people inside.

“He kept telling us he was smelling roast flesh, and he eventually went mad. We had to transfer him to a mental hospital in Kampala, but he has not recovered,” Oboma said.

Another youngster, Colin Okello, no relation to Richard, was abducted in 1995 and escaped in September. The slender 14-year-old said he was ordered to hack three members of a family to death in front of rebel commanders.

“I cut into pieces a man, his wife and their baby. If I did not do it, it was I to be killed instead,” he said, his words droning out in a listless monotone.

Dick Ojok, 13, was listening to his aunt tell a story when rebels grabbed him.

“We were quickly trained to handle guns and machetes,” he said, his eyes expressionless. “We came back to my own village and started killing. Killing was part of the life there.”

The camp’s staff of 10 includes counselors, teachers and vocational trainers who try to help the children overcome the past and reunite with their families.

“We tell them that it was not their will to kill . . . that although they were forced to kill, it was not a crime. Bit by bit, they recover,” said a counselor, Betty Lorim.

Staffers believe the rebel practice of forcing children to kill their own people is intended to isolate them from their communities, forcing them to continue fighting rather than return to face the wrath of society.

The child soldiers also are made to punish one another, to keep them living in fear not only of their superiors but of each other. One child told of being forced to kill another child who tried to escape.

Robby Muhumuza, acting director of World Vision’s operation in Uganda, said Kiroko camp was receiving 30 children a month two years ago. Now it gets 90.

“The atrocities committed by the LRA are unequaled in the world and can only be compared to those committed by RENAMO in Mozambique and UNITA in Angola,” said Herve Cheuzeville, head of emergency operations for the U.N. World Food Program, which feeds 250,000 Ugandans displaced by the insurgency.