A former Catholic altar boy is conducting a reign of terror in northern Uganda, targeting civilians and specialising in mass abduction, reports Robin Denselow
MAJOR-GENERAL Salim Saleh peered through his Ray- Bans and pointed out beyond the army base to the green plains that stretch northwards from the little town of Gulu towards the Sudanese border.
“Yes, he’s out there,” he said. “Maybe 15km away. His raiders are hiding out in the swamps and the forests. Will he attack Gulu again?” he shrugged. “It’s possible. Aren’t you frightened staying around here?”
In the early Eighties, the general played a key role in the “liberation war” against Milton Obote. Now his half-brother, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni, has recalled him from life as a businessman (current interests: airline food, publishing, gold prospecting) to lead the fight against a very different guerrilla leader who has brought chaos and a peculiarly brutal brand of terrorism to northern Uganda.
The man Saleh is determined to track down is Joseph Kony, a former Catholic altar boy and herbalist who targets civilians rather than the military, and specialises in the mass abduction of teenagers and even children, of both sexes. He has acquired a mythical status among local people who believe the stories of his supernatural powers as leader of the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).
“They should be called the Devil’s Resistance Army,” said Saleh. “Everyone in the district except me seems to believe in witchcraft. Their prisoners are killed if they don’t accept his ideas. Even the girls he takes are taught to fight, and are married off and raped. The people are scared. They’ve killed 50 or 60 people in the last week.”
Five miles outside town, the latest victims had been laid out along the roadside. Eleven villagers were killed overnight, apparently because they had refused LRA orders not to live so close to the highway. Some had been shot, others hacked to death with a hoe.
One old woman had been spared but ordered to set fire to her own hut, which was now a smouldering pile of ashes. Her two sons had been taken away by the rebels. She said she didn’t know how she could go on living.
Museveni hoped he had finished with religious- inspired uprisings in the north after the defeat of the Holy Spirit Movement, led by the “prophetess” Alice Lakwena, who devastated the region during her 1987 rebellion. Kony, said to be her cousin, picked up where she had left off, took control of the remnants of her forces and began an even more brutal campaign.
He has been helped by the traditional hostility of the Acholi people to the Kampala government and by terror tactics he appears to have learned in south Sudan. Here, in the vast, lawless region that marks the border between black Africa and the Arab north, where there has been fighting for decades between different rebel militias and the Sudanese government, there has also been a history of child abduction. Some has resulted from inter-tribal feuding but in recent years there have been reports that government-backed militias were involved.
Kony has made such abduction the basis of the terror campaign. Over the past three years, thousands of young people have been captured from villages and schools in the area around Gulu and forced to join him. His current raids — the most devastating so far — are believed to be carried out by enforced conscripts he captured last August. His aim, according to the Ugandan military, is to capture 10 000 more. In the last three weeks he has already succeeded in abducting several hundred, who are now being marched back towards Sudan.
Sixteen-year-old Beatrice Atim is lucky she’s not among them. On the night of July 25 she was asleep when the rebels surrounded her dormitory in the little mission school of St Mary’s College, out in the countryside five miles from Gulu. The girls were ordered out at gunpoint and taken down to the town, where the raiders stole salt and crates of soda. The girls were told to carry them, on their heads, as they were taken north towards the Sudan border.
Some managed to escape during an attack by helicopter gunships of the Ugandan People’s Defence Force. Others — including Beatrice — were simply abandoned in the bush because they were incapable of walking further. This is not the usual LRA practice. Most who can’t keep up are killed.
Now, back in class and dressed in her blue and white school uniform, Beatrice said she was frightened the rebels would come back. Eleven of her class-mates who didn’t get away are still out there with them.
Their prospects are not good, according to Aldo Ocen, the “community mobiliser” at the World Vision Trauma Centre in Gulu, which offers counselling and help for those who manage to escape from the LRA.
Some 1 200 young people, aged between eight and 22, have been treated here since the centre opened 17 months ago, in a little compound on top of a hill overlooking the plains that stretch towards the Sudanese border.
It’s not the ideal place for therapy, with the rebels still just a few miles away. The sound of gunfire and mortars often echoes at night around a battered little town that has become increasingly nervous since its electricity transformer was shot up. But Aldo’s current group of 169 “clients” are grateful that here, at least, there are Ugandan soldiers to guard them.
All have horrific stories to tell. Aldo says that one in five has been involved in killings, usually of fellow abductees who tried to escape. They were forced to beat their fellow prisoners to death with sticks and stones or else be killed themselves.
“And after that they enter a different world where killing doesn’t matter. They know they’ve committed a crime and they don’t want to go back to the government side. Then they are ready for the rebels’ military training.
“The girls have the worst psychological problems. They are forced to have sex with th LRA commanders, to cook for them and act as their wives — but never eat the food they have prepared.”
Christine Anena is one of those attending the centre. She was 15 when she was abducted last September and taken to southern Sudan, where she was “forced to be married like a wife” to one of the LRA officers.
“He had three other wives besides me,” she said in a near-whisper, staring blankly ahead of her, “and we each had a day when we had to sleep with him. We had to do what we were told or we were beaten. People were killed for disobeying military orders.”
In one of the rituals that all LRA members must go through, she was smeared with shea nut oil: “They believe it gives you strength and courage and makes you holy. It cleanses you like a holy spirit, and you can fight without fear.”
She was involved in skirmishes with the SPLA, the guerrilla militia fighting the Sudanese government in south Sudan, and in “looting and burning people’s houses like a robber. I don’t know if I killed anyone.” She escaped when the LRA brought her back across the border to Uganda in May and she too was still terrified “because the LRA always vowed they would recapture any deserters”.
As the killings and abductions continue, there’s a danger that this could become an international conflict. The Ugandans accuse the Sudanese of helping the LRA, just as the Sudanese government accuses the Ugandans of helping the SPLA in south Sudan. Both claims are almost certainly accurate.
The Ugandans’ latest weapon in their propaganda battle against Khartoum is policeman Benson Ojera, who was abducted last August and chosen by Kony as his trusted personal bodyguard. Ojera escaped back to the Ugandan side last month.
If his eyewitness accounts are correct, the Sudanese have provided Kony with weapons, food and medicine — though not direct military training.
Museveni, clearly embarrassed by the continuing rebel attacks, has already sent his half-brother 5 000 ex-servicemen who have been recalled to join the estimated 12 000 troops already stationed around Gulu.
Saleh is under pressure to get results. He admits, privately, that as a soldier he’d like to chase the LRA when they cross back to Sudan “but that’s not the policy yet — the government really has to think about that. The LRA will go on killing until they are killed.”