A deadly game of hide-and-seek

The hide-and-seek begins at bedtime when thousands of small figures emerge from grass huts and tramp towards the town of Kitgum in the gloom. It is a cold night to spend on the streets but the children huddle under the stars until dawn.

Out in the bush, unseen, are other children: the seekers armed with AK-47s, clubs and knives.

It is a game played every night in the nearby towns and villages, an area stretching for hundreds of kilometres. If the hiders are found by the child warriors of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), they experience one of three outcomes: they are killed on the spot, marched into the bush and killed, or marched into the bush and forced to become killers themselves.

It sounds like a macabre twist to the tale of the Pied Piper or Lord of the Flies, but this is northern Uganda in the 17th year of a conflict entering a bloodier phase. After a lull the LRA has slipped back into Uganda from southern Sudan to renew a campaign of rebellion against the government and terror against fellow Acholis.

This month eight people were hacked to death and 100 grass-thatched houses set on fire in the village of Alito, according to the Ugandan army. It was the latest in a spate of raids which has left dozens dead and wounded. The day after the raid envoys from members of the UN security council visited Kampala to meet President Yoweri Museveni and discuss ways of ending the conflict.

In Kitgum few are hopeful of a breakthrough. Simon Addison of Oxfam’s humanitarian programme in northern Uganda says more than 800 000 people have been displaced, moving mostly to camps without adequate food and shelter. Clinics and schools are collapsing.

Oxfam supplies blankets, food and medical care but it is not enough. ”The people are caught in a situation where they are totally impotent,” Addison says. ”They are not in a position to take up arms or to make the peace process work.”

Parents are helpless because this is a conflict waged largely by and against their own children, with sons and daughters as young as seven the victims as well the perpetrators of atrocities.

The Ugandan army has herded communities of farmers into supposedly protected camps and towns. The few who have risked staying in their villages send their children into town at dusk to avoid abduction by the LRA. Known as ”night dwellers”, they trudge in silence along dirt roads. The lucky ones carry blankets, food and pots and cluster in the grounds of churches, hospitals and schools.

The night the Guardian visits there are more than 1 000 bedding down outside the locked doors of Kitgum’s general hospital. In the dark it is easy to tread on a sleeping body but nobody complains. Since the Ugandan army crossed into Sudan and pushed the rebels back into Uganda last year this has become routine, with night dwellers multiplying in recent weeks as abductions increase.

The LRA is led by Joseph Kony, an elusive mystic, thought to be in his 40s, who wants to rule Uganda according to the 10 commandments. His child fighters are directed by adult commanders who were themselves once child warriors.

Atrocities

Kitgum’s Concerned Parents’ Association, which rehabilitates ex-combatants, estimates that 14 000 children have been abducted, with 8 000 escaped or dead, leaving 6 000 still in the LRA.

On the walls of the association’s office are escapees’ drawings. Among them is one of a woman suspended by her right ankle from a tree while a figure beats her with a cane and another lights a fire beneath her head.

Another shows severed limbs and a prostrate man bleeding from the mouth. Richard Kinyera, the association’s chairman, says these incidents actually happened. And new escapees arrive every day with more stories.

At another NGO, the Kitgum Concerned Women’s Association, Wanok Constant (13) tells of being abducted and forced to take part in beating to death another boy who had tried to escape.

Patrick Ocaya (17) still dressed in the wellington boots, tattered trousers and grubby anorak which was his LRA uniform, escaped five years after being abducted from his home in Acholibur. Nervous and avoiding eye contact, he speaks of leading groups of 11-year-olds in looting vehicles.

He was so successful the LRA nicknamed him Ambush and made him a corporal. Injured three times, he was also ordered to kill seven people by clubbing the backs of their heads.

”Sometimes one blow is enough,” he says. ”You have to make sure the skull is crushed and the brains come out.” He is surprised when asked if he felt sorry for those he helped abduct. ”I didn’t have pity. They were my orders.”

There are documented cases of recruits forced to kill relatives, to march over spilled brains and to cook and eat human flesh.

The terror serves the LRA because, once implicated, many children consider themselves outcasts. ”They become too afraid to flee because they’ve been made to commit atrocities,” says Pietro Galli of the Italian charity AVSI.

Younger children are the most trigger-happy. ”To impress their peers they become very efficient killers.”

Lieutenant Okot Santo Lapolo, Kitgum’s district commissioner, is uncompromising: his soldiers and their recently acquired helicopter gunships will crush the rebels.

The people of northern Uganda, unable to till their fields, destitute and hungry, want nothing more than peace and security — but a military solution means killing their children. For many that is too high a price.

Colonel Sam Kiwanuka says some parents provide food to the rebels and withhold information from the army. They know that army statements trumpeting LRA casualties are roll calls of dead children. The inexperienced ones are most vulnerable to helicopter gunships.

An amnesty and peace overtures have faltered: some guerrillas fear retribution, others are part of a generation who know nothing but bush war.

Father Jose Gerner, a member of a group of religious leaders promoting peace, is close to despair. ”The government policy is to destroy them but the LRA is women and children,” he says.

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