Proscovia Acayo, who gave birth to four children during her nine years of captivity with the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), lives today in a small mud and thatch hut in a village near Gulu in northern Uganda.
Abducted in 1995 when LRA rebels attacked her village, Acayo eventually escaped the LRA in 2004, returning to Gulu with her four children from the bush.
Her homecoming was heartbreaking, however, when she learned that her parents had been killed by the LRA and her five younger brothers and sisters were stranded at Lacekocot internal refugee camp in Pader district, north of Gulu.
Acayo and her family of nine survive on the $2 a day she earns selling charcoal in the neighbourhoods of Gulu. But it is far less than she needs to feed, clothe and educate her family. On the day we spoke to Acayo no fire burned in her crowded little hut, signalling that her family was going without lunch.
“I am requesting any person, organisation or even the government to help me with these children especially their education, health, feeding and house rent, because the business I do gives me very little money,” she said.
Acayo is among thousands of men and women who have returned from LRA captivity to communities across northern Uganda, only to find themselves amid crushing poverty and with little hope for the future.
Many of the former abductees, especially women, are demanding help from the government in the form of resettlement packages made available to former rebels through the Uganda Amnesty Commission.
The women complain that they have not received reintegration assistance – meant for both men and women – which includes a foam mattress, plastic containers, cooking pans, a blanket and Ugandan currency worth about $115.
Amnesty Commission chair Justice Peter Onega said the total number of former LRA members to be supported through the project could be as high as 29 000, including those still in the ranks of the LRA.
He says 22 000 have already received assistance; 1 800 are waiting for help; and a further 5 000 could be eligible for it when and if the LRA, now operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo, demobilises.
“If the comprehensive peace agreement between the LRA and the government of Uganda is signed, we expect the LRA to leave Congo and Sudan and come back to Uganda,” said Onega. “We will give them reintegration packages.”
But Acayo, who says her suffering continues despite her freedom, says she never received aid from the government.
After she was kidnapped, Acayo says she was handed over to a man named Ayo, a commander under Okot Odhiambo, who among others in the LRA has been indicted by the International Criminal Court, (ICC), for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Ayo, only 13 at the time, says she was handed to another commander, Okwera Aginya, becoming his fourth wife. She had her four children with him.
After Aginya died in 2003 at Owiny-Kibul in South Sudan during a shootout between the LRA and South Sudanese forces, Acayo escaped with her four children, ending up at a reintegration centre in Gulu.
Acayo was given a small amount of money from the Concerned Parents’ Association, a group of parents whose children have been abducted by the LRA. She used it to start her charcoal business.
Onega said many former LRA returnees have yet to receive resettlement packages because the commission was provided funds only in 2005, by which time many of the rebels and their captives had settled back in their old villages – some in far-flung parts of the north – and were difficult to trace.
But Onega said new funds were available now to provide for those who were overlooked in the first phase of the assistance project, which appears to have focused on demobilised fighters.
Now, he says, special attention will be given to mothers, the disabled and women and child soldiers. “We will be gender sensitive,” he said.
Caroline Ayugi and Patrick Okino are Ugandan journalists working with the Institute for War and Peace Reporting