WUNRN
WOMEN NEWS NETWORK
January 13, 2009
Girl
Soldiers - The Cost of Survival in Northern Uganda
Powerful Video Included
Mindy Kay Bricker – Women News Network – WNN
In a national effort to expel a swelling
and beleaguered Sudanese refugee population from the country, an eager soldier
of some sort had stopped our matatu (mini-van) in the middle of the night. He
awoke me—at gunpoint—demanded my passport, and told me to get out of the
vehicle. Within a few minutes, about 10 or so of us re-boarded with two less
people—a Sudanese woman and her daughter.
On that night, little did I know that
somewhere, kilometers away, an 11-year-old Lucy Aol was sleeping in the thick
Northern Ugandan bush hoping that she wouldn’t be awoken in the same fashion.
With one thin mattress below her, and one covering her, her dark chocolate skin
was swallowed by the night as she hid from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a
rebel group that was not only largely supported by the Sudanese government but
was enthusiastically amassing an army of children to torture, kill and steal
from the area’s Acholi people.
Her luck would last two more years. At 13,
this Acholi girl would be abducted and issued a gun so that she could protect
herself while she pillaged homes for food and clothing at the behest of the
LRA. Within days of her abduction, she would be made a “wife”, a position she
would keep until, at the age of 16, she would understand that death was a small
consequence if she were caught escaping.
“I’m not going to risk much,” she
negotiated with herself. “I have to escape.”
She would walk cautiously and quietly for
more than 24 hours, without rest, through bush so dense a cat would find it
difficult to claw its way through. When she would finally reach Gulu, the
second largest populated town in the country and home to a military base
against the LRA, she would immediately enter a rehabilitation center, where she
would be told the unimaginable: She was pregnant. A teenager so traumatized,
Lucy had never even had her first period.
The Lucy Aol who I didn’t know existed 11
years ago, I return to meet in 2008. Now 22 years old, Lucy delivers a
handshake so cotton-ball soft that even a ballerina would feel brutish in her
company. Her voice is quiet, her smile gummy, and her laugh affable. What you
don’t see, however, is the gallery of torture on her body—a shrapnel scar on
the heel of her foot, the panga (type of a machete) and stick scars on her
buttocks from being repeatedly beaten by soldiers in the bush.
But there is a reality that neither a smile
nor clothing can mask: When you meet Lucy, what you see is a girl—wanting to be
a woman—and desperately trying to extricate herself from her experience as a
child soldier of yesterday, while anxiously trying to safeguard her child from
the stigma of being tomorrow’s rebel soldier.
Lucy is among more than 60,000 Northern
Ugandan children abducted by the LRA during its 21-year-long civil war against
the Ugandan government. Organized by former Catholic altar boy Joseph Kony,
theoretically, the LRA was founded to protect Northern Ugandans from the
National Resistance Army, which had staged a military coup in 1986, and was
exacting revenge in the north, the home of many of the soldiers that tried to
resist the coup. It didn’t take long before Kony began attacking, rather than
protecting, the Acholi people—which, ironically, was his own tribe. As they
began to fear him, he accused the Acholi of betraying him and he wanted them dead,
all the while bolstered by the messages he claimed he received from the “holy
spirit.”
“A person who believes in God cannot kill,
cannot rape people, cannot burn their house … cutting their ears, cutting their
necks,” Lucy says. Kony “is a devil, not God.”
“When you first arrive [after being abducted by the
rebels], they put all the girls together. Then they call the officers so they
can pick who they want for a wife. Even if you are very young. I was given to a
very big man. He was blind on one side. So maybe he didn’t see that I was very
young.”
- from a Ugandan girl soldier, exhibition of drawings and
quotes for Nobel Peace Centre via CAP International – Children/Youth as Peace
Builders 2006
Most abductions occurred during the’90s.
Like Lucy, thousands of the girls who were abducted were forced into
“marriages” with soldiers. Almost 40 percent of the girls who were forcibly
married had at least one child in the bush, according to reports.
Within days of her arrival in southern
Lucy would become the fourth wife of a
24-year-old captain. “He was so big,” she recalled. “He was so old.”
Devastated, Lucy burst into tears and refused the man.
Image: HDPT CAR - Humanitarian and
Development Partnership Team -
“They told me to lie down, and they said,
‘You pick: Do you want life or death?,’” she recounts. “Then they brought a boy
near me and killed him using a panga. They cut him here (her finger slices her
neck), here (waist), here (legs) … Then they told me, ‘Have you seen what has
happened with that boy?’ I started crying. ‘You are crying!’ Then, they started
beating me.”
She chose “life,” which meant that for 2.5 years she was forced to have sex with her husband twice a week, each time crying and each time being beat for her tears. She would sometimes be denied food for up to five days and almost just as long without water—when deprived water, soldiers would make her drink someone else’s urine. She was only required to fight in the field once, but was forced several times a week to pillage villages to gather food and clothing.
Kony was set to sign a peace agreement in
April of this year, officially putting an end to a war that left nearly 2
million people homeless, 80 percent of who were women and children. But he
never showed. The LRA still managed to stay in the headlines, however, when
they orchestrated over 300 abductions in
“For us, we are just waiting,” Lucy says.
“Will he come back to kill you? Will he come back to arrest you? Will he come
back to abduct you?”
“I was scared. There were many bullets fired. I dropped
down for safety, but could see the tree leaves falling from the bullets… I
didn’t shoot, but six rebel soldiers and man abducted children were killed.
Over twenty children died. I was running for safety and had to jump over many of
the bodies. The youngest was about twelve.”
- Grace T., age 16, abducted July 2002, VOHU – Village of
Hope –
Back in Gulu, Lucy is at ease on her home
turf, her black flipflops dusted with red dirt as she calmly walks around the
city. The expense of the bus ticket prohibits her from visiting her mother and
her daughter, Winnie, often—she only manages the 7-hour journey about once a
semester.
Winnie “likes my mother more than me,” she
says matter of factly. “I don’t feel good [about that]. I want my kid. Just
because I’m away from her, she’s not like me. So when I finish my course, I
will come back, and she will know me better.”
Motorbikes buzz past her on the street,
carrying women with children, and men clutching nearly empty briefcases, while people
bustle about with an effort of feigning life in a city. The market buzzes with
excitement, and the smell of dead fish wafts over women walking around with
straw-weaved doormats on their heads. Lucy is stopped by a friend, who
instantly grabs Lucy’s arm and slowly walks with her down the street, asking
question after question: How much is your tuition? When does the next semester
begin? How do you like the program?
“It’s normal,” Lucy says. “People used to
stop me all the time. They want to know everything.”
Lucy is studying environmental health, with
the hope that she will work as an environmental health assistant with the
Ministry of Health in her region of the country, working to improve sanitation
in the community, educating people on disease outbreaks, like cholera and
tuberculosis, and providing HIV counseling and testing.
Her friend’s interest is genuine. One would
be hard pressed to find another country where education is so prized, but so
unattainable for many, as exorbitant school fees depress any kind of academic
aspirations. Around 41 percent of former abductees returned to school, 28
percent of whom were long-term abductees. According to a recent study, however,
girls, like Lucy, returning from the bush with a child had nearly a zero percent
chance of returning to school.
But despite her success as a student and
her sacrifice as a mother, there is no guarantee that she will land a job—the
reality in
“It is different for boys and girls when they are coming
back. The boys come back without children. But us, we all have children from
our time with the rebels. They are our children, you cannot leave this child,
she is yours. But if you want to make a new life, start a new life with a man,
you will always suffer because of this child. And the child will suffer too,
because of you, because of your past in the bush.
It is harder for girls. And it is hard. Because people
will say things to you and that thing will live with you. It stays in your
heart. And when you are suffering, when you are depressed, you will always
think about those things. A boy just forgets but a girl is not made that way.
And people do not let a girl forget. It is impossible for a girl to brush that
thing off.”
– Interview with girl child soldier
A few hours before Winnie comes home from
school, Lucy finally arrives in her mother’s village, a mud-hut suburb of sorts
two kilometers outside Gulu. Lucy walks around for a few minutes before a
friend spots her, the two simultaneously laughing at the sight of each other.
“This is my friend, Grace” Lucy says. “We
met in the bush.”
The two met when Lucy had been deprived of
water for three days. Lucy begged Grace for a drink, and Grace acquiesced, even
though she would have been killed had she been caught.
Now when Lucy and Grace see each other it
is instant relief, mostly because they know they will be able to discuss their
problems, their traumas, their fears. Since they understand each other’s pasts
so well, they can offer each other therapy that they can rarely find anywhere
else. Lucy does not even talk about her days in the bush to her mother—it is a
taboo topic.
But Grace and Lucy have more in common than
just their harrowing past: Neither of them plan to tell their children any time
soon of how, and to whom, they were born. Children are already beginning to
taunt their children at school, calling them “bush children”, creating rounds
of questions for both the mothers. Both Lucy and Grace, who had two children in
the bush, avoid the discussion, by offering terse explanations.
Grace tried to marry, which would have
assuaged the situation, but the man divorced her when his family found out she
was one of “Kony’s children.” This sort of rejection is sadly typical for
former female soldiers with children.
“I tell [Winnie] that she wasn’t born in
the bush; she was born in Gulu,” Lucy says, which is the absolute truth—Winnie
was conceived in the bush, but she wasn’t born there.
To mitigate such harassment, Lucy enrolled
Winnie in a private school, where she has a more intimate learning environment.
There are no educational standards in public schools, Lucy says, so the family
sacrifices everything to provide this for Winnie. Lucy’s mother takes food
rations from the displacement camp to sell for Winnie’s school fees. But she
broke her arm recently when taking cassava to sell in the
In June, rising food prices provoked a
5,000 shilling (CZK 50, $3.20) boost in school fees—school fees that Lucy’s
mother hadn’t managed to gather yet, bringing the total to 50,000 shillings
(CZK 500, $32).
“I’m not happy at all because they ruined me. I had to
cut short my studies. I have no hope that I will one day be somebody. I gave
birth to two children and was not prepared. I have two children and no means of
survival. I worry about what will happen next.”
- Christine A., age 20, abducted in 1996, VOHU – Village
of Hope -
Emotionally spent, Lucy and her mother sit
inside the dark mud hut and discuss the option of selling charcoal over the next
few weeks. Lucy also suggests asking the school to allow for an extension in
payment. However, the two women conclude that they aren’t going to be able to
keep up the momentum—the women might need to return to their family in the
displacement camp, and Winnie might have no choice but to be in a poor school
system with provocative children.
“She should not be hearing such kind of
language as she’s growing,” Lucy says. “It will be dangerous for her to hear
that she was born in the bush and that her father is from the bush killing
people … She will not be fine in the future.”
But Lucy maintains her hope that at some
point she will find, or create, some kind of job, and that she will be able to
purchase land for her parents, five brothers, their wives and children, so that
the family can leave the displacement camps, where over 1 million northern
Ugandans still live despite the Cessation of Hostilities Agreement that was
signed in August 2006 between the LRA and the Ugandan government. And then, and
only then, will she be able to build a fence around the family compound “to
protect” Winnie.
“Maybe I can get a job, and in the future
my child will be okay,” she says. “If you have nothing to do, then you suffer.”
A day into her trip and a day away from
returning to school in
“That child has the eyes of a rebel
soldier,” she says to her.
And as much as Winnie doesn’t know about
her life, she understands that the words are vitriolic. Winnie sobs. And Lucy
consoles her, careful not to tell her the truth.
____________________________________
For VIDEO, Click to Website Link and Scroll Down Article
http://womennewsnetwork.net:80/2009/01/13/ugandagirlsoldier809/
- Ugandan
girl soldiers often suffer critical trauma from the violence they witness and
take part in during their incarceration with the LRA – The Lord’s Resistance
Army. A VOHU -
________________________________________________________________________________
For more information on this topic see
these reports:
UNHCR – The UN Refugee Agency – Child Soldiers Global Report 2008 - Uganda
CAP International – Children/Youth as Peacebuilders
VOHU - Village of Hope – Uganda Child Soldiers Report
================================================================
To contact the list administrator, or to leave the list, send an email to:
wunrn_listserve-request@lists.wunrn.com. Thank you.