Rebels leave deep scars on Uganda's youth
By G. Jefferson Price III
KITGUM, Uganda – (July
7, 2005) Sunday Lalam, a 16-year-old girl, was a forced accomplice and a victim
in a cruel conflict that's been waged for 19 years in northern Uganda and
southern Sudan.
Ms. Lalam was
abducted Aug. 4, 2000, by a Ugandan rebel group known as the Lord's Resistance
Army when she was 11. During nearly five years of brutal captivity, she lived
under constant threat of death and endured numerous beatings. On pain of her own
death, she said, she killed many people, so many she does not know the exact
number.
More than 20,000
boys and girls have been abducted by the LRA in its insurgency against the
government of President Yoweri Museveni. Those who have managed to escape have
described barbaric treatment by the LRA, which is led by a messianic cultist
named Joseph Kony. He holds sway with a mixture of
terror and spiritual mysticism and says he wants Uganda to be ruled by the Ten
Commandments after he overthrows the Museveni regime.
Sunday Lalam
escaped last month, six months pregnant with the child of an LRA commander to
whom she was given as a "wife."
Sitting beside a
counselor from the Concerned Parents Association, a group formed to rescue and
rehabilitate youngsters like her, she told her story.
She was taken
along with 11 others at night. They were forced to march into the bush lugging
the booty the rebels, some as young as she, had plundered from her village.
Later, all of the others were released. The young men were too old for the sort
of indoctrination the LRA uses on young minds. The young girls were all over
l6, too old for indoctrination and old enough to be HIV-positive, Ms. Lalam
explained.
In a ritual
designed early in the experience to instill fear in young captives, she and
others were ordered to kill people - not to shoot them, but to beat them to
death with clubs.
One day, Ms.
Lalam said, she and four others were ordered to beat to death a boy her own age
from her village because he had become too weak and was a burden. "I felt
sad because I knew him, but they would have killed me if I did not do it.
"I have
killed many people," she said quietly.
The penalty for
trying to escape was severe, possibly deadly. She and four girls tried to
escape one night. They were caught and dragged back to the LRA camp. "Each
of us was beaten with 100 strokes," she said.
Ms. Lalam said
she and all the others were trained to use automatic weapons and to fight. The
LRA moved between northern Uganda, where its forces raided villages for new
recruits, food and other supplies, and southern Sudan, where they did the same
against southern Sudanese farmers. The LRA also battled southern Sudanese
insurgents who were fighting their government in Khartoum, for which Khartoum
provided supplies in return.
The LRA has been
weakened lately by defections and diminished support from Sudan now that
Khartoum has signed a peace agreement with its own rebels. The Ugandan army has
been reinforced. But the LRA is still raiding, abducting and killing people in
northern Uganda, where 90 percent of the population have fled their homes and
are living in camps, and in southern Sudan where many also live in camps.
Six months
pregnant with the child of her commander "husband," Ms. Lalam managed
to escape last month in the confusion of a government attack on her LRA camp.
Now, like
thousands of others with similar stories, she is being counseled and helped to
return to her family and her community, the very people terrorized by the LRA.
International aid
agencies are heavily involved in trying to help the millions of people
displaced and otherwise affected by the conflict. But apart from that, hardly
anyone outside of this region knows of the atrocities here. If Sunday Lalam had
been abducted in America, she might be the subject of intense attention from
the media and police. Here, she and thousands like her are casualties in a
conflict that's largely unnoticed by the outside world.
That's a crime,
too.
G.
Jefferson Price III was a foreign correspondent
and an editor at The Sun. He has been traveling on behalf of Catholic Relief
Services.
© The Baltimore Sun
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