Kids Forced to Kill
Escaped captive tells of atrocities under Ugandan rebels
By Ilana Ozernoy, Special Correspondent
Originally published in Newsday, June 3, 2002
GULU, Uganda — Kristine Abalo never wanted to kill anyone. As a 12-year-old girl in this impoverished, dry region of northern Uganda, she had no ambition to become a guerrilla fighter, to loot nearby villages or to haul 90-pound cases of bullets to the battlefront.
But Kristine never had a choice. She is one of an estimated 10,000 children kidnapped over the past 16 years by the Lord's Resistance Army, a guerrilla group that mixes Christian fundamentalist and animist spiritual teachings with a penchant for casually killing or mutilating those who displease its commanders.
Traumatized and mistrustful, haunted by memories of the killings she saw—and those she committed—Kristine, now 18, still counts herself as lucky among the resistance army's victims, simply for having escaped alive.
The tale of her enslavement, combined with an escalation of this obscure but brutal war since March, offers ominous signs of new disaster for the thousands of children still in the rebels' grip. As the Ugandan army drives into southern Sudan to wipe out the resistance army's main camps, human rights and relief workers say, many of the abducted children are likely to die in battle. UNICEF, the United Nations Children's Fund, says about 5,106 of at least 10,000 children abducted by the resistance army since 1987 remain unaccounted for.
While Uganda says it aims to free "thousands of children abducted by the LRA … we have yet to see any evidence that the children are being rescued," said Carol Bellamy, executive director of UNICEF. Stories of intense fighting "raise deep concerns that innocent children and women—the primary victims of [LRA] … brutality—are themselves being caught in the crossfire," Bellamy said in a statement in April.
After grisly coups and wars under Milton Obote and Idi Amin from 1966 to 1985, Uganda has stabilized largely under the tight, 16-year grip of President Yoweri Museveni. Its economic growth of 6 percent a year helped prompt President Bill Clinton to praise the country as a model during his 1998 tour of Africa.
But such hopefulness doesn't apply to the war-ravaged north. Museveni concedes that poverty has only deepened there. Gulu made headlines in 2000 for an outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus, but most of the region's miseries go little noted abroad.
East of Gulu, Ugandan troops fight an episodic war against ethnic Karamojong herdsmen, whom they accuse of banditry. Here in the lands of the ethnic Acholi, the resistance army's random savagery has killed thousands and driven about half of the population, or a half-million people, from their villages into camps where they live uneasily under the soldiers' guard, surviving on aid agencies' handouts.
Bands of the Lord's Resistance Army raid villages to kidnap children, loot goods and enforce draconian "rules," with frequently arbitrary brutality. Rebels have killed people for raising sheep or other "unclean" animals and amputated the feet of those caught riding bicycles, human rights groups say. In describing one such account, South Africa's Mail and Guardian newspaper said bike riders were targeted on the grounds that they would otherwise escape and warn the Ugandan army when the rebels were around.
After giving haven to the LRA since the mid-1990s, Sudan agreed in March to let Ugandan troops enter its territory for what was to be a two-week mop-up. But the fighting has been tougher than Uganda's army expected, and its spokesman said last month the assault would last through June.
Catholic church officials in southern Sudan said the resistance army had torched villages and killed 470 civilians in one district in the first weeks of the offensive, and Sudan's government said about 4,000 people had been uprooted.
Accounts of the group's child captives, brought back by escapees like Kristine Abalo, suggest that the children are perhaps more likely to be killed in battle than rescued. The children are brainwashed to fight to the death and may be tough to distinguish from their captors, even if the Ugandan army takes the care to do so. The resistance army hopes to overthrow Museveni and install its own government based on the Ten Commandments.
In her six years of captivity, Kristine said, the rebels' leader—a self-styled prophet named Joseph Kony who claims to be in contact with the Holy Spirit—often lectured the children that his men would kill them if they tried to escape, or that Ugandan troops would do so if they returned home.
Kony reportedly keeps authority through a combination of brute force and occult mysticism. "I believe he is possessed by evil spirits," Kristine said. "He is a very bad man and was the cause of my suffering."
Kristine was kidnapped as she walked home from a local market one evening. A group of rebels seized her and six other children on the road, tied their hands and shoved them into the back of a truck. In an isolated field several miles away, the men threatened the children and beat them with machetes, killing two, Kristine said.
For a year, the guerrillas forced the children to move with them and to help loot villages in northern Uganda. "My job was to carry the booty … like clothes and grain. In Sudan, I had to carry 90-pound cases of bullets to the front lines," she said.
"One month after I was taken from my village, I was forced to have sex with one of the rebels. I was trained to shoot," Kristine said. "The rebels forced me to kill many people. We were told that if we didn't fight, we would be killed by the rebels."
In the camp in Sudan, the rebels kept their new abductees isolated from one another and busy with hard labor. Kristine said she was given as a wife to a rebel who beat her for insubordination and forced her to clean, wash his clothes and cook when she was not out killing the rebels' enemies.
After Kristine gave birth to twins, she plotted an escape. One night, when the rebels had taken most new captives out for an offensive, she fled with her babies and six other children. Eventually, they reached Sudanese authorities who helped find an aid agency to fly them home.
The children who make it back to Uganda "have flashbacks, nightmares, hallucinations, they lose the ability to concentrate. There is also a physical impact. Some children come back with missing limbs. Some come back HIV-positive," said Julius Tiboa, head of Gulu Save the Children Organization, or GUSCO, a local group that provides medical help and counseling to the returnees.
And they face ostracism. People often blame the children for the violence they committed. If a local family finds a son "has brought home a girl who was in captivity, they are abusive and unwelcoming," said Sara Akoko, a social worker for the organization. "When I asked other child mothers if they had any hope for future children, most of them said they have no hope, and they have no desire."
Akoko—whose group has worked with 2,700 returned children—has been monitoring Kristine's return and says her chances of leading a normal life are grim. Kristine spent two months in the group's rehabilitation program, getting counseling and medical attention. While there, she tried to give away her twin sons, who were a painful reminder of her captivity. She was depressed and had nightmares.
Now, living again with her family, she spends her days willingly caring for her malnourished 2-year-olds, who still tug at her breasts in hopes of getting milk. Kristine wants to believe she is safe here, in the shade of palm trees that surround her family's clay huts. But she seldom leaves the compound and remains ashamed and angry at what happened to her. She says she will never marry, never trust men.
