Child to Soldier: Stories from Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army Read online

  A strict teacher who insisted on formal school education, my father, Alipayo, forbade us from learning some parts of Acholi culture such as playing the lukeme (thumb piano) and attending the laraka-raka youth dances that were held in the dry season in neighbouring villages. The latter, also known as myel-moko (the ‘get-stuck’ dance), brought young girls, whose breasts were just beginning to peek from behind their colourful kalega (bras), into close proximity to young men whose voices had ‘broken.’ Clad in colourful beads, the young men held large half-gourds in one hand and wire beaters in the other, and formed an outer circle around the girls, singing while simultaneously beating the half-gourds in unison. A girl freely chose which young man to ‘get stuck’ with, usually someone she liked and wanted to get to know better. As part of the dance routine, the newly ‘stuck’ couple briefly left the circle of dancers to whisper sweet words into each other’s ears before rejoining the circle again.

  For my father, ever the schoolteacher, these were primitive distractions from the serious business of classroom learning. But, as young teenage boys, we learned to steal away from our beds in the dead of the night to join the laraka-raka. We eagerly joined the circle of dancers, and occasionally I was lucky and got ‘stuck’ with a dancer or two. We danced until night sky turned into the red of dawn. Then we rushed home before our parents discovered us missing.

  While my childhood recollection of culture is filled with good memories, the LRM/A made violence and killing routine experiences for Miya Aparo and other child combatants who were manipulated to believe these were normal part of Acholi culture, which they were not. She recalled her first encounter with the LRM/A’s brutality:

  We walked for two days, going way up to Patongo, all the time keeping in the bush. There we came into a clay area which stuck to the bottom of the shoe such that it was impossible to walk. I was attempting to shake away some of the dirt when the sharp blade of grass went straight into my leg, burying itself between the bones. My leg went numb, paralysed, such that I could not walk.

  Some of the rebels said I should be killed on the spot. One of the officers, a young man from Alero, argued that I should not be killed, I should not be killed. His name was Triga,3 the other name Okello, called Okello Triga. He was always called by that name; perhaps it was a name he got from the bush; I didn’t know. He said I should not be killed, that he be allowed to look for a bicycle to be used to carry me because my foot was so swollen. The sharp blade had entered deep into my bone, a big thing this size, the stalk of millet.

  When the officer [Okello Triga] brought an old man pushing a bicycle, I was put on it and pushed for a week in the convoy. When we were close to meeting with the main rebel group led by Kony, instead of being freed to return home, the old man who had pushed me on the bicycle was simply killed. When the old man was killed, I realized that I, too, could be killed. After all the help the old man gave me, he was killed just like that? The old man had faithfully rolled me along on the bicycle, and now even his bicycle was cut into pieces. The old man, dano adana, a human person, was killed next to the pieces of what was his bicycle.

  Dano Adana (Human Person)

  What stood out for me in Miya Aparo’s narrative was her use of the Acholi notion of dano adana to emphasize how the old man was killed next to the pieces of what was his bicycle. This was the second time I had heard a former CI soldier use the exact same phrase. The first was at the World Vision Center4 in Gulu in March 2000. I had returned to my hometown with Christa Schadt, a Canadian film-maker planning to make a film about children who fight in wars. My role was mostly that of a translator and ‘fixer’ with the local contacts whom I deemed crucial to the successful making of the movie. On my home turf, I was able to negotiate details including accommodation, transportation, and meetings with the former child combatants, something that my Canadian colleague would have found difficult to do since this was her first trip to Uganda. Over several days, between 12 March and 18 March 2000, once they felt confident enough to open up to me as latin Acholi me Canada (the son of Acholi from Canada), as they referred to me, these ex-CI soldiers revealed themselves to be a resilient, stoic lot that never complained about what they had gone through. Though quite young, between the ages of eight and fifteen, when forced to join the LRM/A, these former fighters neither sought pity nor expressed regret for what had happened to them – life simply happened to them, and that was the way it was.5 They were capable of – as indeed many told us in their stories of life before, during, and after the war – the most brutal acts of violence, causing deep suffering to both combatants and civilians alike.

  As I listened to their stories, one eighteen-year-old who had spent six years with the LRM/A kept repeating, ‘Wan dano mere calo dano adana ni ya’ (‘We are human persons like everyone else’) (field notes, Wednesday, 15 March 2000). It later occurred to me that, by using this phrase, the former child combatant was expressing an ongoing inner struggle to reconstruct, transform, and transcend the limitations of the term ‘child combatant,’ as employed by his home community, which viewed him and others like him as killers, and by the international charity machine, which insisted on referring to these ex-soldiers as victims in fund-raising campaigns in Europe, the United States, and Canada (Cook, 2007; Mawson, 2004).6 As dano adana, they had moved from the fringes of society to become integral participants within it. The former child combatants, in other words, saw themselves as ‘normal’ within the context of a society at war where violence itself had become banal.

  Throughout the book, in the context of children caught in war, I will reference as lanyut (pointer or signpost) the Acholi cultural notion of dano adana, universally recognized by all cultures as the ‘human person.’ In the Xhosa and Zulu cultures of South Africa, for example, ubuntu (personhood) describes the essence of humanness (Battle, 2009, 1–2). In my own case, the stories we were told as children had moral endings that instructed us how to relate to people around us as dano adana, a core identity endowed on each individual which determined how that individual viewed him/herself and was treated by others within the community.

  My parents often taught us how we should behave by emphasizing kit ma omyero ibed calo dano adana (how you should live like a human person). I heard that phrase just about every day. It was part of the daily Acholi conversation, used casually in greeting, in jest, in arguments, and in serious discussions. ‘Ah, pe dong imoto dano, an bene dano adana ya!’ (Why, you don’t say hello any more? I am a human person like everyone else!) At the village stream, one often heard the shout – ‘Nyee, kong wun wukuu manok, dano adana pud tye ka lwok’ (Hey, just wait a minute, human persons are still taking a bath). Since the pathway ran past the stream, you knew that the ‘human persons’ in this case were caught in the compromising situation of taking a bath naked. If the intruders were indeed members of the opposite sex, protocol required that they cool their heels, hidden from view, until the bathers had finished washing and put something on. Often older village women coming to collect water from the stream cheekily ignored our shouts of warning, sending us boys dashing nude into the bushes while covering our privates with our hands. ‘Come on boys, your little things are barely dangling, there is nothing to hide,’ one of the women would shout with laughter in her voice, to which one of us would respond – ‘Aac, wan dano adana bene ya’ (Whatever, but we are human persons like everyone else!) It was our way of reasserting our humanity at that particular moment.

  Sometimes the phrase dano adana was used as emphasis to convey a story of a serious incident, say an accident. ‘Dano adana owane marac’ (A human person was seriously injured). These kinds of stories usually brought a collective gasp of disbelief and expression of concern. People getting injured in accidents, such as during communal hunts or because of a lightning strike, were such rare events that they became a big story for everyone in the village. When death occurred – ‘dano adana oto tin’ (a human person died today), with the word ‘human’ used to underscore the unexpectedness and tragic natur
e of the incident – there was an immediate expression of shock and grief from the audience and the news spread fast throughout the entire village. Then there was palpable urgency as the community rallied to respond to the sad story, often accompanied by the loud wailing of women converging on the deceased person’s compound. But not all stories of death were treated with the same degree of sadness. The death of a child, of a young unmarried adult, or of young mothers and fathers was a bitterly sad event. Not as sad were deaths of respected elders who had reached the grand old age of dayo (grandmothers) and kwaro (grandfathers). In such cases, there was little grieving, and people generally anticipated the joyful celebration of guru lyel, the last funeral rites when extended families and clans gathered for the final goodbye to the dead person whose life was considered ripe and rich because of the many children and grandchildren left behind. The celebration often lasted many days, with much singing, dancing, eating, and drinking, and was usually held during the dry season. The distinctive sound of bul-lyel (funeral drums) wafted through the still night air, throbbing in a steady beat, itself telling the story of a life lived and ended within the Acholi life cycle of birth, childhood, youth, marriage, parenthood, old age, and death. That was the rhythm of Acholi culture as carried through time by each succeeding generation, in peace and in war, in happy times and during communal suffering, with the emphasis always being on dano adana.

  Suffering, Agency, and Human Personhoodin Child-Inducted Soldiers

  Acholi poet Okot p’Bitek (1966) wrote in Song of Lawino that in Acholi culture the measure of a person’s ability to be resourceful is based not on age but on how he or she does certain things:

  A person’s age

  Is shown by what he or she does

  It depends on what he or she is,

  And what kind of person

  He or she is

  You may be a giant

  Of a man

  You may begin to grow gray hair

  You may be bold

  And toothless with age,

  But if you are unmarried

  You are nothing

  (p’Bitek, 1966, 105)

  p’Bitek’s culturally mediated understanding of children as human persons, which is the view adopted in this book, differs somewhat from the definition used in the Cape Town Principles and Best Practices, which define a child soldier based on chronological age as:7 ‘any person under 18 years of age who is part of any kind of regular or irregular armed force or armed group in any capacity, including but not limited to cooks, porters, messengers and anyone accompanying such groups, other than family members. The definition includes girls recruited for sexual purposes and for forced marriage. It does not, therefore, only refer to a child who is carrying or has carried arms’ (Legrand, 1997). Based on a rigorous international legal framework for the protection of children, the Cape Town designation of child combatants is useful in defining the problem, raising global awareness about it, and mobilizing resources in response. In legal proceedings focused on war atrocities, former child combatants could presumably, and with some justification, base their defence on the innocence of childhood. A good example of the need for such a legal defence is the incarceration and trials at Guantánamo Military Detention Center in Cuba of Omar Khaddar, the former child combatant who fought and was captured in Afghanistan by U.S. forces in 1995. The U.S. military prosecutors focused mainly on Khaddar’s current chronological age while ignoring the experiences he went through as a child in combat. A big man with a big beard now, Khaddar bears no resemblance to the skinny kid he was many years ago, and his current physical appearance is exploited by military prosecutors eager to portray him as a radical hard-line jihadist who was an enemy combatant and not a child combatant.

  Yet, although popular and entrenched, I argue that the term ‘child soldier’ is a misnomer, one that implies a development frozen in time in which the child remains a child even when he or she is now a thirty-something-year-old adult with a family. It is not useful in describing who these ‘children’ are, the nature of their cultural upbringing and orientation towards life, and the life skills they bring with them to war, and out of war. It is an extreme view that ignores completely the transformation that children undergo after being forcibly or voluntarily inducted into soldiering.

  More so, the Cape Town definition paints a picture mostly associated with dependence, lack of fully developed decision-making skills, and inability to take care of oneself. Under such circumstances, child-inducted soldiers are often seen as helpless victims who lack personal agency and the wherewithal to control their lives amid the violence of war. With this view has often come the one-size-fits-all solution that sees former children emerging from wars as broken victims in need of repair rather than as dano adana who, in the act of survival, have shown incredible resourcefulness.

  This stigmatized view of children who survived war has often led to further victimization. In Acholiland today, the returning former child combatants who are the focus of this book are referred to as olum, a derivative of the word lum, which I translate as ‘bush’; olum means ‘the one who belongs to the bush.’ Just as the label ‘child soldier’ conjures up certain negative images in popular Western media – for example, in M. Ockslong et al. and E. Zwick’s (2006) film Blood Diamond, with its half-crazed, drug-addicted, bloodthirsty child-killer wielding an AK-47 machine gun – the local label olum is laden with stigmatized meaning for the former child combatants, who are shunned by the community, even by close relatives. Payaa Mamit, one of my informants, talked about being rejected by her father, who claimed she was possessed by cen, the evil spirits of people she had killed in her time with the LRM/A. ‘Perhaps my father acted that way because he heard what people were saying, that, “If your daughter has stayed for a while in the bush, stayed for these number of years, she returns with evil spirits or there is an evil spirit in her head,”’ she said.

  Instead, after listening to the stories of Acholi children that illuminate the specific cultural circumstances under which they became soldiers within the LRM/A, I have deliberately coined the phrase ‘child-inducted soldier’ or simply CI soldier. Induction in this case stakes out the point at which the child enters into the process of becoming a combatant. It is messy and bloody, often with many children losing their lives, but it is a process nonetheless in which survivors learn to live and grow. The terms defines the starting point of the tortuous journey, initiated in childhood, that takes these children into the world of organized violence, and from which, if they survive, they often emerge not as children but as young adults. It acknowledges, first and foremost, that the soldiers once were children, tender, vulnerable, open to exploitation and manipulation by the adults in their lives. Second, it acknowledges that, over time, the children in combat are transformed into combatants, in some cases hardened killers. Third, it accepts that, by the time these young combatants leave the LRM/A, or for that matter the numerous armies that use children around the world, they are often not children anymore, but young adults. In essence this description confirms that the soldiers are not, or will soon not be, children, and may have no wish to be treated as such. At the same time, the term requires and demands that post-combat legal proceedings, compensation, rehabilitation, and so forth account for the critical fact that, when they were children, they endured gross violations of their rights and traumatic combat experiences. Moreover, it affirms the former combatants as dano adana, a term that I suspected was their way of attempting to cast their identities as pedestrian and ordinary. Rather than perpetuate the aura of the exotic, they desired to free their humanness, caged as much by their experiences of war as by the label of olum, the name applied to them by others in the communities where they resettled.

  To be clear, in using the term ‘child-inducted soldier’ to describe children who are pulled into the vortex of war, I do not imply a genteel process which respects the rights and humanity of the child, nor do I wish to deny that children suffer in war. I do, in fact, acknowledge the
many factors, most of them quite violent, that attend the creation of CI soldiers. While some children are abducted or forcibly recruited, as was the case with the LRM/A, many voluntarily join the ranks of armed fighters (Brett & Specht, 2004; Cohn & Goodwin-Gill, 1994; Machel, 2001; Singer, 2006). Often, the conditions under which the children are targeted for recruitment as CI soldiers include displacement due to war, separation from family, and lack of education. Poverty is also cited as pivotal in drawing mostly poor children into the military, where access to food and shelter is better guaranteed (Brett & Specht, 2004; Singer, 2006).

  That said, the notion of CI soldier challenges the dominant and widely accepted image of children as young as six wielding light but lethal automatic weapons in war zones (Klare, 1999; OXFAM, 2006; Salopek, 2002; Singh, 1995; Stohl, 2002; Stohl & Smith, 1999). Those promoting this image point to the availability of guns, such as the Chinese G3 assault rifle, the Russian-made Kalashnikov, and American M-16, that enable children to enter the fray of combat with the same degree of lethal effectiveness as adult combatants. But, while such factors are important in explaining how children are pulled into wars, this book focuses instead on the CI soldiers’ inner struggles as they try to make sense of war and to take some measure of control over their lives so as to manage the unpredictability of the situation in which they find themselves.

  By examining and understanding the nature of the CI soldiers’ survival, I maintain, we gain deeper insights in how Acholi and non-Acholi children abducted by the LRM/A, and perhaps children in other wars around the world, are forced to become active combatants and then struggle through personal agency to find meaning within the context of violence. The term ‘personal agency,’ as I use it in this book, is defined as a form of self-production that fosters and utilizes cultural experiences and skills to overcome a series of traumatic life experiences in order to reassert a sense of self.