To Stop a Warlord

by Shannon Sedgwick Davis

  “No,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  She went silent, gazing out at the lake. It was a volcanic lake filled with methane pockets, risky to swim in, too huge to see across to the opposite shore. A blue misty strip of mountains was sometimes visible to the south of us. I could see that she was upset.

  “I just got back from eight days in the field,” she said slowly. “Shannon, there was another Christmas massacre. We just found out.”

  I couldn’t believe what she was saying. For months there had been no indications of LRA violence. “How is that possible?”

  “It was up in Makombo, near the Uele River.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a map. I could see the river, a dark, twisting line. A series of dots extended down from the river and back to it in a circle, each dot labeled with a date as well as a name. Villages. Attack sites.

  “The LRA hit more than a dozen fishing and farming communities in four days. We’ve documented three hundred twenty-one killed. But those are only the confirmed dead. Maybe as many as two hundred more bodies were never recovered or buried. The survivors we interviewed told us that this whole area, this sixty-five-mile circular route of attacked villages, was strewn with bodies. People described the ‘stench of death’ throughout the region for weeks after the attacks.” She paused to let the facts sink in before she continued. “There were abductions, too. A total of two hundred fifty. Eighty children.”

  “How did no one know?”

  Ida sighed again and began to recite the hard, familiar truths. There was no communication infrastructure that allowed the communities to warn each other of the attacks, no way to call for help. There was no electricity. No cellphones. The roads were so narrow they were barely passable on a motorcycle. And the LRA moved incredibly fast through the dense jungle, faster than word of mouth. Another large-scale attack had occurred one year after the first Christmas massacres, and once again the UN, despite its increased presence, had been unable to protect people.

  News of the first attacks had circulated in the region, but not soon enough to prevent more deaths. In Tapili, Ida told me, residents had heard rumors of LRA violence at a fisherman’s market in Mabanga almost thirty-seven miles away. They sent two people to investigate. But the scouts had barely begun their journey when they were ambushed by the LRA. Their eyes were gouged out, and they and their motorcycles were set on fire. And then the rebels advanced into Tapili and launched their next attack.

  In other places the LRA had sent explicit warnings to discourage people from sharing information about the rebels’ whereabouts. In early December, weeks before the massacres, three people had been harvesting sweet potatoes and cassava on their farm near Bangadi when a small group of LRA combatants surrounded them and tied them up. The youngest LRA rebel, a teenage boy, was commanded to cut off the captives’ lips and ears with a razor. Then the captives were sent home as a warning to their village not to talk about or listen to information about the LRA.

  When the massacres began, the LRA swept quickly between villages, using similar tactics in each place. The combatants arrived disguised as Congolese army soldiers. They pretended to be on patrol, they spoke reassuringly in Lingala, the main language spoken by the army in Congo, asking locals where to find schools, markets, churches, water points—any place where people would be gathered. And then they attacked.

  Many people were killed outright with axe blows to the back of the head. Others were taken captive, tied together at the waist with rope or wire, and marched out of the villages at gunpoint. The abductees were forced to march twelve or fifteen miles each day, carrying heavy loads of salt, sugar, batteries, clothes—all of the goods the LRA had pillaged along the way. At night, they had to sleep tied together. On the long marches, those who couldn’t keep up were killed on the spot. The boys who lived were trained to fight. The commanders rubbed oil on them, saying it was magic and would protect them from bullets. The female captives were assigned to LRA commanders according to a hierarchy—first to Lieutenant Colonel Binansio Okumu (called Binany), then Commander Bukwara, then Commander “One-Eye” Obol.

  “When we finally heard about the attacks, we traveled up there on motorbikes with a Congolese human rights activist,” Ida continued.

  Ida’s treks to research violent incidents were rarely without danger or mishap. She once told me about a twelve-hour motorbike journey on a narrow, almost non-existent path through the forest, escorted by a Congolese army captain who kept wiping out on the rough trail. Each time he fell off his motorbike, his rifle and grenades and other supplies went flying around in every direction, a slapstick spectacle that would have been funny if it weren’t so terrifying. At one point during the long journey, the captain picked up a live chicken he planned to cook for dinner that evening, and tied it on the back of his moto. The next time he wiped out, the chicken escaped, and it took the entire party of soldiers and moto drivers almost half an hour to recapture the chicken and resume their journey.

  There was no comic relief in what Ida told me now. “We interviewed more than a hundred people last week. Every single person had a horrific story. There was an eighty-year-old man in Niangara, a chief. He was grieving for his son who’d been killed by the LRA, and what he said gave me chills. He said, ‘We have been forgotten. It’s as if we don’t exist.’ ”

  A waiter in a white-collared shirt and black pants came to take our order.

  “Merci,” Ida murmured.

  “Merci, aussi,” he replied.

  In Congo, it wasn’t customary to say, “You’re welcome” or “It’s nothing.” In reply to a thank-you, a person said, “Thank you, too.” In casual exchanges and formal settings, this thread of reciprocity ran through. Here we were in Eastern Congo, one of the deadliest regions in the world, and the everyday language was gratitude.

  “There’s more,” Ida said. Her voice was low, guarded. “The Makombo massacre may not be the only unreported large-scale attack. We’ve also received reports of attacks in remote regions of the Central African Republic, but there’s been little attention or follow-up from the CAR government or the UN.”

  The United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC), the UN presence in the region, now had one thousand peacekeeping troops in northeastern Congo and a proactive mandate to go after the LRA. But even the major peacekeeping presence in the region that was meant to protect innocent lives seemed unwilling to act against Kony’s army. I remembered hearing after the first Christmas massacres in 2008, after Operation Lightning Thunder, that a boy had run from his village to the UN base twelve miles away, the base that was there to protect all the villages in the region. He had stood on the fence and said, “The LRA are killing people in all of our villages.” The UN troops still hadn’t left their compound. This time the massacres had happened much farther away from the MONUC bases. The UN hadn’t been in a position to prevent the violence. But it was their responsibility to respond. I asked Ida what the UN was doing in the aftermath of the attacks.

  She told me that on January 20, over a month after the attacks, MONUC had sent a human rights official up to Niangara to investigate. He stayed for an hour and a half. He had recommended that the UN form a special mission to investigate, but none had been approved. UN officials had later told her that without the GPS coordinates for Makombo village, they couldn’t land a helicopter there to conduct investigations. Nor did they seem to have made much of an effort to find an alternative.

  “They didn’t send any sort of aid or support to the survivors? They didn’t go after the LRA?”

  She explained that they hadn’t made any offensive operations against the LRA in more than four years, not since they’d lost eight Guatemalan peacekeepers in a counter-LRA operation in Congo in 2006, a serious loss that had discouraged them from further action.

  “This can’t keep happening!” I remembered Laren’s long, steady sta
re the night at the Mercer when he’d told us about his meeting with the member of the National Security Council. That disillusionment and dread. The groups designated to stop the violence were doing nothing to prevent massacres from happening again and again. “Who else can we call on? Who can we pressure for a response?”

  Ida told me that some of the Congolese soldiers stationed in the region had been helpful after the attacks, gathering corpses, digging graves. And a Congolese military team from Bangadi had come in late December—weeks before the UN had sent anyone—to conduct an investigation, walking for two whole days to reach the attack sites. But there had been no government response to the massacres. The officials Ida had talked to in Kinshasa just the week before were totally unaware of the attack. Congo’s President Kabila and his cabinet continued to assert that the LRA was not a threat.

  Even if the government had been more proactive and responsive, the Congolese army, the entity with the most obvious responsibility to protect Congolese civilians, was saddled with problems. With few helicopters and vehicles, abysmal communications systems, and salaries and rations that arrived late, if at all, the army wasn’t equipped to pursue or protect against the LRA. Especially so when the president refused to acknowledge the threat.

  MONUC had plenty of resources, several established bases in the region, and a mandate to stop the LRA. They even had an agreement to help the Congolese army with food and transport. But with rampant corruption within the Congolese military, it was impossible to make sure the UN’s support was getting where it was supposed to go. And the tragic lack of response during both Christmas massacres showed that even a big budget and proactive humanitarian peacekeeping mission were not enough to guarantee safety in the region.

  Ida said that the Ugandan military seemed better positioned for counter-LRA missions, and had actually sent a group of soldiers in pursuit of the LRA after the Makombo massacres. But they’d lost the trail at a river crossing. And although they were allowed to cross international borders to go after the LRA, they didn’t have the troop power to adequately protect civilians in the hundreds of villages in the region. They also weren’t in a position to coordinate well with the Congolese military or the UN. In fact, one of Ida’s Ugandan military contacts had told her that they didn’t even bother trying to coordinate with the UN anymore since MONUC had proven so ineffective at protecting civilians.

  It didn’t seem right to accept that we were at an impasse to stop the LRA’s atrocities. And yet I couldn’t see a way forward. A humid breeze came up off the lake and rustled the tablecloth. The tables near us on the patio had filled up and we could hear voices murmuring in English and French. A man laughed. The waiter returned with our coffee and tea. He smiled brightly at us before he moved away across the flagstones.

  “What now?” I said. “What are we going to do?”

  “We’ll publish our report,” said Ida. “The New York Times has already agreed to run a story. I have to believe that we can do something positive if we keep the world informed. If we keep the pressure on.”

  I wanted to believe that, too. It was what the humanitarian and world leaders I’d been honored to work with always said: that we have to work hard, we have to do our very best—and we also have to trust. Trust ourselves, each other, God. One of my favorite passages of scripture, 2 Corinthians 5:7, says: For we walk by faith not by sight. I had to trust that there was a solution to the LRA crisis, even if I couldn’t see it yet.

  I looked across the lake, trying to make out the shape of the mountains against the sky.

  YOU COULD BE NEXT

  David Ocitti

  IN A CLEARING an hour outside Pabbo, the commanders split the children into smaller groups. David was sent one way, his brothers another. They continued to march.

  Before dawn they came to a small camp. In the dark, David could see rebels standing guard around a group of women and children asleep in the grass. David and the new arrivals were ordered to find a place on the ground to sleep. When David collapsed, his whole body began shaking. He felt that the heaviness in his body would break him. He tried to slow his breathing, to search the sky for familiar stars. He stretched his body out on the rough grass. His eyes had just fluttered closed when the commander yelled and David bolted upright. The commander pulled a young boy up from the grass. In the moonlight David could see that the boy’s face was streaked with tears. The commander grabbed him by the shirt and promptly shot him in the face.

  “Don’t cry,” the commander warned the survivors. “Don’t talk. Don’t even look at each other—or you’ll be the next to die.”

  * * *

  —

  At sixteen, David believed he was the oldest boy in his group. Most seemed to be between the ages of five and fourteen. Boys were targeted at this age, David would learn, because they were big enough to carry guns and young enough to be brainwashed. The boys were trained to kill. The girls were each assigned to a soldier. David could hear them crying out at night. Sometimes the soldiers didn’t wait until night to beat or rape them.

  By the end of the first week David finally wept. Even though crying meant death, he couldn’t stop himself.

  Each day the commander kept them moving until the sun set, when they stopped to rest. Too many nights, another child would be killed, murdered within a circle of his peers. Sometimes the victim was singled out for having disobeyed, or as an example of what happened to those who tried to run, or for talking to a friend. Sometimes the victim was chosen arbitrarily, and this was worse, because it signaled that no matter what you did, you could always be next. You could follow the rules, but you were never safe. You had no control. You could be killed for any reason, or for no reason at all.

  * * *

  —

  The days of marching were exhausting, but as long as they were moving there was a respite from death. Then, a few days after his abduction, David noticed a change in the rebels who had captured them. They were edgy and even more aggressive than usual, kicking and pushing the children as they tried to march, yelling loudly. Soon David understood why. They reached a clearing where a stocky, middle-aged man was waiting. He had a mustache, and his chin and cheeks were covered in stubble. He smiled as the group approached, but even from a distance David could see his narrow brown eyes, piercing and stern. He was an upper-level commander, the one David’s group commander reported to. His name, David would learn, was Okot Odhiambo. He had ordered the attack on Pabbo and neighboring camps.

  Odhiambo wasn’t especially tall, muscular, or physically overbearing. But he was terrifying. He spoke in a friendly way one moment, and then turned to rage. David saw him beat one of the men, an established LRA combatant, and then, as he lay on the ground, cut his shoulder open with a machete. “Move!” he yelled, kicking the bleeding man.

  They didn’t stay long with Odhiambo. The LRA constantly split and regrouped as they brought in new abductees. Along with the terrible violence and fear, it was a way to control the new recruits, to always keep them guessing. Just as they came to understand a commander’s methods or feel a bond with a fellow captive, they were forced to adapt to new people, new behaviors. The only constant was terror, and the direction of their march. They were steadily moving east, in the direction of the rising sun, leaving home farther and farther behind them.

  * * *

  —

  Soon David and the other new captives weren’t just witnesses to violence. They were forced to participate. The commander shoved them into a circle. He gave them a heavy stick. He chose a boy at random to send into the middle and ordered the others to take turns hitting him with the stick.

  “Keep passing the stick,” he shouted. “Hit! Hit! If you refuse, you will die.”

  The stick was in the hands of a boy across the circle from David. The boy hesitated. The commander raised his gun. The boy closed his eyes and waved the stick.

  “Harder!” the comm
ander yelled. “Make me hear the blow, or you will be next.”

  David tried not to think about the boy in the middle or the awful sound, or the stick making its way around the circle toward him. He tried to remember the faces of his family. He tried to hear his uncle playing the lukeme, the trance-like, heartbeat sounds. At last, the commander said they could stop. The victim lay slumped and bloody in the middle of the circle. He was dead.

  “You are alone,” the commander told them. “Home is gone. Everyone you love is dead. We are your family now.”

  David felt more and more vulnerable and afraid each day. But he had lost the ability to cry. The worse the brutality became, the more his sensitivity to horror seemed to lessen, a knife gone blunt with use. It was how the mind survived: ceaseless distancing and endless vigilance. Don’t let it in, and always stay alert. You could be next.

  If he allowed his mind to wander, the terrible memories consumed him: his father falling, the question he’d been forced to answer. The guilt made him sick; he couldn’t swallow. A bitter taste always filled his mouth. This was how the LRA broke their abductees’ bonds with home. And David was luckier than some. He had killed his father only with his words. He would see kids forced to kill their parents with their own hands. To raise a machete over a father’s head and let it fall.

  Questions tugged at him under the constant stream of horrific images like a current. Where was his mother now? His brothers? Did anyone know where he was, that he lived? Was anyone he loved still alive?

  God created me, he tried to remember. God has plans for everyone. In his pocket was a little Bible he’d been given at school. In his loneliness, to stop the haunting images, David invented a game. He’d take out his Bible and close his eyes, praying, God, show me what to read. Then he’d open the Bible at random. And he’d trust that whatever passage he opened to held a message from God, something to help him understand what God intended for him.