To Stop a Warlord

by Shannon Sedgwick Davis

  Late that afternoon, Laren broke away from the welcome party and snuck into the “hellhole” of the helo, the crawl space where the blades go down into the transmission, and dialed me on the sat phone.

  After just one night in Djemah, Acellam was moved to Nzara, and a few days later I sat at a table in an open tent with Howard Buffett, waiting to meet Major General Acellam and his family. It was the most important surrender to date and I wanted to celebrate with the troops and help strategize a flyer drop we planned to do to encourage and help Kony’s soldiers to leave the bush. Major General Acellam was so respected and famous in the LRA. Based on what he’d said about the number of LRA soldiers eager to leave, it seemed possible that a flyer with his picture, showing him safe and relaxed and free, could go a long way in reassuring and inspiring combatants to come out of the LRA.

  Howard had agreed to join me to help congratulate the SOG troops, and he also accompanied me to the meeting with Acellam. I wondered what it would feel like to be in the presence of someone who was responsible for killing so many and in such horrific ways.

  When Acellam and his forced wife and their child arrived and sat across from us in green plastic lawn chairs under the open-sided tent, it wasn’t the general’s violent history that hit me. He was reserved and distant, as though watching the proceedings from a third-person perspective, but he seemed at peace.

  Perhaps the strangest thing about him was that he existed at all. His name had been so pervasive in the reports on the LRA’s atrocities and so long at the top of our list of targets, his whereabouts so elusive, that he had begun to seem more like a spirit than a man. When he was finally sitting in front of me, it was as though I was meeting a ghost. To look into his long narrow face and intense eyes and hear him talk—about how hard it was to live off of wild yams and be out in the rain running all of the time, about how rested he felt now that he was free after twenty-four years in the bush—it was almost too much to take in. At one point someone asked him if he was sorry for what he’d done. His face grew introspective and he tapped the tips of his long fingers together as he reflected. When he spoke at last he wasn’t defensive or regretful, just matter of fact.

  “I was a young man when I was recruited into the rebellion,” he said. “I was trained from a young age in the methods of war. And I learned that in the art of war, the word sorry does not much exist.”

  As the interview with Acellam continued, I made eye contact with the mother of his child. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty, her cheeks still girlishly smooth and round. Acellam was sweet and deferential to her; I had to remind myself what was real, that she’d been abducted and raped, that her captor and abuser was also the father of her child. Now that she was finally free, she faced the hard road of healing from her trauma, and the stigma of returning home a single mom. Her beautiful daughter, in a bright blue-and-yellow-flowered dress and matching flip-flops, a black-and-yellow scarf tied around her head, was just a little younger than Brody. She sat contentedly in her mother’s lap, smiling at me and chewing on the stick of a Tootsie Pop that Howard had given her. Trying to close a gap between us, I took out my phone to show Acellam’s forced wife and her daughter pictures of my sons. For a moment the chasm between our worlds and experiences disappeared. The Ugandan mother shot me a radiant smile, a bridge between mothers.

  Meanwhile, Howard had opened his backpack and, to my surprise and confusion, pulled out a small, white plastic Wonder Bread container shaped like a sandwich, and then a jar of Jif peanut butter and a jar of grape jelly. I stared at him. Was this really the time for a picnic?

  “It’s a peace offering,” he explained. To Acellam, he said that in America we have a favorite food. He took out the two slices of bread, opened the peanut butter and jelly jars, and started spreading them on the bread. He closed the sandwich and handed it to Acellam. It was an absurd moment. And precarious. I didn’t know what to make of Howard’s gesture, and I couldn’t anticipate how it would be received. I gave Colonel Joseph a nervous glance.

  The silence stretched as Acellam looked at Howard, perhaps unsure what to do with the sandwich, or afraid that Howard was poisoning him. Howard seemed to understand Acellam’s hesitation. He carefully cut the sandwich in half, leaving one half on the table for Acellam, and taking a big bite out of his own half. Acellam hesitantly accepted the other half of the sandwich. When he tasted it, he smiled.

  Howard captured Acellam’s smile—his white teeth and shining eyes—in a photograph that we included on some of the flyers we promptly printed to drop over areas of suspected LRA activity. The flyers also included his personal message:

  I, Major General Acellam, have come out of the LRA, and am sending a message to my brothers in the bush. Put down your guns and stop fighting. Kony has been deceiving us all, we have nothing to fear. I am here living free, and the Ugandan army did not harm me when we met. If you come out of the bush, you will be free like me. Do not fear, the Ugandan army are our brothers and they want us to come back home. If you come out you will be granted amnesty. Let us make the war come to an end.

  Twenty-six captives would leave the LRA in the next sixty days.

  ROADIE

  David Ocitti

  THE VAN PARKED in the lot near the campus auditorium in a college town on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and David stepped out into the cold air. Before arriving in the Midwest for his first roadie tour, David had never seen snow. He’d been disoriented by the endless white covering the ground. Now deep mounds of snow were piled high against the edges of the parking lot.

  In the coming months he would do three tours as a roadie, each in a different region of the country, eventually visiting a total of thirty states. As he moved around the country he would search for latwok in the night sky, and contemplate how far he was from home. The cultural training he’d received before his arrival in the US had prepared him for differences, but he’d been overwhelmed when he landed in San Diego for his initial orientation before deployment by the high energy of the real-life “crazy mzungus” who held up a sign and shouted his name, welcoming him, a stranger, as though he was a long-lost friend. He didn’t think he would ever adapt to the winter cold or the taste of the fast food they subsisted on during tour, but he had grown used to living on the road, sleeping each night on a different couch in a different college town; to the comedy of meeting Americans who spoke to him extremely slowly as though he wasn’t fluent in English. He had even grown comfortable sharing his story of abduction, escape, and reintegration.

  He and the other roadies visited campus after campus to share stories about the LRA conflict, talk to students, and find ways to plug them into activism. For some students, that meant signing up for lobby days to pressure legislators to take more decisive action in ending the conflict, for others, pledging thirty-five dollars a month, which would cover one half of one person’s school fees in Uganda. Tonight, David would recruit students to speak up without speaking—to stand in silence for twenty-five hours in solidarity with brothers and sisters who had suffered in the LRA war for twenty-five years. It never ceased to thrill him when young people stood up to make a difference. It was empowering to direct the pain of the past toward compassion and peace for the future, to tell his audiences, “Together, we can end the war.”

  Once, David had felt completely alone in his suffering. It was still a shock sometimes to realize that he was being heard, that he was helping to lead change—first in northern Uganda with the Peace Clubs, and now across the world. When he first visited the Invisible Children headquarters in San Diego, a young American man with blond hair and blue eyes had made a point of stopping in to meet him. It was Adam Finck, Invisible Children’s regional program director for Central Africa. Adam had lived in northern Uganda for two years and now spent about half of each year at home in San Diego, and the other half in Congo, the Central African Republic, and Uganda.

  “I’m thrilled
to finally meet you,” Adam had told David. “Let’s definitely catch up and grab a drink when we’re both back in Gulu.”

  Tonight, inside the auditorium, there was time for a quick microphone check and a slice of greasy pizza in the graffiti-covered backstage room before David and his fellow roadies, all in black Invisible Children T-shirts, walked out into the stage lights to begin their presentation.

  “No one walks the path of life alone,” David opened. “And that is why we are here today. We cannot make it alone without you joining us. We can never serve any soul unless we stand together.”

  41

  TRACKING WHITE ANT

  WE LOST SAM’S mom in July 2012. She’d endured aggressive chemo treatment; Sam was able to be there with her through much of her illness. And then she was put on hospice. We explained to the boys that she was dying, that cancer was taking her away too soon, that it wasn’t her wish. We sat with them while they said goodbye.

  Grief swallowed Sam. It was a terrible time.

  “How does someone get sick?” Brody asked me once. “Will you get sick, too?”

  “These are such good questions,” I said. “But there aren’t good answers. We just don’t know.”

  * * *

  —

  Before I knew it, the summer had almost passed. August brought encouraging news from the field. A team from the first SOG deployment, led by Lieutenant Pauson, tracked an LRA group to their deep jungle hideout north of Dembia, Central African Republic. It was the group led by Dominic Ongwen, aka White Ant, that we’d been playing cat and mouse with for a year. Lieutenant Pauson sent a small reconnaissance team to watch the forest for signs of movement and to try to locate the LRA observation posts. When the recon team heard LRA members climbing trees in search of food, Lieutenant Pauson sent flanking squads around the camp and launched an assault. But this time, speed—not the LRA’s, but the SOG’s—worked against them. Impatient for results, the main assault force made contact with the encampment before the flanking squads were in position, and the LRA forces were able to escape. But the SOG troops recovered artillery, ammunition, and a notebook full of intelligence.

  A few days later, Lieutenant Charles’s assault team intercepted the remnants of Ongwen’s group and attacked their temporary base. The LRA group scattered, but the SOG team recovered more guns and ammunition, a radio, and a captive LRA fighter who said that Ongwen had splintered from the group and was now hiding with only three women and four AK-47 rifles. It seemed just a matter of time before there would be another top commander out of the bush.

  We got another boost when Colonel Michael Kabango was appointed the Ugandan military’s new overall counter-LRA commander.

  “I think I know what we need to do differently,” Colonel Kabango told Laren one night as they sat in camp chairs.

  Colonel Kabango had only been in the field a short time, but he was already bringing new vitality and strategies to the mission. He had an immediately commanding presence. His eyes were always narrowed in alert concentration, his back and broad shoulders held perfectly erect. Something in his posture and quality of attention said, “I’m the boss.” At the same time, he was playful and gregarious. He often spoke with his hands, gesticulating wildly as he recounted a story or articulated a new idea. He would regale everyone with songs and stories late into the night, and he walked around camp with his headphones on, whistling and dancing along to the music.

  The youngest of five children, he’d grown up in Kisoro, in western Uganda, the self-proclaimed wild child of his siblings, always in motion, often up to mischief. As a boy he’d been lucky enough to go to school and even owned a pair of shoes, but he was so embarrassed to wear shoes when others had none that he always took them off on the way to school, arriving barefoot like everyone else. He had deeply disappointed his strict father, a police officer, when he had joined Museveni’s rebellion right out of school instead of pursuing a career as a doctor or lawyer or teacher as his father had wished.

  Despite his family’s misgivings, he had shone in the military, fighting in the original bush war that helped Museveni take over Uganda. He had been working to fight the LRA ever since, rising in rank and distinguishing himself through his leadership and commitment. He’d been tapped for command of the counter-LRA mission because he was practical above all else and had a proven ability to bring results. From day one of his command he’d been serious and systematic about getting the work done. He’d spent two weeks flying around to each and every outstation, getting to know the soldiers and seeing what they faced when they were out in the jungle.

  “I see an opportunity for the squads to be more effective,” Colonel Kabango told Laren that night.

  By now, Laren had long since left Invisible Children to become the Bridgeway Foundation’s operations officer. At first, he’d been a novice in military operations. But over the year and a half since the first training, he had proven himself capable of offering helpful insights, enough so for Colonel Kabango to respect his feedback. The two talked every day about counter-LRA strategy.

  “The tracking teams hole up in the jungle and rest,” Colonel Kabango continued. “They’re being left in the bush too long without a break and I’m concerned that the mission’s not going to get anywhere with morale this low.”

  The Special Operations Group—still led by Captain Kommando—had been at it for more than a year by then, and although Major General Acellam’s surrender had been a huge win that buoyed the men’s spirits and inspired them to keep pushing for Kony’s capture, they were also exhausted.

  “Most of these guys haven’t been home in a year,” Laren agreed. “They’re out of reserves.”

  In the next few days, Colonel Kabango set up a rest and recreation (R & R) schedule to rotate soldiers in and out of the field—no one was to be in the bush for more than fourteen straight days—and secured an extra food allowance. Vegetables would be flown in once a month, and meat would be served at least once every two weeks. He also supplied the soldiers with new boots and got a generator for the med bay. Some leaders would have pushed the men harder, telling them that the sacrifice was its own reward, that to do something meaningful had a price. But Colonel Kabango saw that the soldiers’ rest and comfort was a matter of military strategy. If they could constantly move fresh energy into the field, there was automatically a huge advantage over the LRA. As Major General Acellam had told us, the majority of LRA soldiers were exhausted and wanted to come home. Other defectors coming out of the Vovodo and Chinko river basins confirmed that the LRA was beginning to feel the pressure of the Ugandan military operations. And they were becoming disillusioned by the promises Kony had been making that he would come down from Kafia Kingi to lead them. A year after the promise, Kony still hadn’t appeared.

  The mission’s presence alone seemed to be pushing the whole rebellion closer to collapse, and Colonel Kabango had the vision to capitalize on the LRA’s vulnerability. He brought in a new intelligence officer and began stocking fuel. Acellam’s surrender and the surge in defections were bringing us closer to a more exact understanding of Kony’s whereabouts, and he wanted to be ready to airlift soldiers and supplies as soon as they had the intel needed to act.

  * * *

  —

  With the LRA groups splintered and most on the run, it seemed an ideal time to push for more defections. Defection messaging had been successfully used all over the world to end armed conflict by encouraging perpetrators of violence to put down their weapons and come home. The UN base in Dungu, Congo, had been using aircraft to do flyer drops since at least 2010. But the UN campaign had had limitations. A long approvals process meant that it took at least one month, sometimes three, before a flyer could be green-lit and printed. Adam Finck, our friend and Invisible Children partner, and his team, had begun collaborating with the UN to make defection flyers because, without the bureaucratic red tape, Invisible Children could design, app
rove, print, and deliver as many as fifty thousand flyers in just three days.

  In addition to providing faster turnaround, Adam and his team of Acholi and regional staff had been able to improve on the content of the flyers, collaborating with LRA defectors already home in Uganda to fine-tune the language and messaging. For example, some of the early flyers had shown drawings of defectors with their arms raised in surrender. In Acholi culture—and in particular for anyone in the LRA—this posture was seen as an act of weakness and submission. Effective defection messaging wasn’t about commanding LRA members to submit to surrender. It was about empowering LRA combatants to make the choice to rejoin their families and reclaim their freedom.

  The flyers now used more culturally appropriate language, and an inclusive perspective that we hoped would resonate with LRA members. The text began, My brothers and my sisters, come home. The photos and illustrations of the defection process, from escape to homecoming—important because many LRA members couldn’t read—didn’t picture defectors raising their arms above their heads, but showed them being welcomed by Ugandan soldiers and embraced by their families. It was also important to include pictures of recent defectors wearing different outfits and in a variety of situations—at home, work, social events—in order to show the passage of time and the depth of their reintegration, to help convince those still in the bush that the defector hadn’t been killed after taking a single picture and that he was indeed happy and being taken care of. Sometimes a flyer would include photos of defectors drinking Coca-Colas. Since Coke was a luxury not afforded to those in the bush and a status symbol of sorts, the photos showed that defectors were not living in abject poverty but enjoying some of the pleasures in life.

  * * *