“I’m hearing all the time from people here that conditions are so bad they wish they never left the LRA,” one of the returnees told the group.
“We can’t continue to encourage surrender if life at home in Uganda is worse than life in captivity,” Adam said.
David agreed. “Let’s do something here first,” he said. “Let’s fix the latrines. Let’s make it sanitary, let’s bring dignity back here. Let’s get funding to process the amnesty certificates so returnees can get back to their families right away.” The certificates gave legal protection to defectors so they had assurances that they wouldn’t be prosecuted through the Ugandan justice system. In the coming months he would receive Bridgeway grants to fund both projects.
But that was just the start. “Physical security, legal security—these are necessary for quality of life,” David said. “But if we’re really going to thrive after months, years, even decades in captivity, we need to be more than physically safe. We need to know that we’re valued, that we have a purpose.” His long face grew serious. “We have to find a way to get over the guilt from the past. We have to be able to forgive ourselves.”
Okuti and the others nodded, and the room grew still.
Adam finally cut the silence. “I hear what you’re saying about the importance of healing and reintegration. Are there concrete things we can do together to support that process?”
David had two ideas. He suggested that we fund the public ceremonies and celebrations in returnees’ home communities to knit the community back together and spiritually cleanse everyone from the pain of the past. And he said we should focus efforts on rehabilitation and practical vocational training.
“Before captivity, each of us had a dream—to become like someone we admired, a doctor or teacher. To offer value in the community. But Kony gave us a different dream. He forced us to believe something else: I am a killer, I am a murderer, I don’t belong at home anymore, this is my spot. He gave us only one dream: to rise in the ranks, to command a brigade. When we come home we need to remember: What is my dream? What pushed me to come home? What do I want to give to my family and community?”
“I know my dream,” Okuti said. “I will do anything now to stop the LRA. That’s my dream, to get my brothers and sisters home.”
Everyone in the circle nodded and murmured agreement.
“Your courage to come out may inspire many others to do the same,” Adam said. “What do you think would be most effective to influence other senior commanders and large groups to come out without bloodshed?”
Okuti’s bright smile flashed. “I can tell you about other commanders who have fallen out of Kony’s favor or are tired of fighting. Get messages to them, personally, that I’ve come out, that I’m safe.”
We had seen the efficacy of broad defection messaging in encouraging people out of the bush, and we knew that high-level defectors were especially credible sources to someone still trapped in the ranks. But this was the first time we seriously considered targeting specific LRA members by name, and drawing them out with voices, not fire.
Adam helped Okuti record messages for radio broadcast and helicopter loudspeaker messaging addressed to specific individuals within the LRA—leaders like him who were primed for defection, including someone called Opio Sam. He had been abducted as a young child and had spent twenty-four years with the LRA. He’d become well respected and highly ranked in the organization, but, like Okuti, had recently fallen out of favor. He was currently in LRA “jail.” Physical imprisonment wasn’t possible on the move, so instead he’d been stripped of his weapons, staff, and title—a punishment that amounted to losing his identity. The advantages that might have been keeping him with the LRA didn’t exist anymore. And his life was in the balance; it was well known that Kony had been killing other formerly loyal commanders. Okuti reasoned that Opio Sam might feel threatened enough to risk an uncertain fate—to end his twenty-four years in the LRA.
Okuti’s suggestion to call out specific disgruntled commanders reinforced our “cut the snake off the head” strategy. Targeted messaging had the potential to further drive a wedge between Kony and his senior leadership, creating a rift that we hoped would help foster disloyalty toward their leader, while strengthening their ties to an ally who had already defected.
Okuti recorded short and long messages, some to be played over local FM radio stations in the LRA’s area of operations, and some shorter and more targeted messages to be played over aerial loudspeakers in specific locations where Ugandan intelligence showed a particular leader’s group might be.
“First, I want to thank the people of Acholiland and the entire people of Uganda for welcoming us back home,” one of Okuti’s messages began.
He went on to address Opio Sam and other commanders directly, calling them out by name:
Other people like Opio Sam, we are also friends. Remember what happened to you? Your own wife was taken and now she is with Kony himself. Just think about this and know that your life is the most important one. You were taken by force, you have been forced into all these horrible things, and what are you fearing? Think about your people and your home and let your heart speak to you.
50
A SON NEVER FORGETS
I REMEMBERED THE article Opa had shown me a few years ago at Christmas, about Kony’s mother’s deathbed wish for him to make peace. What if Kony had heard her plea? Could his mother’s voice have been powerful enough to call him home? What if we could make the targeted defection messages even more highly personal? David had enhanced and expanded his volunteer reintegration support; he’d formed a local organization funded by Bridgeway grants, and was helping with all aspects of reunification, including tracing the families of recent defectors. What if he could help find mothers, fathers, childhood friends of people who had not yet defected, and record the voices of their families calling them home?
David told Adam he was happy to try, but warned us that family tracing held no guarantees. He often traveled five to eight hours a day, sometimes several days in a row, to remote villages where there were no roads for cars to pass, only to find neighbors and friends and family members who had long since given the LRA captive up for dead. To hear that a loved one they’d already grieved was alive wasn’t always joyful news. Families were often suspicious of David; sometimes they just didn’t want to reopen a wound.
One time he’d happened upon a defector’s family after they’d given up on their loved one’s return and decided to fix a date to perform the last funeral rites. When he’d said he was there on behalf of their family member who’d recently returned they’d said, “No, he is dead.”
David had insisted that their son had come out of the LRA, that he was safe with the Ugandan army at a base in the Central African Republic, that he was ready to come home. But the family had been so distressed and frightened that they’d smashed David’s phone, taken his keys, and screamed at him to leave them in peace. David’s presence wasn’t a gift, it was causing them suffering. They had already let their son go, and hope was too painful for them to kindle. David had refused to leave, insisting that he was meant to be there, to help their son—who’d been abducted at age eleven and was now twenty-four—come home. He showed them a recent picture of their son—but no one, not even his own mother, recognized his face.
David had kept coming back to check in on the family, and finally, on a subsequent visit, the returnee’s brother had examined the photo again and recognized him.
But now, David was on more uncertain footing. We were asking him to trace the families of individuals who had not yet left the LRA. If David managed to find their families, he had to encourage them without making any promises. To help their loved ones come home they would have to take the risk of investing hope in a reunion that might not ever occur, of falling headlong into an old loss, of rupturing whatever peace had been earned through time and healing. They would have to
open their hearts to the possibility of more disappointment and pain.
* * *
—
David traced the family of an LRA member who seemed ripe for defection and drove long hours to the village where he hoped to interview the LRA fighter’s family. The mother held her face in stiff reserve when David knocked on her door and introduced himself, but she invited him to enter her clean, simple home with its gray mud walls and dirt floor. She was much shorter than David, her back curved with age, her bony shoulders visible under her large black sweatshirt. David remembered the awe of seeing his own mother again after six months of captivity. If this woman’s son came home after many years in the bush, he’d find his mother irrevocably changed. The strong back that had carried him through infancy and babyhood was now stooped, her short hair now silvery gray.
As David told her the story of his own abduction and escape and difficult homecoming, the experiences that motivated his attempt to help with the reintegration work now, she carefully nodded her head. When he described his reunion with his mother in Alero, the feeling of her hands on his head as she cleaned his wounds, tears gathered in her eyes.
“Does my son even remember me?” she asked.
“Take it from me,” David told her, “a son never forgets.”
Her message for her son was as poignant as it was simple: “Dwag paco.” Come home. “I have never stopped waiting for you.”
51
BROTHER, YOU ARE HOME
WE CONSTANTLY PLAYED Okello Okuti’s message over the area where we knew Opio Sam’s group was operating, and waited to see if the targeted defection approach would work. But for week upon week there was only silence on the other end.
Then, on May 17, 2014, an LRA HF radio communication was intercepted. The signaler said, in brevity code, “As we talk right now, Opio Sam has escaped.” For many months he had been hearing defection messages and contemplating leaving the LRA. He had reputedly split away from his group, but had kept with him the forced wives of other men. His “hands passed onto them”—he raped them. He feared there would be consequences for his transgression. This was the tipping point that pushed him to finally act on his long-standing desire to leave the LRA.
Two other HF radio intercepts confirmed that Opio Sam had left the ranks. We waited to see if and when Opio Sam would surrender. Weeks passed, but he didn’t appear.
* * *
—
In late June, Laren and Adam came to San Antonio for an operations meeting. We were sitting at my kitchen table, reviewing defection efforts, when Colonel Kabango sent us a text on WhatsApp, followed by an email: Lt. Col. Opio Sam is out, the subject line read. The body of the email said, Go to my drop box for photos! On June 24, Opio Sam had walked out of the bush near Nzako. He wore dirty military fatigues. His head was wrapped in a black-and-white checked bandana. He’d made the decision to end two and a half decades of captivity. And he’d made it out alive.
He was brought to Obo, and Colonel Kabango was the first to greet him with a big smile and a warm handshake, an arm around his back. Then the Ugandan troops stationed at the base there greeted him one by one. In the photos Colonel Kabango shared with us, Opio Sam looked thin from years on the run. His camouflage jacket was buttoned high, his belt cinched tight. But in every photo, he was beaming.
“His smile says it all,” Laren said.
Opio Sam’s defection was a huge triumph—the first time in the mission that we’d experienced such a successful convergence of military pressure, intelligence, and defection tactics. It was also incredibly poignant. I’d been privileged to see the Ugandan army welcome defectors throughout the mission. “Brother, you are home,” each Ugandan soldier would say, some respectfully shaking the returnee’s hand, others enveloping him in a huge hug.
I still wanted Kony and his warlords to stand trial at The Hague. But I was seeing a different version of justice, the peace that came from deep forgiveness and restoration.
Opio Sam was offered food and a shower and civilian clothes, but before he would attend to any of these creature comforts, he wanted to make sure his ambitions were clear. “I want to help the others come out,” he said eagerly. “I heard those voices in the jungle—now I want them to hear my voice calling them home.” Sam volunteered to pose for a defection flyer photo before he’d even been invited. His smile in the photo is infectious.
After the debriefing, he went back out into the bush with the Ugandan military squad to chase the same satellite group he’d once commanded. He led them to a weapons cache he’d helped bury. And he initiated meetings with community leaders. In one village, a diamond-mining town where some had traded and met with the LRA, Sam held meetings with the same villagers he’d met with when he was an LRA commander. He insisted on wearing a Ugandan military uniform to these meetings to send a signal, essentially saying, The LRA has lied to us. We’ve all been lied to. I’m out by choice, and I’m working with the Ugandan military now to get these guys out.
Opio Sam also recorded loudspeaker messages with Adam, and flew with him several times over the jungle in the Bell 412 for hours on end during four straight days of message dissemination, playing his message: “I, Opio Sam, am urging you to have the courage to come back home, so you can start a new life.” When they flew over areas where certain commanders were known to be operating, he called them out by name.
THE BITTER ROOT
David Ocitti
WHEN IT WAS time for Opio Sam to return to Uganda to begin his new life, David was the one to drive him to his home village several hundred miles outside of Gulu. David steered his aging Land Cruiser—he affectionately called it “The Tank”—over uneven ground, turning the music up, trying to make Opio Sam as relaxed as possible, and also trying not to dwell on the mixed emotions of being in the presence of an older, high-ranking former LRA commander, someone who had participated in the brutality for twenty-four years. David had been held captive by men like Opio Sam; they’d forced him to take orders, to witness unconscionable acts. Opio Sam had left the bush, but many abductees were still in the ranks. Ending the cycle of violence required so much more than one person’s defection. And helping get someone like Opio Sam home was only the beginning of the pivot from violence to peace.
To remove a combatant from the battlefield was one thing; the battlefield also had to be removed from the man. He needed an ox-plow and seeds so he could farm and eat. He needed psychosocial support so he could learn to trust others and build healthy relationships. Many defectors suffered from PTSD and were prone to erratic behavior. They needed a way to make a living and a life, when in many cases the LRA was the only life they’d ever known—or at least the only life they remembered.
“Man, you’re back,” David said to Opio Sam now, navigating The Tank over a pothole. “You fought the first battle.”
“Yeah, and I’m done fighting for a madman,” Opio Sam said. “I’m through with all that.” Opio Sam had worked for Odhiambo and still bore the scar on his lower back from a caning for an unnamed offense. His body held many scars.
“Coming out is just the beginning,” David cautioned. “Going home seems like the end of the struggle, but it’s not going to be easy.”
Opio Sam looked away from David, staring steadily ahead as if trying to see through the cloud of dust rising up on the road.
“It’s a battle where you won’t be following anyone’s command. It’s your choice how it ends up—whether it’s positive or negative.”
David knew that Opio Sam had already applied to join the Ugandan army, the chosen path of many defectors. A military career didn’t appeal to David, and it was important to him that LRA defectors have choices in the life they made. But he could understand why joining the Ugandan military would be appealing to some. They were already proficient soldiers, and they wanted to make a positive contribution with those skills. In addition, the military paid better than many
other trades. It was a way to make enough money to give back to their families. Moreover, the highly structured military life helped many make sense of freedom. Though Opio Sam had wished to join, he was in his mid-thirties, and had been deemed too old to begin a military career with the UPDF.
“I worked with small motors in the LRA,” Opio Sam said. “I think I could be a good mechanic.”
“If that is your dream, that’s good, we can help you get some training,” David said. “When we get to your village, you’ll see that the community is going to welcome you. But don’t think they’re going to forget the past. No one ever forgets. Once it’s written, it’s written. It will never disappear.”
David thought of the terrible look on the boy’s face when he had confronted David in the schoolyard, the ragged edge in his voice as he yelled, “It was you!” The pain and confusion and guilt had been so intense, he had barely endured. But now he saw that moment as a blessing. It had prompted him to choose a path to peace and to discover a life purpose.
“They lost everything,” David continued. “They lost limbs, they lost loved ones. And now that you’re here, what are you going to do to reassure them that yes, it was you, but you didn’t intend to? It’s your job now to show your community that you feel their pain and you’re here for the good.”
David had been to many reunification ceremonies, and he was well-versed in the traditional reconciliation mechanisms built within Acholi culture. When they arrived in Opio Sam’s village, a local leader would help facilitate two traditional ceremonies that worked hand in hand with Uganda’s policy of legal amnesty to enable victims and perpetrators to live together in peace. The dissonance had to be acknowledged—even accepted—before it could be transcended. The community reunification ceremonies helped clear the air.
To Stop a Warlord Page 25
