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

by Opiyo Oloya

  One of the earliest known forced recruitments of children occurred in April 1988 when the LRM/A attacked Sacred Heart Secondary School just west of Gulu town in northern Uganda, taking a number of students (Behrend, 1999; Human Rights Watch, 2003a, 2003b). But it was in mid-1991 that Kony intensified the abduction of children from the Acholi countryside (Human Right Watch, 1997). The LRM/A may have adopted the use of child combatants from the NRM/A, which, after all, had relied on the kadogos, ‘the little ones,’ as combatants in the five-year guerrilla war that toppled the Okello government in January 1986. The exploits of the kadogos were freely admitted by President Museveni (Museveni, 1997). Given the LRM/A’s ethnocultural chauvinism, which denigrated the efficacy of the enemy while emphasizing its own abilities, it is not far-fetched to consider the possibility that Kony saw Acholi children as better fighters than Museveni’s kadogos.

  Whatever its rationale for abducting children, the LRM/A seemed to recognize very early on the necessity of using an army of children to sustain its war effort. The period of eager adult Acholi volunteers willing to fight the NRM/A had ended with the defeat of Alice Lakwena’s HSM. The Acholi were also tired of a war that had caused misery to many yet did not bring commensurate gain to the beleaguered communities (Gersony, 1997). The LRM/A’s decision to forcibly recruit children for combat would have come out of the realization that adults could not always be relied upon to remain disciplined, loyal, and highly motivated. Children, by contrast, could be trained to do as told. Can Kwo, one of the former child combatants I spoke to in the summer of 2008, believed that the LRM/A abducted children out of necessity, for keeping the insurgency alive. Speaking in Luo, he noted:

  So Kony is strong because he abducted children, and completely made them forget their home experiences. As an adult, you could not forget your home experience. Perhaps you were abducted when you already had a wife or you were abducted just when you were ready to elope with a girl or you were abducted when you were dancing and already knew how sweet life was. But we who were abducted as children knew nothing. All we knew was that combat is a good thing. As a young child you are treated according to your size, given some small reward that fits your thinking and size to entice you. For an adult given a big reward, he or she is immediately aware that you are trying to bribe him or her.

  However it came about, the LRM/A decision to abduct children was rendered possible by the extreme culture devastation in which the Acholi were living at the time. Cultural as well as formal institutional safeguards that forbid abduction of children and that would have normally protected children from harm were non-existent owing to the violence that permeated every facet of communal Acholi life. Acholi elders, whose voices could have provided a moral counterweight to the LRM/A’s decision to use children in combat, were themselves struggling for survival as the war intensified and destroyed social and cultural life. What would have been unthinkable in the Acholi community prior to the 1986 war was now a reality.

  As my informants saw it, families were no longer able to protect their children from either the NRM/A or the LRM/A. By the mid-1990s, child abduction had become an entrenched LRM/A modus operandi that set it apart from many previous insurgencies in sub-Sahara Africa. The vastly unprotected countryside in eastern and northern Uganda and the ineffectual response by the UPDF made it easy for the LRM/A to abduct children from their homes, schools, and public spaces. The forced internment of Acholi population into camps beginning in October 1988, ostensibly to deny reinforcements and food resources to the LRM/A, served to create centralized depots where the LRM/A could now snatch many children at once (Dolan, 2009). According to UNICEF, by 1999 as many as 20,000 children had been abducted by the LRM/A and turned into CI soldiers. The most infamous abduction, which took on an international dimension, occurred on 10 October 1996 at St Mary’s College for Girls at Aboke, near Lira town in northern Uganda. Under the cover of darkness, the LRM/A abducted 139 girls that night, of whom 109 were later freed upon the personal intervention of the deputy headmistress of the college, Sister Rachele Fassera (Cook, 2007; de Temmerman, 2001).

  The abduction of the Aboke students exposed to the international media the role that Sudan had played all along in nurturing the LRM/A. In addition to providing bases from which the LRM/A could launch its attacks on northern Uganda, the government of Sudan gave the movement arms, money, and legitimacy, thereby lifting it from its relative obscurity to international attention. In doing so, Sudan was retaliating against Uganda for the support it had given the Sudanese People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), which was attempting to carve out an independent state in the south of the country. In return, one might speculate, the LRM/A may have promised its help to the government of Sudan in its fight against the SPLM/A. Whatever the nature of the arrangement between the government of Sudan and the LRM/A, the latter never fought a sustained war with the ‘Dinka,’ as it called the SPLM/A. Instead, the occasional exchanges of fire between the two rebel armies appeared incidental, mostly a result of rivalry over sources of drinking water. According to the testimonies of the former child combatants interviewed for this study, the LRM/A occasionally retaliated against what it saw as SPLM/A transgressions around the water wells. Miya Aparo recalled the nature of the resulting skirmishes, which occasionally flared into a full-fledged battle:

  We returned and stayed, instead of fighting against the Dinka. Mostly because Dinka came to get water, there was no water! You would go dig the spot where water had already dried up. There was mostly sand. You would dig deep into the sand and discover water below the sand. The Dinka would then come to collect the same water. They would wait until Kony’s soldiers were not at the water well, and would come and collect water … One day, they shot an [LRM/A] officer, hitting and breaking his thigh. An order was given that everyone should move in on the intruders and push them all the way to their defence [lines]. They began chasing the intruders from the water well, [and] along the way you would find some of them with their intestines pulled outside. We went all the way to their defence. We found many women and children. Most of their soldiers had fled, and many had died. Many children and women died once we started firing on their defence.

  Interestingly, in his first public appearance in 1994, which was widely reported, Kony did not address the presence of children in the ranks of LRM/A combatants, instead focusing his bitterness on Acholi elders whom he accused of being turncoats who supported Museveni’s NRM/A. Those he considered to be state collaborators, a category that may have involved whole villages, would be punished, he said: ‘If you picked up an arrow against us and we ended cutting up the hand you used, who is to blame? You report us with your mouth; we cut off your lips. Who is to blame? It is you. The Bible says that if your hand, eyes or mouth is at fault, it should be cut off’ (Schadt, 2001).

  It is possible that the virulent war on the Acholi was the result of the subsequent falling out between Kony and Acholi elders (see Finnstrom, 2008, 212–13). But even such bitterness cannot explain the ferociously indiscriminate atrocities, which fit the description of war crimes (Dormann, 2003), that Kony subsequently carried out against his own people and others. If anything, despite the many and often contradictory statements the LRM/A leader made to justify his war, such as fighting to restore the Ten Commandments, toppling Yoweri Museveni, protecting the Acholi people, ridding Acholi society of witchcraft, and so on, the evidence points to a man obsessed with complete control over the population, and willing to use every brutality known to humanity to achieve that goal. In targeting for violent punishment those it termed betrayers, the LRM/A appeared to reflect the maxim: Either you are with us or you are with the enemy. The difference in this case was that the enemy was everyone outside the LRM/A.

  In other words, from the anonymity of village life in rural Acholi, Kony was now thrust into the limelight where he commanded attention by the sheer notoriety of the gruesome murders, maiming, and other atrocities that were daily committed by the LRM/A. Through it all, as we see in
the next chapter, the LRM/A ruthlessly, if cleverly, subverted Acholi culture in the creation, manipulation, and control of an army of child abductees, who formed the bulk of its forces as it waged a campaign of terror against the population in northern Uganda, southern Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Central Africa Republic.

  Chapter Three

  Culture, Identity, and Control in the LRM/A

  Regarding the small groups [of LRM/A], if they operate independently, what keeps them from escaping and who would be in charge of each small group, i.e. the ones killing civilians on their own?

  (e-mail message, 23 February 2009)

  The above question was posed to me by an Acholi living in the diaspora. She was baffled by a news report blaming the LRM/A for the massacre of an estimated 620 villagers in the Democratic Republic of Congo between 24 December 2008 and 13 January 2009 (Human Rights Watch, 2009). She wondered how it was that leaderless groups of so-called child combatants could cause so much suffering and destruction. Such killings were never part of Acholi culture, she concluded.

  For my correspondent as for many of us, it is perhaps unthinkable that children can be raised to be CI soldiers. Our desire to protect and care for children sometimes interferes with our ability to listen to stories of a complex process of indoctrination in violence and killing. In wanting to know how and why children become violently transformed for unthinkable ends, we can be too quick to assume moralistic stances rather than see education and culture as processes used by figures of authority in various positions of care, trust, and learning to manipulate the young for their own objectives. While the formation of CI soldiers is my particular focus, education and culture may be exploited for other dehumanizing purposes.

  Studies give many psychological and social explanations for why and how children become CI soldiers (Boothby, Crawford, & Halperin, 2006; Coalition to Stop the Use of CI soldiers, 2001, 2004, 2008; Machel, 1996; Raundalen & Dyregrov, 1991; Wessells, 1997). In this chapter I offer a cultural analysis using testimonies of CI soldiers to trace how Acholi children are taken at a young age and trained through the repurposing of culture and education to serve in war. I argue that Acholi culture has become the means by which abducted children are manipulated, controlled, and exploited in the LRM/A’s war against the government of Uganda and civilians. The LRM/A achieves its goal of transforming children into combatants through a series of cultural conditionings that over time force children to live with dual identities, one in which they retain their sense of belonging and identity within Acholi culture, and the other in which they serve the violent agenda of the rebel organization.

  The LRM/A’s exploitation of CI soldiers is an extreme but not unique object lesson in how adults can use and abuse education and culture to entrap children into fighting wars not of their choosing. For example, J. Schafer (2004) notes that, in the post-colonial civil war that occurred in Mozambique from 1975 to 1992, patriarchal father-child imagery was manipulated by the various armed forces to engender compliance and cohesion among the young recruits, who viewed their commanders as father figures. In their cultural understanding of father-son relationships, where fathers are seen as representing absolute authority, the Mozambique child combatants could never contemplate disobeying their fathers’ orders, however absurd or ridiculous these might be. Schafer observes: ‘During the war, the young recruits clung defiantly to practices and beliefs which maintained their links with home and family’ (91). But the extensive exploitation of children’s prior cultural experiences in the context of war, I would argue, has been refined and expanded by the LRM/A to an unprecedented scale. Rather than rely solely on the threat of punishment or even the fear of death to control abducted children in the theatre of war, the LRM/A exploits various elements of Acholi culture that allow the abductees to bond with their abductors and to fit within the ‘family structure’ provided by the organization.

  On the issue of who is in control, the LRM/A or the abducted children, several popular positions have emerged. While acknowledging the important contributions of these positions in advancing understanding of the dynamics that surround child-inducted soldiers, I have chosen to examine religious fundamentalism and the concept of Stockholm Syndrome to illuminate the transformation of children in the LRM/A insurgency.

  Religious Indoctrination and LRM/A Control of Child Combatants

  The mythologizing of the LRM/A as a Christian fundamentalist organization, I argue, is grounded in the historical reality and the utterances of its leaders at its inception in 1987. At the time, the fledgling insurgent movement that would become the LRM/A fervently sought to cast itself as a worthy successor to the defeated Holy Spirit Movement of Alice Lakwena by highlighting its religious credentials, which it continued to do until at least 1994.1 Perhaps unwittingly, the overarching claim of LRM/A religious fundamentalism was given further credence by the efforts of international human-rights organizations to draw attention to the plight of children abducted by the group. Amnesty International, for example, in a report titled Breaking God’s Commands: The Destruction of Childhood by the Lord’s Resistance Army, documented cases of ‘institutionalized physical and psychological violence, including killings, rape and other forms of torture’ for children as young as ten (Amnesty International, 1997, 10). One fourteen-year-old girl, named only as ‘B.,’ told how she was abducted in February 1997; beaten ‘terribly,’ she watched as the LRM/A ‘killed my mother’ (Amnesty International, 1997, 10). Despite the echo of organized religion in the title of the publication, the many former LRM/A abductees quoted in the report, all of whom described the horrific violence to which they were subjected by the organization, barely mentioned religious indoctrination or control based on religion. Yet that did not seem to matter. The LRM/A’s attempt to portray itself as a crusading Christian organization was seized on in the West to illustrate the threat of domestic terror.

  In the era of the Global War on Terror, media and researchers alike have constructed a widely accepted narrative that views the LRM/A as a transnational Christian fundamentalist rebel movement operating across several borders in Uganda, southern Sudan, the DRC, and the CAR. Brian Beary defines fundamentalism as ‘the literal translation of holy texts and rejection of modernism’ (Beary, 2010, 107) and describes the LRM/A as ‘Christian fundamentalist’ (Beary, 2010, 109). This interpretation argues that religious fanaticism, as a method of both indoctrination and control, explains the longevity of the LRM/A as a rebel movement and its tenacious hold on child combatants. Furthermore, R. Petraitis (2003) claims that kidnapped children ‘are forcefully indoctrinated into the LRM/A’s grand vision of an Acholi nation based on the Ten Commandments – savage beatings are meted out to all nonbelievers’ (para. 3). In a similar vein, G.N. Smith (2008) writes, ‘As far as I can figure, there is no coherent ideological component in their fight, but rather a combination of Christian fundamentalism and opposition to Museveni’s government’ (19).

  In attempting to link the LRM/A to the fight against global terrorism, P. Hough (2008) draws a parallel between the LRM/A and the U.S.-based Ku Klux Khan:

  Christian fundamentalism has long been blended with crude racism in US white supremacist groups such as Aryan nations and the Ku Klux Khan. In recent years the most prolific overtly Christian violent non-state actor has been the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRM/A). The LRM/A, who are largely based in southern Sudan, have been conducting a civil insurgency against the government of Uganda since the late 1980s aimed at the establishment of a theocratic state governed by the Bible’s Ten Commandments. (Hough, 2008, 70)

  Hough’s claim that the LRM/A is an organization that uses religious fundamentalism as a method for indoctrinating and exercising control over child abductees is rejected elsewhere as a media creation (Finnstrom, 2008, 123–4) or simply as unsupported by evidence (Finnstrom, 2008, 108–12; Rice, 2006) or by the LRM/A itself. Writing on the subject for United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), G. Prunier (1996) asserts that ‘this bizarre
blend does not seem to coincide with any sort of Christian fundamentalism, any more than does another of his [Kony’s] stated objectives, namely to transfer the Central Bank of Uganda to Gulu, in Northern Uganda, so that “the people will become rich”’ (para. 5).

  In fact, at the well-publicized Kacokke Madit, a conference of Acholi in London in 1997, the LRM/A distanced itself from any claim to fundamentalism. LRM/A spokesperson James Obita dismissed outright the idea that the LRM/A is a religiously fundamentalist organization, saying: ‘Propaganda by the Museveni regime and the media that the LRM/A is a group of Christian fundamentalists with bizarre beliefs whose aim is to topple the Museveni regime and replace it with governance based on the Bible’s Ten Commandments are [sic] despicable and must be rejected with all the contempt it deserves’ (Obita, 1997, section, 3.4).

  As supported by testimony by my informants which I discuss later in this chapter, the experience of LRM/A child abductees was characterized by a mix of physical violence, exploitation of Acholi cultural rituals such as wiiro moo yaa (anointing with shea-butter oil), and rigorous physical regimes that included marching for hundreds of kilometres with little or no food. But, at the same time, the LRM/A occasionally referred to the Ten Commandments to reinforce its organizational rules. For example, Can Kwo Obato recalled edicts such as ‘Do not commit adultery, don’t smoke, don’t drink.’ But he admitted that these rules, especially the one that said ‘Do not kill anybody for any reason,’ ‘was not simply a rule for the LRM/A only but was part of Acholi tradition.’ Other former child combatants referred to religion as a source of personal strength rather than as an instrument of control perpetrated through indoctrination. To endure her life as an abductee with the LRM/A, Jola Amayo told how she used to recall her parents’ teachings that ‘everyone is created by God, God created all as equal.’ Meanwhile, on the day he deserted the LRM/A for good, Ringo Otigo prayed to his ancestors to guide him back home safely. In sum, none of the stories told by my informants corroborate the claim that religious indoctrination was a method for controlling LRM/A child abductees.