“Who do you love the most?” the commander shouted at David. “Your mother or your father?”
An absurd question. David shook his head.
“Answer me!” Spit flew out of the commander’s mouth when he yelled. “Who do you love the most?”
David could feel his brothers shiver against him. “I love them both the same.”
“You have to choose!” The commander was so close David could smell his sweat, the stench of his uniform. He could see the dark sheen of his gun, the hands that gripped it. They were thin hands. Dirty and calloused, but young and bony. “Answer me! Who do you love the most?”
David knew he had to answer. But his tongue felt stuck, his mind tangled. He looked at his father and mother in turn. He had to speak a name. But he couldn’t find an answer.
“Who do you love the most?” the commander shouted again. “Answer me now or I’ll shoot!”
His brothers had begun to cry. David felt the burn of a pepper filling his mouth. A heat so intense it felt lethal. He squeezed his brothers’ shoulders again. “My father,” he said, choking on the words.
The commander signaled to one of the rebels guarding the group of men and then moved to another group of siblings, demanding, “Who do you love the most? Who do you love the most?” “My father,” David heard many answer. The rebels brought the fathers to stand before their children in a ragged line, and then surrounded them, holding large sticks, chunks of wood. At some unknown signal, the rebels threw themselves at the fathers, beating them. The sound of wood against flesh was low and deep. Then the sharper crack of clubs on skulls. The fathers moaned and one by one they dropped to the earth. David’s father was the last to fall. The LRA didn’t stop beating them until all of the fathers were dead.
David’s father lay with his face in the dirt. Blood stained the ground. David’s brothers were crying, but David couldn’t cry. He felt overcome by heaviness, as though someone had rolled a boulder onto his chest. His breath came in little gasps. He searched the crowd of bystanders for his mother but she wasn’t there. While the fathers were being killed the other adults had been taken away. His parents were gone. David and his brothers were forced to march out into the dark with the other abductees. His feet stumbled over the uneven earth in the night.
2
PROTECTION URGENTLY NEEDED
“WHEN ARE WE going to give him back?” my three-year-old son Connor asked.
“Shhhh,” I murmured, rocking the newborn baby in my arms. Sam was in our bedroom, trying to squeeze in a few hours of studying before his evening law school class. It was January 2009 and by then Brody was a month old, and time felt blurry, measured not in grant assessments, board meetings, and international travel itineraries, but in the too-brief stretches when my newborn son’s colic subsided long enough to allow him (and me) to sleep. My words were a feeble attempt to soothe all of us: the tired baby, Connor’s frustration over Brody’s constant demands on my attention, my own fear that my love—which I knew to be endless—somehow wasn’t enough to meet both of my boys’ needs.
I had chosen motherhood. I had no ambivalence about becoming a mom. And even my strong desire to experience this kind of human love had not prepared me for the profound and total merging of myself with another. The call to love and mother them was like the call to life—something no less precious because I did it automatically, without questioning.
“Mommy,” Connor demanded, “answer me.”
I looked at Brody’s round cheeks and scrunched-up nose, his bald head, the way his face twitched as he struggled to sleep. “Baby Brody’s here to stay, my love,” I said. “He does cry a lot. He can be really loud and he makes Mommy really tired, too. But he won’t always be a baby. One day he’ll be a boy like you. He will love you and want to be your friend. You might even find that he’s pretty fun to play with.”
Connor eyed me skeptically and returned to sorting his plastic safari animals by color and size.
Brody asleep at last in my arms, I dug my phone out of the couch cushions and scrolled through work emails, looking for any new reports from the organizations funded by Bridgeway. When I had joined Bridgeway a year and a half earlier, when Connor was going on two and Sam and I were starting to try for a second child, I had done my best to keep clear boundaries between my work and family life. But I quickly learned that I just don’t operate that way. This work and my family would always be present, daily.
At Bridgeway, I managed a global portfolio of grants aimed at helping people around the world stop, prevent, and recover from mass atrocities. Now I scanned my in-box, particularly eager to see if there were any new developments from Sudan, where we were keeping an eye on the crisis in Darfur. My quick review didn’t reveal any news from Sudan, but I did notice a post from Human Rights Watch, written by Ida Sawyer, a lead researcher in Uganda and Central Africa, whose position Bridgeway had been funding in response to the LRA’s ongoing violence in the region.
In 2006, the Ugandan military, the Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF), had succeeded in driving the LRA out of Uganda and into southern Sudan (they eventually took refuge in the Democratic Republic of Congo), and the Ugandan government entered into peace talks with Kony. We had believed that the LRA would soon be dismantled. But the LRA threat hadn’t diminished. Far from it. Still intent on overthrowing the Ugandan government, Kony had set up his new headquarters near Garamba National Park in northeastern Congo, where Ugandan troops weren’t allowed to pursue him, and in the two years that the peace talks had dragged on and ultimately failed, his army had rested, regrouped, and rearmed. By 2008 the LRA’s violence against civilians was reaching new extremes and had spread not only to Congo, but also to the remote corners of southeastern Central African Republic and southern Sudan.
When I saw the headline of Ida’s report, my heart sank: “LRA Slaughters 620 in ‘Christmas Massacres,’ Protection Urgently Needed as Killings Continue.” A lump formed in my throat as I read on. Joseph Kony’s army had murdered hundreds of innocent people and abducted more than 160 children in a string of bloody reprisal massacres after a failed assault on an LRA camp in the Democratic Republic of Congo, near the border with southern Sudan.
On December 14, 2008, just three days before Brody’s birth, the Ugandan military and its partners had launched Operation Lightning Thunder, a joint effort between the armies of Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and southern Sudan, and supported by a number of US military advisers whom, in the last weeks of his presidency, President George W. Bush had assigned to provide logistics, communications, and intelligence.
But, as I read in Ida’s report, the mission was riddled with flaws and mishaps. The attack helicopters that had been sent ahead of the ground forces were delayed by bad weather. By the time they bombed the compound, Kony, apparently tipped off to the attack, had already fled with his top commanders. There might still have been a chance to capture them, but the ground troops meant to pursue any LRA members who fled after the aerial assault were hampered by transport problems, and also arrived late—seventy-two hours late. Worst of all, the troops delegated to protect civilians in the region never appeared at all.
On the upside, the operation had succeeded in destroying the LRA central camp and forcing Kony and the other leaders into hiding. But this actually made them harder to pursue. The LRA splintered into small groups, a multitude of tiny armies hiding within an area that spanned three countries, a region roughly the size of California. In trying to mitigate the threat of the LRA, the intervention had only made them more dangerous.
And then the LRA retaliated.
On Christmas Eve and Christmas day, LRA rebels committed horrific murders. In town after town across northeastern Congo, invisible to most of the world, the LRA went on a killing spree. One of the first attacks occurred in Batande, a small village about a mile from the Sudanese border. A close-knit community, the whole town had g
athered to share a feast after Christmas services at the Protestant church. A seventy-two-year-old man arriving late for the festivities was on a footpath leading to the church when the LRA attacked. I held my breath as I read his account of the massacre:
The LRA surrounded all the people and began to tie them up with cords, rubber strips from bicycle tires, and cloth from women’s skirts, which they tore into strips. I saw them tie up my wife, my children, and my grandchildren. I was powerless to help them.
After tying them up, they tore off their clothes and put them facedown on the ground. Then they started to hit them one by one on the head with large sticks. They crushed their skulls till their brains came out. They were quick at killing. It did not take them very long and they said nothing while they were doing it.
I slipped away and went to my home, where I sat trembling all over. That night I heard the LRA celebrating. They ate the food the women had prepared and drank the beer. Then they slept there among the bodies of those they had killed.
The next morning, they left and I went to try to find my wife. There were bodies everywhere. I could not find my wife. It was only after a few days that I found her just beyond the stream. Her skull had been crushed like the others. Her body was already decomposing so I had to bury her where she was killed in a mass grave with other women and children.
In town after town throughout this region of northeastern Congo, in the Doruma area near southern Sudan and the Faradje area 180 miles to the east, it was the same. The LRA attacked people gathered for Christmas feasts, concerts, and services, tying up the men and raping women and children before crushing their skulls. They shot off the legs of children. They took girls away into the bush on a rope. They tried to twist off the heads of two three-year-old girls.
With more than sixteen thousand United Nations peacekeepers stationed in Congo, only two hundred were deployed in LRA-affected areas. In the Haut-Uele district of northeastern Congo where the massacres occurred, fifty villages were attacked in the space of two days, with zero protection from the international community. A terrible tragedy had occurred in response to a failed intervention.
* * *
—
As I read the final troubling paragraphs of Ida’s report, Brody stirred in my arms and began to cry. I held his tiny body against my chest, gently patting his back. His fragility overwhelmed me sometimes. I hated not knowing what was making him hurt, not knowing how to help him feel better. Brody struggled and cried in my arms. Connor looked up from his animals, waiting for my response.
3
BAND-AIDS ON BULLET HOLES
“HOW DEEP ARE the cutbacks?” my board member Ann asked one afternoon a few months after the massacres in Congo.
“They’re deep,” said John, her husband and fellow board member. John had founded Bridgeway Capital Management, an investment firm that donates half of its profits through the work of the Bridgeway Foundation. John leaned in as he spoke. The low sun slashed through the blinds of our meeting room, framing his head in gold. The mood in the room was somber. But John seemed to gather the light.
He was one of the most intentional people I had met, and came from a line of powerful women and extraordinary, open-minded parents. His grandmother was a suffragette; his father prioritized integrity above all else in business; and his mother crossed social barriers her entire life: she was the first woman ever to earn a PhD in religion at Rice University. John’s parents encouraged him to make his own choices about how he engaged with the world. He’d founded an investment company with the mission of preventing genocide because he couldn’t ignore the responsibility inherent in privilege, and refused to look at the world through protective lenses. He faced the hard truths directly, and he had a way of bringing life and light into the toughest situations.
Even now, as he delivered difficult news to the Bridgeway Foundation board members, I could sense him trying to reframe the losses and costs of the current recession as an opportunity.
“We’re going to give less, and that’s going to hurt,” he said. “It’s also an invitation: to make the dollars we can give count the very most. To be completely clear and united about the work we do.”
I felt a wave of dread. On the table in front of me was the binder in which I kept a printout of our current grant portfolio, a roster of urgent and highly worthy causes. And now we would be supporting fewer of them. We needed to be doing more, not less.
Bridgeway was built on the conviction that human security is a right that you’re born into, no matter where. Whether you’re a native of San Antonio, Texas, or Batande, Democratic Republic of Congo, it is your right to live free from fear, free from being terrorized, free from being raped, free from being abducted, free from having your kids stolen.
But the right to human security is not equally protected in the world. When the global community fails to preserve security it affects the poorest of the poor disproportionately. People at the bottom of the development spectrum. The most isolated. The ones who go about their days working hard to make sure their kids have enough to eat and that they can go to sleep under a peaceful sky. The people most threatened by oppressive groups like the LRA. These are the people whose human right to security is routinely violated because the conflicts that threaten the innocent often don’t threaten Western interests.
My eyes were first opened to the complexity of global systems of injustice when I was in my second year of law school at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. In August 1999, there was a devastating earthquake in Turkey. At least seventeen thousand people died, and half a million were left homeless. The following spring, my church in Waco sponsored a one-week mission trip to provide relief near Istanbul. When we arrived, it was clear that a quick drop-in visit wasn’t going to go very far in helping people. The needs were tremendous, and the people doing day-to-day relief work were too few—and too exhausted. I had very little flexibility in my law school program, but when I returned home I asked my professors if I could interrupt my studies to go back to Turkey for another few weeks to support the relief efforts. To my surprise, they agreed.
For several weeks, I ferried across the Bosporus Strait each morning to the side of Istanbul where the earthquake damage was most severe, and crossed back across the water in the evening to sleep. At the ferry crossing, children flocked, selling small items, begging for money. The first morning I crossed, one boy in particular caught my attention. He wore a blue sweatshirt and carried a yellow plastic bag filled with packages of tissues he was selling, little plastic-wrapped pouches meant to go in a pocket or purse. When he grinned, I could see that he had recently lost his top two front teeth. His name was Pilar. He was six years old. I asked him how much for a package of tissues and gave him the money, but told him to keep the tissues so he could sell them to someone else. As I boarded the ferry, I saw a bigger boy come and take his money away. I decided that when I came back across that night, I would be smarter. I would give Pilar food instead of money. That evening, I looked for him and bought him a toasted cheese sandwich. As I walked away I noticed that when he started to take a bite, an older child ran by and snatched it from him. The next day, I bought him another sandwich and a Coke to drink, but this time I sat with him until he had finished his meal. That became our routine each morning when I waited to board the ferry, and each evening when I returned. It was a lesson in presence, in the importance of just being there—to witness, to become aware, to attune to the culture and the strength all around, to learn and absorb without reactively trying to fix something you don’t yet understand, or misapprehending your power or role. Often we look to the easiest ways to help—give money, give food—but presence is also an aspect of giving.
One evening I came home later than usual, after dark, and looked for Pilar. Usually he waited right near the platform and ran up to me, eager to eat and share smiles, but this time I couldn’t find him. I wandered around in the dark, searching for him.
And then I saw him. He was under a tree, asleep, using his yellow plastic bag full of tissue packages as a pillow. That’s when it struck me: he was a street child. I couldn’t believe how utterly naïve I’d been. For the rest of my stay, I began talking to the homeless children, and asking the humanitarian workers I met about Pilar and the many other homeless kids. I learned how dire their situation was. In order not to starve, they were forced to pay off corrupt adults, selling small items to tourists, handing over all of the profit. Many children resorted to sniffing glue—in fact, many were forced to so they could be doped into addiction and compliance. I had come to Turkey to assist with disaster relief, but in trying to do something small to fill one extreme need, I became aware of a deeper—and perpetual, chronic—injustice. I realized how important it is for every person to take responsibility for what happens in the world—and at the same time, how easy it is to discharge our guilt, to do something superficial and think we’re helping in a way that matters. There was nothing wrong in giving money and sandwiches to a little boy. But the larger system of injustice in which he was trapped was allowed to perpetuate.
My work and my passion have taught me it is possible—and necessary—to stand with others to protect the basic rights of freedom withheld from those trapped by systemic injustice or caught in the middle of conflicts like the LRA’s long-running war. To stand for something bigger than oneself, bigger than philanthropy, bigger even than a nation. To come together to stand for justice, and the belief that we are all equal, regardless of where we live. To live with the unshakable certainty that everything we do today matters forever, and that we must use our own freedom to enhance the freedom of others.
I passionately believe in Bridgeway’s mission statement, which says in part: to prevent oppression, genocide, and human rights abuses throughout the world. As I sat in the quiet boardroom that afternoon, it hit me. Since its inception, Bridgeway Capital Management had been committed to creating a world without genocide and stopping crimes against humanity. Meanwhile, Kony was brutally killing entire communities. And what was the humanitarian community—what were we—really doing to stop him?
To Stop a Warlord Page 3