To Stop a Warlord

by Shannon Sedgwick Davis

  * * *

  —

  On the flight home, Laren and I continued to strategize. Collaborating with the Ugandan government on military training still seemed out-of-bounds. But the communications need we could try to fill right away. There were already numerous local leaders working to establish communication systems that would allow villages to share information about LRA attacks in Congo. We hoped to find a way to support and supplement the communications efforts already in place and figure out how to build an Early Warning Network that would help villages communicate with each other about threats in order to prevent attacks. The network could also help communities collectively gather evidence and details about the attacks—the same work that individual communities had been doing in the notebooks we had seen filled with careful handwriting, but that sat on dusty shelves, the information never seeing the light of day. The incidents could be documented in real time, offering proof of the LRA’s atrocities that international bodies would find more credible and harder to dismiss.

  * * *

  —

  In response to discussions with Invisible Children about setting up an early warning communications network, Bridgeway soon received a proposal Invisible Children had sourced from Father Abbé Benoît Kinalegu, a courageous Catholic priest and the president of the Dungu-Doruma Diocesan Commission for Justice and Peace (CDJP) in Congo. He was asking for a small amount of money to add a dozen radios to the existing network of high-frequency, two-way, long-range radios in communities in Congo.

  High-frequency (HF) radios—similar in size and technology to ham radios—could transmit and receive signals across a distance of more than five hundred miles and cost only a tiny fraction of a cell tower. They could also be housed completely inside an existing structure, like a church, with only a small antenna running out, often from the top of a bamboo pole. One of our concerns in creating a communications network was in building something visible that would become a new target for the LRA. We wanted to be sure we didn’t make the communities that housed pieces of the warning network even more vulnerable to retribution and violence. But the HF radios kept a low profile. The whole unit, including the solar panels, could be easily concealed. And the operators could be trained to use a brevity code that would mask the contents of the message. Even if the communications were heard by the LRA, the contents and location of the signal would be obscured. Plus, the network was scalable—it could be expanded over time. We could easily add HF radios to the network and eventually put a radio in a significant number, if not most, of the affected villages. From a financial and logistical perspective, Abbé Benoît’s plan seemed like a no-brainer. And the proposal came from within the vulnerable communities that would operate the network, from the people most affected by the violence and most empowered to find solutions.

  In collaboration with Invisible Children and the dozens of community partners already working on an early warning system, Laren and his colleagues went in search of the first five HF units needed to expand Abbé Benoît’s network. The HF radios were the technology used in World War II and Vietnam, and though they could be found among enthusiasts and hobbyists in the United States, they were no longer used in commercial or military fields there. But in many parts of the world people still used HF radios on their vehicles to communicate with colleagues spread out across long distances in areas without cellphone service.

  Assuming we could find the five complete HF units, the bigger problem came in transporting them. The equipment was bulky and heavy. Each unit included a long antenna connected to a twenty-pound radio pack and a receiver and a microphone, powered by a seventy-pound battery connected to solar panels. You couldn’t just drive a truck across the vast distances and into the remote locations where the units were most needed. The units had to be flown in, which meant chartering a plane or negotiating passage on a UN aircraft.

  * * *

  —

  In late summer, Laren wove through a crowded, dusty market in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo. Music blared among the hundreds of wooden stands where vendors displayed their wares: plastic buckets, bolts of brightly colored fabric, whole goats hung upside down by their feet, warm sodas and beers, skewers of meat, and reused plastic bottles filled with homemade fruit juice. A flock of kids chased after him, calling, “Mzungu, mzungu!”—Swahili for white person—and flashing him a thumbs-up. He found the wooden stand where a vendor who sold Italian leather shoes and other luxury goods imported from Europe was rumored to have a supply of European-made HF radio units. The merchant smiled at Laren and said he did have five units in back. He would sell them for seven thousand dollars apiece. He accepted only cash. There wasn’t time for Laren to call and have the cash wired. He was able to borrow the money from a UN contact, who also helped arrange for the equipment transport. He went back to the small wooden stand with the crocodile and Italian leather shoes, and gave the vendor thirty-five thousand dollars in cash for five HF radio units. As he loaded them onto a truck, he asked the vendor why he sold the unlikely combination of leather shoes and radios. The vendor said that the radios had to be shipped all the way from Italy, and in order to make the most of each shipment he filled each radio container full of Italian leather shoes and belts.

  Laren drove straight to the airport and waited with the HF units until they could be loaded onto a UN aircraft, then he flew with them to Dungu. A few days later when he arrived in Limai, the first community to receive a new HF unit installation, a man was lying on the ground with a gunshot wound to the leg. There had been no way for them to call for help or flag transport, and the wounded man had to wait for more than twelve hours before a motorcycle could be summoned to ferry him to a clinic.

  In October 2010, Laren would email me a picture of the first HF unit installation. A small group of men stand in a circle holding a long bamboo rod they gathered from the bush. Attached to the top of the bamboo rod is the radio antenna that can be raised up during use and pulled back to the ground to prevent its being detected by the LRA. The men hoist the bamboo pole above them. A woman and small child watch from the doorway of a square brick building with a thatched roof. Behind them, the immense green wall of the forest. The men gaze up at the top of the pole as it breaches the tree line.

  The note Laren sent with the picture was brief. We’re in business, he wrote.

  THERE IS A TIME

  David Ocitti

  APRIL CAME, FOUR months since his abduction, and almost everyone in David’s original group was already dead. “How long is this going to go on?” he muttered to his friend Maxwell. “Why don’t we just get out?”

  This was the first time he put the possibility of escape into words. After this, they would try to have quick, furtive exchanges in the dark each night. But there was never enough time to settle on a plan. Still, David felt his conviction gathering. “There’s a time for everything,” he whispered to Maxwell one night. “If it’s our time to die, we’ll die. If it’s not, we’ll live.” Surviving or dying—either way, it was a way out of living like this.

  * * *

  —

  They marched one afternoon in mid-June. It was the hottest day yet. Behind him in line David could hear a baby crying. The baby had been born in captivity. David could hear the baby’s mother trying to comfort him. Hush, baby, hush, baby. They’d been marching all day in the heat without a break. The baby was hungry. He cried louder and louder.

  “Please,” his mother finally called up to the commander. “Can I stop to nurse my baby? He hasn’t eaten all day.”

  “I’ll make him stop crying,” the commander said. He went to the mother and grabbed the baby from her arms. The baby wailed harder. The commander gave the mother a disgusted look. He carried the baby to a nearby tree and began to hit the baby against the trunk. Thud. Thud. When it was over he threw the body into the bushes. He shouted at everyone to keep marching.

  David heard the mother crying beh
ind him on the trail. If even a baby can get killed, he thought, we are all going to be killed. This time running away wasn’t a possibility. It was a necessity. He was certain. Better to die running than to go on each moment fearing and witnessing death. It was time.

  He couldn’t picture when or how he’d make his escape. But he knew he had to try. When they stopped for the night he pulled out his Bible. God, show me what to read, he prayed. He thumbed the pages, feeling for the right spot. He opened the Bible to Ecclesiastes 3:1–8. To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die…A shiver ran up his spine. The time to leave was now.

  * * *

  —

  Early the next morning, a little before sunrise, he whispered to Maxwell, “If it’s our time to die, let us die. But if it’s our time to continue living, let us go now. We can’t stay here.” Then he took off running. He didn’t bother trying to hide as he fled. He just moved as fast as he could. He could hear Maxwell running behind him, and saw a third boy join them, another of the remaining older captives. With every footfall, the mantra drummed in his head: If it’s my time, it’s my time. Gunshots erupted behind them. They raced for the forest at the edge of the clearing. Before David reached the trees, the boy who had joined them fell. He’d been shot at close range. He lay in a heap, motionless. David forced his legs to pump harder. If it’s my time, it’s my time. David reached the trees and looked back. Maxwell was on the ground at the edge of the clearing. He was bleeding from his thigh.

  “Go!” Maxwell yelled. “At least one of us can go.”

  David ran into the trees.

  * * *

  —

  He fled for two days, using the direction of the setting sun to guide him west, toward home. When he dared to stop for a brief rest or to check the position of the sun, he could hear what he thought to be his pursuers. When he climbed a tree to look around, to see if a river or landmark could give him his bearings, he could see the flicker of their movement in the bush. Once, when he was in a valley, following a stream, he was sure he saw the green of their uniforms winding down from a ridge.

  On the second day, as he threaded his way down a steep hill, he heard voices suddenly right behind him. He could hear them talking, the tall grass breaking. If it’s my time, it’s my time, he thought, pushing himself to run.

  He could hear people running behind him. It was rocky terrain this high up, craggy cliffs jutting through the green. Just in front of him the ground seemed to drop off. He was afraid to slow down. He wasn’t aware that he had tripped until he was crashing to the ground, his head knocking against a rock. He got up in a haze, not sure if he had blacked out for a moment or a day. A stick had impaled his left leg when he fell. A fragment of it was still jammed in his calf, just below his knee. He was afraid the wound would bleed more if he pulled the stick out, so he left part of it in his leg and kept running, uncertain if anyone was following him. His whole body hurt. Except for the rasp of his breath as he ran, all was quiet.

  When he heard no sign of anyone on his trail, David permitted himself to stop and rest. He dozed off, then startled awake, voices in the distance. He didn’t know if it was the LRA, but he couldn’t risk letting down his guard. He forced himself to keep running and limping, his nerves jumpy with paranoia and the desperate need to sleep. He came upon a number of paths through the dense forest, but he didn’t dare follow them. Although it was slow going to cut his own trail, it was safer to create a path than to follow an established one. That way, if he heard someone behind him, he would know he was being pursued.

  As darkness gathered his third night on the run, David felt fatigue and despair grip him. He couldn’t tell direction in the dark. He sat on the damp earth, his back against a tree at the edge of a small clearing. When he stopped moving, he could feel nothing but the throbbing of his injured leg. If you want to give up, it’s fine, a voice in his head murmured. You can stop running. He let his eyes close. He wondered how long it would take for death to come, for the pain to disappear. He merged into a state that was not awake or asleep, his mind floating. Then his grandmother’s voice came to him: Don’t be a foolish hunter, she said. His eyes snapped open. Right above him were the stars. The brightest star will guide you home, she had taught him. He looked for latwok, for the many colors it showed when he gazed only at it. He found it. Are you sure? a voice asked. What if fear made his eyes play tricks on him? What if he followed the wrong star? He found the brightest star again and rose to his feet, making his path through the dark in the direction he thought to be home.

  In the morning, the sun came up right behind him. He was still moving west, on his way home.

  Later that morning, the fourth since his escape, David came upon a larger road. A signpost pointed north. Atiak, it read. Atiak was the town north of Pabbo where three major roads met. This was the road that led south, toward home. He was close now, less than twenty miles away. But he couldn’t follow the main road. The LRA traveled the main roads to abduct captives and pillage for supplies. He could be recaptured. Or the Ugandan soldiers who patrolled the roads might mistake him for an LRA member. It was a known tactic the LRA used to ambush the Ugandan military—they’d send a rebel out on the road, pretending to be bad off and seeking help, and then a group of combatants would descend on anyone who stopped to help. Even this close to home, he would have to make his own path.

  * * *

  —

  Late in the afternoon, he reached Pabbo. The wound in his left leg looked infected, part of the stick still jammed into his upper calf. He could feel blood crusted over the side of his face, and the wound on his head was hot to the touch. Children scurried away from him as he limped his way through the village toward his mother’s hut. He could smell the cooking fires, the evening meals. He had eaten only the fruit he could pick on the run. But now that he was within reach of a meal, he didn’t feel relieved. Life went on in the camp. No one welcomed him. No one seemed to recognize him. He couldn’t read people anymore, couldn’t tell what they were thinking. He had grown so used to fear and distrust, to being alone in the world. Even if someone had spoken to him, he would not have known how to reply. It was Pabbo, the same town he had left behind six months ago. But it wasn’t home anymore. It was the place where his life had ended.

  He came to his uncle’s hut first. It was still charred and crumbling from the fires the LRA had set the night of the attack. No one had restored it. The big tree that stood beside it had also been badly burned and was not yet recovered, the bark still black, the limbs without leaves.

  Then he stood outside his mother’s hut. He watched his hand close into a fist and knock. He heard footsteps within. His heart pounded. The door opened. A little girl stood there. An unfamiliar woman’s voice called from the dim interior. “Who is it?”

  “He’s dirty,” the girl said. “He’s got blood all over his head.”

  “Wait,” the girl’s mother said. “Don’t let him in.” She hurried to the door.

  David’s mouth was as dry as dust. He tried to speak his mother’s name, to ask if the strangers knew where she was now. But he was afraid to hear their answer. His voice came out in a stutter. He tried again. Finally he managed to say her name: Pyerina Alum.

  The woman shrugged her shoulders. “Never heard of her,” she said. She pulled her daughter back inside and closed the door quickly.

  14

  IRON LADY FROM TEXAS

  WE SAT UNDER a white, open-walled tent on damp, sagging couches at the Hotel Africana in Kampala, where the whirring electric fans were doing little to cut the heat. Across from Laren and me sat Colonel Walter Ochora, the former Gulu District Chairman (a position similar to governor), now President Museveni’s representative in northern Uganda. He was the largest man I had ever met, easily 350 pounds, and wore a traditional loose, colorful African shirt. His faint black mustache and lamb-chop sideb
urns only exaggerated the expanse of his enormous cheeks, spread even wider by a jolly smile. Laren, who knew Colonel Ochora from his Invisible Children work in Gulu establishing programs to help LRA victims, had already briefed the colonel on our possible collaboration with the Ugandan military.

  I’d thought that in beginning to fill the communication void, in helping villages establish an Early Warning Network and achieve a modicum of safety and protection, we were reaching the peak of our direct action. But the more aware you are, the more deeply you dive, the greater your knowledge—the more responsible you become.

  When we’d met with Uganda’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs in June I’d thought it impossible that we would actually pursue supporting tactical operations against Kony. But in the months that we’d been working on the Early Warning Network, new data was coming in all the time—from the UN and the existing six radios in the network. In June alone there were thirty-one separate reports of violence, resulting in sixty-five civilian abductions and twenty-three civilian deaths. Helping communities communicate with each other about attacks was only a piece of what was needed. The attacks needed to be halted. We’d stopped asking if we should investigate supporting a military intervention. Now we were asking how. What tactical action could private citizens take to stop an atrocity like this? What was legal, what was just, what was right? The legal and ethical implications made my head spin. I’d begun consulting with lawyers to determine whether funding military training for a foreign army was compliant with US laws. If all went well in our meeting today, Ochora would broker a meeting with General Aronda Nyakairima, commander of the defense forces, the head of the Ugandan military.