by Opiyo Oloya
The Context of Stockholm Syndrome
The phenomenon of Stockholm Syndrome is named after a 1973 Swedish incident in which four bank employees were taken hostage by an escaped convict, and held for five and a half days in a bank vault (Fitzpatrick, 2009). In time, the hostages reportedly developed an attachment to the hostage takers, going as far as asking authorities to treat them with leniency (Burgess & Regehr, 2010, 43).
The concept of Stockholm Syndrome has been tremendously influential over the last three decades in offering explanations for the complex motivations that propel hostages to bond with their captors instead of being repelled by them. Stockholm Syndrome has been used to explain the battered-spouse syndrome in which the victim stays in the relationship and even shields the abuser from prosecution (Dutton & Painter, 1981; Ehrlich, 1989), the concentration-camp victims who idolize the guards who badly mistreat them (Bettelheim, 1943; Eisner, 1980), cult members who faithfully follow the leader regardless of potential harm to themselves (Mills, 1979), and many unrelated abductions where the victims later act in a manner that appears to benefit their abductors. The most famous of these abductions, familiar to North Americans but by no means the complete list worldwide, include the cases of Patricia Hearst,2 Elizabeth Smart,3 Shawn Hornbeck,4 and Jaycee Lee Dugard.5
More recently, notwithstanding its Eurocentric roots, attempts have been made to use elements of Stockholm Syndrome to explain the experiences of child combatants in the civil conflicts in Liberia (Wessells, 2006, 66), Sierra Leone (Richards, 2002; Denov & Maclure, 2006, 79; Junger, 2000), and Uganda (Barry, 2006). The parallel drawn between Western hostages and their captors, on the one hand, and child combatants and their commanders, on the other, hinges on the observation that despite the mistreatment they suffer and the harsh conditions of war, child combatants are loyal to their abductors to the exclusion of all other considerations including their own safety and well-being (Richards, 2002). K. Peters and P. Richards (1998a, 1998b) describe Sierra Leonean child combatants who fought in the 1991 civil conflict as ‘heedless of danger’ (1998b, 183) in following the orders of commanders. Similar bonding was observed between child combatants and their commanders in the Liberian civil conflict, prompting M.G. Wessells (2006) to speculate that this may ‘reflect a psychological process called Stockholm Syndrome, wherein captives identify with their captors.’ Wessells further notes:
That their captors, who could kill them, spare their lives, creates a strong sense of gratitude in the captives. Isolated from the outside world, they come to see their captors as good people or even as saviours, forging bonds of identification with them. A similar process may affect child soldiers who recognise that the armed group could kill them at any moment but who see particular commanders as having saved them. The resulting gratitude can create a strong sense of loyalty and obedience to the commanders. (66)
However, to understand why Stockholm Syndrome has limited usefulness in explaining the relationships between Acholi child abductees and their LRM/A commanders, it is imperative to examine the original context of the syndrome and subsequent interpretations of it. The original incident began on the morning of 23 August, 1973, when a desperate convict named Jan-Erik Olsson attempted to rob Sveriges Kreditbankens in Norrmalmstorg, Stockholm. During the incident, which lasted almost six days, Olsson held four bank employees as hostages. They were Elizabeth Oldgren, twenty-one; Kristin Enmark, twenty-three; Sven Safstrom, twenty-five; and Brigitta Lundblad, thirty-one.6 At the demand of the hostage taker, a second convict, Clark Olofsson, was later rushed to the scene to help with the negotiations. As the ordeal dragged on, Kristin Enmark, one of the hostages, told police negotiators that she felt safe with Olsson but worried that police might escalate the situation, a comment she repeated on the second day of the drama when she spoke by phone with Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme (Buzacott, 1991, 41). Enmark chided the prime minister for not conceding to the demands of the robbers.7 After almost 131 hours of drama which was broadcasted live on Swedish television, the crisis ended when police drilled a hole through the flat above the bank vault and piped in noxious but non-lethal gas. The two suspects surrendered almost immediately and, as they were being led away, Enmark, who was on a stretcher, reportedly smiled and called out to Olsson, saying, ‘We’ll see each other again.’8 Her behaviour was interpreted by criminologist Nils Bejerot, who had been helping police with negotiations as well as providing psychological context to the drama on live television, as a survival mechanism that the hostage deploys in order to appease the hostage taker (Bejerot, 1974). He coined the term Stockholm Syndrome to describe the behaviour.
In its original usage, therefore, Stockholm Syndrome is a condition defined by positive feelings that develop between the perpetrator and hostage or victim in hostage-like circumstances where the stakes are either life or death – for the hostage (Lynn & Rhue, 1994; Strentz, 1980; Symonds, 1975). In explaining this contradictory behaviour, D.L.R. Graham, E. Rawlings, and N. Rimini (1988) propose that, for Stockholm Syndrome to be present, the condition must be attended by: (a) a perceived threat to survival and the belief the captor will carry out the threat; (b) the abductee’s perception of some small act of kindness from the abductor within the context of terror; (c) isolation from perspectives other than that of the abductor; and (d) a perceived inability to escape. Furthermore, M.J. Schabracq (2007) suggests that victims stay with their abductors not because they have bonded with them but because ‘by adopting this mindset they can better predict what the captors are up to’ (66). F.M. Ochberg and D.A. Soskis (1982) believe that the positive rapprochement between the abductee and the abductor is established slowly, but is set by the third day. The strength of the bond between the two is dependent on the intensity of the experience, its duration, the dependence of the abductee on the abductor for survival, and the psychological distance between the abductee and the authorities.
But, in attempting to link Stockholm Syndrome to LRM/A abductees, D. Barry (2006) claims that control over child combatants is exerted through ‘apocalyptic spiritualism,’ which gives rebel leader Joseph Kony ‘Stockholm Syndrome powers over the young boys he has abducted into his army’ (Barry, blog, 2006). The claim of apocalyptic spiritualism suggests that Joseph Kony and the LRM/A has, for example, end-of-world tendencies similar to those of Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple in Guyana, where members committed mass suicides by drinking poisoned cola in November 1978 (Chidester, 2003; Klineman, Butler, & Conn, 1980), and David Koresh and the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas, whose members perished in a huge fire on 19 April 1993 rather than submit to arrest by U.S. federal officials (Bromley & Silver, 1995; Hall, 1995; Hall, 2002).
This explanation, like many others attempting to apply Stockholm Syndrome to explain the relationships between child combatants and their commanders in various civil conflicts in Africa generally and specifically in northern Uganda, is of limited usefulness at best. First of all, Stockholm Syndrome was originally conceived to explain hostage situations mostly in confined spaces such as a house, an airplane, or a train. In this scenario, both the hostage and captor understand that the conditions in which they find themselves will last until a resolution occurs and, on the basis of this assessment, mutually develop the ground rules under which to operate to avoid escalating the crisis. This may explain why Kristin Enmark, the sympathetic hostage in the Stockholm crisis, was upset with the authorities, whom she perceived as attempting to escalate the situation by violating the rules that had been established between the hostages and the captors. Her vantage point as a hostage placed within the same room as the captors gave her the advantage of being able to ‘read’ the captors, and, on these grounds, she reached the conclusion that the captors would not be dangerous so long as they were not provoked. Swedish authorities thought otherwise.
Second, as happened in the original Stockholm crisis, the drama generally plays out within several hours to a few days, enough time for Stockholm Syndrome to develop. Throughout the ordeal, the interplay bet
ween the abductee and the abductor is underwritten by fear. The bond that forms between the abductor who holds the power of life and death and the unfortunate abductee is symbiotically driven to benefit both the abductee and the abductor in some way. We could surmise that the abductee needs to survive until he or she can escape or be rescued, while the abductor’s goal is to achieve his or her demand or satisfy certain needs.
The same, however, cannot be said of the LRM/A abductees who have undergone transformation into CI soldiers. For one thing, these children traverse and operate in vast geographical areas of forests and jungles spanning several countries, which offer far more opportunities for escape. Also, the LRM/A abductees are kept for much longer periods, from several months to more than a decade. On average, my informants spent five years with the LRM/A, far longer than the hostages in Western countries whose behaviour in captivity has been explained using the concept of Stockholm Syndrome. Further limiting Stockholm Syndrome as a viable explanation for abductees’ contradictory behaviour is the 8 per cent rule proposed by Federal Bureau of Investigation psychologist D. Fuselier (1999). According to Fuselier, only 8 per cent of hostages develop the condition described as Stockholm Syndrome. Fuselier adds that ‘those occasions where the Stockholm syndrome actually occurs remain the exception to the rule’ (Fuselier, 1999, 22). If we apply Fuselier’s 8 per cent rule, we cannot explain the thousands of child combatants who operate under the command of the LRM/A, bonding with their commanders, following orders during battles and raids, carrying out extremely dangerous cross-border assignments, and returning to the main base camp wherever it is established.
I learned, for example, from several of my informants that desertion often came about because the circumstances changed or because of new factors that made it imperative for the child combatant to leave. In one case, a child combatant who had become a mother deserted the LRM/A when the father of her child threatened to take the child away from her. She explained that she walked away because, had she remained within the LRM/A, she and her children could have been killed, thereby wiping out her family lineage. The reason for leaving the rebel organization, in other words, did not arise from a desire to quit working for the LRM/A or even from a need for self-protection from the LRM/A. Rather, her motivation came from an Acholi cultural context in which being childless is considered one of the worst possible calamities that can befall a healthy woman of childbearing age (Ocitti, 1973, 27–8; p’Bitek, 1966, 105). Her action is understandable when viewed in the cultural context of fear of becoming childless, itself further evidence of cultural retention despite her being conditioned to work for the LRM/A.
Ringo Otigo decided to return home after his team ran out of food while in northern Uganda and he himself was unsuccessful in rejoining the main LRM/A in Sudan. A similar circumstance forced another group led by Can Kwo Obato to return home after trying unsuccessfully to cross a big river in order to join the main LRM/A in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In all these cases, the decision to desert the LRM/A was not arrived at because of a sudden opportunity to escape, as the Stockholm Syndrome would require us to assume; instead, leaving the LRM/A evolved out of unforeseen factors that enabled the CI soldiers to break out of what I. Martin-Baro refers to as the ‘stigmatized identity’ (Martin-Baro, 1994, 132) that the LRM/A had forced them to accept.
The CI soldier’s personal escape from a stigmatized identity, in which he or she is forced to perform certain tasks, including rape and pillage, and to adopt the persona of a killer in a culture that abhors killing, I suggest, is possible because the LRM/A manipulates the children to make these actions appear normal through liminal repurposing of Acholi culture. But, as I explain in greater detail below, because the child combatants also retain their original, desired identity, which was formed within the cultural freedom of their villages prior to their abduction, the possibility always exists that this identity may re-emerge when circumstances change.
Towards a Theory of Liminal Repurposing of Acholi Culture
As I develop the idea here, repurposing of culture presumes a deliberate manipulation of culture from its intended use in order to achieve another end. This subversion of culture exploits well-understood cultural norms, turning them inside out, reinterpreting them, and eroding established meanings while giving new meanings that serve the intended purpose. Implicitly, the concept of repurposing culture acknowledges that children’s initial world view is formed within the family, community, and shared culture in which they live. Their understanding of the world is received through the community that sanctions, promotes, and prohibits certain activities (Harkness & Super, 1991; Nsamenang, 1992; Weisner, 1984). Shared culture, defined as ‘a set of common understanding manifest in act and artifact’ (Bohannan, 1995, 47), contributes to how individuals bond within a defined cultural space. Culture, anthropologist Clifford Geertz reminds us, should be viewed as a set of ‘control mechanisms’ that is malleable enough to assume different patterns (Geertz, 1973, 45–6). To Geertz, culture is a process by which humans make meaning of who they are as persons and the world around them. In this sense, culture is seen as the genesis of agency, which I define as the ability to mobilize cultural resources in the pursuit of personal production and action in the actualization of who the child imagines himself or herself to be.
Viewed thus, culture is interactive in allowing the individual to adjust continually his or her sense of self, individuality, and identity on the basis of the prevailing social conditions and environment, and in relation to those around him or her. This process of identity formation is possible because culture, as A. Swidler (1986) argues, ‘consists of such symbolic vehicle of meanings, including beliefs, ritual practices, art forms, and ceremonies, as well as informal cultural practices such as language, gossips, stories, and rituals of daily life’ (273). For Swidler, culture furnishes the child with the ‘tool kit of resources’ from which the individual can ‘construct strategies of action’ (273). Culture, moreover, provides the child with the ingredients for defining the specificity of his/her identity within a community. For instance, Miya Aparo, being the oldest girl in the family, assumed many of the household responsibilities at a very early age: ‘You would return from school, often there was no water in the house, and you needed to grind millet on the milling stone because there were not as many milling machines as there are today. We all had to pitch in to mill the millet.’
In the context of the LRM/A war, abducted children still performed many of the familiar cultural activities they grew up with, like grinding millet, collecting water, and eating communally. The difference was that they were also now trained to fight in a vicious war in which many were killed, wounded, and traumatized. This ‘normal abnormality’ is made possible through the process in which the LRM/A forces child abductees to undergo the rebranding of the mind, a retooling of previously held cultural ideas, and introduction into a new thought process within the repurposed cultural space.
In developing the concept of liminality to describe the transformation of child abductees into child combatants, I borrow from Victor Turner’s The Ritual Process (1995) in which he describes living with and observing the Ndembu tribe of Zambia perform various rituals. Turner, who builds on the idea of transformation of the individual first proposed by Arnold Van Gennep in Rites of Passage (1960), likens these rituals to rites of passage for individuals within Ndembu society. To illustrate his notion of liminality, Turner describes installation rites of the Kanongesha of the Ndembu during which the chief-elect ‘dies from his commoner state’ (100). On the eve of his ascension to the new leadership role, the chief-elect goes through the rite of Kumukindyila, ‘which means literally to “speak evil or insulting words against him”’ (100). First he must be reduced to nothing before being elevated to the chieftaincy. The chief-elect is then subjected to insults, taunts, and humiliation from his would-be subjects. Turner explains what happens next: ‘After this harangue, any person who considers that he has been wronged by the chief-elect in the
past is entitled to revile him and most fully express his resentment, going into as much detail as he desires. The chief-elect during all of this, has to sit silently with downcast head, the “pattern of all patience” and humility … Many informants have told me that “a chief is just like a slave (ndung’u) on the night before he succeeds”’ (Turner, 1995, 101).
The predicament of the freshly abducted Acholi child, I hasten to point out, is far removed from that of the Ndembu chief-elect in that, through the liminal process of transformation, the child abductee is emotionally, psychologically, and physically reduced to nothing. Any similarity between the two cases is limited to the fact that both involve transitional phases from one status to another; through culturally sanctioned rituals, the chief-elect is transformed into a chief, and through the harshest possible torture and pain, the child abductee is transformed into a child combatant. In either instance, there is a foreboding that life can never be the same again. The chief-elect can never again be the commoner that he was before his initiation, while the child abductee is transformed through liminal processes into a child combatant operating within the repurposed culture.