by Opiyo Oloya
At that moment a wave of anger overwhelmed me, making me cry. I said, ‘First I was grievously injured, and now you want to treat me, what for? Better to kill me outright.’ The doctor quietly told me two things. He said, ‘Boy, here nobody cares about you, if you are begging to die, you will be killed this very moment. You should thank God that you are still able to drag yourself on your buttocks, perhaps your wounds will heal.’ Then he fell silent, never repeating anything else. I took the drug he gave me, and then I began cutting banana barks, putting them on the fire and then placing them over my body.
The following morning, four children were discovered dead, having succumbed to their wounds from the beating of the previous day. The doctor again pointed out what Ringo already knew: ‘That was when the doctor spoke to me again, saying, “Boy, yesterday, did I not tell you so? I told you to be thankful that you were able to drag yourself. Look at those who could not take it any more. Here, if you focus on being killed, then you will be killed, nobody cares. You have seen how a chicken is slaughtered, no? Here the death of a person is no different from a chicken’s; at least a chicken is killed when a visitor comes, and is eaten. Here nobody cares about the death of a person.”’
Ringo’s budding self-reliance would prove crucial in the next few weeks when the LRM/A commanders chose to march hundreds of kilometres to Aruu inside Sudan. The long trek was physically taxing for any able-bodied adult, but for many of the abducted children, who were already weighed down with big loads on their heads and who lacked proper nutrition while nursing serious body wounds from the numerous beatings, it was fatal. At least a dozen children, including two of Ringo’s relatives who could not walk any more, were clubbed to death before his very eyes. When the large party stopped to rest at the mouth of a river, the officers asked children unable to walk to step forward. Ringo hung back, his instinct for self-preservation fully deployed: ‘They called out to any one who was badly off and could not walk to step forward. I decided that I would not step forward this time; however bad I felt, I would not get up. Seeing people being hacked with machetes, speared with bayonets, beaten with hideous looking sticks, and at time times whacked with an axe on the back of the head, made me resolve to hang tough, never to step forward. If I was going to die, I would die walking. I never stepped forward.’
Friendship on the Long Walk to Aruu Camp, Sudan
For many of the abductees, surviving the cruel transformation into child combatants involved finding a morsel of friendship amidst intense suffering, violence, and death. These moments of humanity and friendship afforded them some semblance of dano adana, human personhood. For Ringo, a genuine friendship seemed to develop between him and the doctor who treated him after the severe beating. As a senior officer with the LRM/A, the doctor was able to fend off any further attempts at mistreatment of Ringo. In some ways, he seemed to assume the role of a father figure for him. He ordered other boys to help with Ringo’s bath and attend to his wounds. The doctor also ensured that Ringo got regular doses of antibiotics, administered through needles, to ensure that his wounds did not become infected.
A sure sign of the strength of the new relationship came when Ringo was afforded a luxury that other children did not have, hot tea:
The doctor had a bag in which he kept some sugar. He instructed his escort, telling him, ‘You go and make some tea and give it to the boy to drink.’ He came and prepared hot tea, one cup. I drank that. Sweat began pouring down my body. We stayed. When we woke up in the morning, I found my body stiff but I felt strong enough to walk. That morning, the doctor asked, ‘Boy, how do you feel?’ I replied, ‘I am here, I don’t feel too badly now.’ I was afraid of what I had seen happen with my own eyes and I was afraid to tell him how I really felt. I responded with that simple statement: I am here, I don’t feel too badly, I can walk. That morning, he gave me two more needles, and we began walking.
Despite his hesitation in trusting the doctor, Ringo had a growing sense of loyalty to him. On the long march through the arid desert of southern Sudan, the doctor entrusted Ringo with a jerry-can full of water. Ringo Otigo almost lost his life attempting to protect the water from another LRM/A officer who wanted it:
I walked along with the water; the water almost got me killed. Someone started beating me, demanding the water, and I said, ‘Look, this water does not belong to me. The person who gave me the water made it clear that should I give it to someone, I would be killed here in the bush.’ I said, ‘This is not my water.’ Still, I was beaten up, and my hand stabbed with a bayonet, the scar is right here. I was holding tight to the lid of the jerry-can so the soldier stabbed my hand, telling me to let go. ‘This is not my water, I was simply ordered to carry it.’ At that moment, the owner of the water showed up, and caught the soldier beating me, and said, ‘You, why are you beating the boy? Do you know who gave him the water?’
The soldier was arrested, and taken to be beaten. Ringo, meanwhile, was now asked to walk with the senior officers for fear that the soldier who was beaten might carry out a revenge attack. By the time the caravan arrived at Aruu camp a few days later, Ringo Otigo seemed on the cusp of being absorbed into the LRM/A. What was left now was formal induction through the ritual of moo yaa and military training.
In Aruu, Ringo was allocated to serve under his officer-doctor friend, who was part of ‘Control Altar,’ the LRM/A high command set in Kony’s compound. He was duly registered the following morning as a new arrival, and began training almost immediately. The formal induction into the LRM/A involving the moo yaa ceremony was conducted a few days after Ringo arrived. The ceremony was a crucial step in becoming a member of the LRM/A, and so Ringo paid close attention:
During the purification ceremony, you took off your clothes, remaining bare-chested, and a gun [was] handed to you, before you stepped forward to be anointed. There were lines of people singing. The controller yard took some water, oil and a rock, and walked towards you, and circled you three times, put some water, placed the stone in the oil, then poured water on top, and then put the mixture on your body … The stone was placed in the bottle, water added, and a string tied at the mouth, a plastic bottle. The ends of the string were tied together and then hung around your neck.
During the rituals, only the controller yard spoke, saying, ‘Today, you are being anointed with oil in front of the sacred home of Kony, and beginning today, you are a soldier for Kony, not anyone else.’ This was repeated on the next person, and the next, until everyone was done.
After the moo yaa purification, the abductees were now considered part of the LRM/A and were expected to apply themselves fully to the training regimen. Ringo’s career path with the rebels came as a result of a casual conversation with his benefactor, the doctor. Ringo recalled the conversation:
The officer who picked me from the lot of new arrivals was a doctor in the camp. He asked me, saying, ‘Young boy, did you attend school?’
I said, ‘I attended school.’
He asked, ‘To what grade did you attend?’
I said, ‘Grade Six.’
He asked again, ‘Can you listen to the BBC?’
I replied, ‘I can listen.’
In the evening, he brought a radio and turned it on. He said, ‘Listen to what is being said on BBC, then tell me.’
After the BBC newscast ended, I told him what was said on the bulletin. He said, No problem. ‘When the opportunity comes for further training, I will send you for it.’ That was all he said, and that ended the exchange. That was the only time he spoke to me about it.
The conversation with the doctor about whether Ringo could understand the BBC newscast was a major turning point for the child abductee. Though at first fearful that he may have overexposed himself by demonstrating his grasp of the English language and, therefore, could be considered a prime candidate for escape, Ringo soon learned that he was going to be sent to Khartoum for further training as dakta mony (war doctor). His status as welo (visitor), which he retained for the first few week
s of his arrival in Aruu, had slowly changed to that of latin paco (child of the home). His new identity was being built around the people in the rebel camp. This was his new home, and the doctor’s family was his new family. He was on his way to becoming a full member of the LRM/A.
Dakta Mony (War Doctor)
In Khartoum, Ringo discovered that he was being trained to become not an actual doctor but rather a medic with knowledge of treating war wounds and administering certain drugs. He and four other trainees lived in Kony’s official residence. Food was plentiful, and they had good beds to sleep on. Life generally was much better than in the bush and even at Aruu camp. The students travelled everyday from the house to the medical clinic where they were trained by Sudanese who spoke mostly Arabic intermixed with bits of English. They were taught to recognize different drugs, what they were for and how to administer them. The trainees also learned how to communicate with patients, how to find out what was wrong with them and make prescriptions. They were taught how to remove shrapnel and bullets from wounds, how to splinter broken bones, and how to administer first aid to those grievously wounded in battle.
A different dilemma now confronted the trainees, who were generally well treated and not as closely watched by the LRM/A as the other abductees were. Should they try to escape from Khartoum? As Ringo put it, ‘beatings and other mistreatments were unlikely. The way it looked, I had been accepted as part of the rebel group in the bush.’ Besides, escape had its own risks and dangers. There were a number of factors to be taken into account, the main one being the inability to find one’s way back to Uganda. There was also a language barrier because none of the trainees spoke Arabic. This would have reduced their ability to ask for basic directions, food, and shelter.
As well, southern Sudan was hostile territory for the LRM/A. The geopolitics of the day that created an alliance between, on the one hand, the LRM/A and the Khartoum government of Omar al-Bashir, and, on the other, between the Sudan People’s Liberation Army and the Kampala government of President Yoweri Museveni, meant that the LRM/A was at war with the SPLM/A. In a curious case of ‘your enemy is my friend,’ the national governments of Uganda and Sudan each sponsored and harboured rebels fighting the other, with Uganda supporting the SPLM/A and Sudan aiding the LRM/A. The LRM/A rebels, as we saw in chapter 2, referred to the SPLM/A simply as the ‘Dinka’3 and fought frequently with them. Former LRM/A child combatants had deep respect for the Dinkas’ fighting prowess, and often spoke of avoiding contact with them whenever possible.
For Ringo and his colleagues, this meant that the idea of escape had to factor in the possibility not only of being discovered by the LRM/A but also of running straight into the LRM/A’s mortal enemy, the Dinka. He recalled a story of six abductees who attempted to escape from Aruu camp. The escapees had not gone far when they ran into the Dinka and were captured. Four eventually escaped while two were immediately executed by the Dinka. On returning back to their barracks in Aruu, the four would-be escapees said that they had gone into the forest to hunt and collect a wild spinach-like vegetable called adyegi for cooking, and had encountered the Dinka. The rescue platoon, assembled to pursue the Dinka, found that the two captives had already been killed, disembowelled, and left near the forest path. In the end, Ringo decided that the risks of escaping far outweighed the benefits. As he put it, ‘now I had to focus and work hard at my job so that, God willing, I could survive.’
As dakta mony, Ringo’s job entailed accompanying expeditionary forces on field operations. His responsibility was mainly to care for the sick and wounded, but he always carried an assault rifle and occasionally engaged in firefights: ‘The first time we came [to Uganda] and turned around, returned to base. Again, I was assigned; we came back to Uganda all the way to Kitgum. On that trip, we engaged the army in a fierce firefight on Lugaa road; many people were injured. I was asked to accompany the wounded to Sudan, and we went back. Forty six people were wounded. Some soldiers were selected among those to return to Sudan.’
Back in Sudan, Ringo was respected by the rank and file as dakta mony and given considerable prestige as a promising young officer. His daily duty at the sickbay was seeing the sick, prescribing medications, and attending to the wounded. Once or twice he treated one of the captured Aboke girls. The routine of life in the rebel camp was broken every so often when new abductees arrived with wounds and blisters from the long march from Uganda and had to be attended to immediately. He spent most of his spare time in his hut, listening to the radio or simply resting.
The LRM/A senior officers felt that Ringo should be given a wife to cook and care for him. Ringo was sixteen or seventeen at the time. However, he declined to take the proffered companion and, for his taciturn attitude, was given some beatings. He nonetheless preferred the beatings to taking a wife and essentially lied to the officers, telling them that he could not afford to have a wife at the time because he could not provide for her, much less dress her properly. ‘I cannot stay with a woman without providing her with a dress to wear,’ he told them. But, according to Ringo, the real reason for refusing to live with the girl was because she had recently been widowed after her husband was killed in a battle with the UPDF. Still steeped in Acholi beliefs about vengeance spirits and the idea that misfortunes happen for a reason, Ringo decided that he could not risk his good fortune by living with a woman whose life had been crossed by ill luck. He explained it this way: ‘Essentially, I had difficulty with taking a woman whose husband was no longer there – she should not be the first to know my manhood [have intercourse with me], and should not be the first woman to live with me. My reservation came from knowing that the woman’s husband was shot and killed, and the thought of taking over was something I could not do. My fear was that what happened to her husband could also happen to me because women come with different luck. That’s why I refused her.’
Ringo clearly linked his refusal to take the widow for a wife to Acholi teachings that he had heard as a young boy growing up in the village, teachings that now guided how he constructed his new persona as an LRM/A child combatant:
That was in keeping with what I had heard much earlier while still at home, free of any problem, something elders would say, namely, that when travelling, particularly when going to the bush, say when a big hunt was called the following day, and everyone had been appropriately informed today about the hunt, there were certain rituals you, as a head of a house, were not allowed to perform. You could receive injuries should you perform them. That is, when you were married when you were going to the bush, you must not have intercourse with your wife. As well, there were certain foods that you were forbidden from eating when going on a hunt, such as sour vegetables. That I had heard.
In the bush, Ringo Otigo had retained the cultural identity formed in his village prior to abduction, and he would not take a woman already widowed and likely dogged by misfortune. It would not be long before he returned to his ancestral home where his original, desired identity would clash with his stigmatized identity as a CI soldier.
We Have Done Our Part
The chain of events that led to Ringo’s eventual departure from the bush started sometime in 2000 when he accompanied another LRM/A expeditionary force to northern Uganda. This was his third trip from the LRM/A base in southern Sudan to northern Uganda and, as it turned out, his last expedition. The previous expeditions had seen the LRM/A take a number of casualties whom Ringo treated on the road back to Sudan. One of the goals of the new expedition was to raid shopping centres for medicine and food to be brought back to Sudan. But these trips were becoming more perilous as the UPDF monitored the movements of the LRM/A. Meanwhile, Dinka militias in southern Sudan were also becoming more menacing to LRM/A soldiers, often tracking them down and killing them. The LRM/A was feeling pressure from all sides, but the raid on the shopping centre went ahead anyway. According to Ringo, it did not go as planned: ‘On this trip, we passed near the foothill of Ogili Hill in Kitgum. From there, the group went to loot the c
entre in Pajule. While looting the centre, a battle ensured with the [UPDF] army, and seventeen people were injured. With seventeen wounded, I was assigned to go care for them at the sickbay near Agago River.’
As time went by, with months turning into years and food supplies running low, all but six wounded soldiers got better and returned to Sudan. Ringo decided to shift base to Palabek, not far from Kitgum town. He was the most senior officer in the group and his decision could not be questioned. He had shown good leadership to his men, who now depended on him to lead them to safety. To avoid exposing their presence to the UPDF and the villagers, Ringo and the six wounded rebel soldiers shifted bases often, moving from one area to another, dodging possible UPDF traps.
During one such relocation, an LRM/A team from Sudan arrived at the sickbay where Ringo’s group had been stationed, and found it empty. After searching for them for a while, the team returned to Sudan, leaving Ringo and his six wounded men behind. Until that point, Ringo and his men had been relying on food taken from gardens in nearby villages. The group also established a relationship with some of the villagers with whom Ringo bartered salt for food. But, as the salt supply ran low, it became harder to obtain food. One day, a peasant came across the footprints left behind by Ringo’s team as they dug up sweet potatoes to augment their fast dwindling food supply. The peasant notified the UPDF, which set up an ambush for the team. The army pounced when Ringo’s team, now weakened by hunger and isolation, returned to steal more sweet potatoes for food. In the fierce exchange of fire, two LRM/A young combatants were wounded, one sustaining a broken leg while the other was shot in the arm. Ringo’s team quickly retreated with the wounded while the UPDF gave chase. In a cat-and-mouse game, the team hid their wounded in a cave, doubled back inside the UPDF circle, and ended up spending the night literally next to the UPDF detachment camp. As team leader, Ringo knew the situation had become dire: ‘Early the next morning, we crossed the road and returned to the cave where we had left the two colleagues. We took them and crossed the Agago River. We came and camped between the Aswa River and Agago. We stayed there for a while. We would send civilians to get us food, and they did.’