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

by Opiyo Oloya

  Miya Aparo, 16 July 2008, Gulu

  The above comment, made by Miya Aparo as we wrapped up our interview on a hot afternoon in Gulu town, provides a nuanced alternative to the popular view – perpetuated by field reports and studies (e.g., Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, 2001, 2004, 2008) – that CI soldiers are victims pure and simple. At many levels, the comment flies in the face of often graphic depictions of children as helpless war victims with horrific war-related injuries and mutilations, drug addictions, and sexually transmitted infections, to say nothing of emotional scars from the many other inhuman indignities they suffered in the war.1 These painful images of CI soldiers as victims of war have been especially effective in mobilizing popular opinion against the exploitation of children as combatants in civil conflicts around the globe. They have also prodded the UN, world leaders, and state policy makers to enact laws that make it illegal to use children in war, and to take action in enforcing the rights of children before courts tasked with investigating war criminality and atrocities.2

  However, the narratives of returning CI soldiers as hapless and helpless child victims of war, some of which border on what A. Honwana (2006) refers to as ‘exaggerated narratives of victimization’ (15), have overshadowed the complexity of the coping strategies that child combatants employ in order to survive war. For those in Western society eager to express shock that children can be used in such an horrendous manner, in such horrific settings, CI soldiers become the focus of our collective sympathy, victims upon whom we can shower our love and at the same time turn into heroic figures. In essence, by taking this approach, we lose a fundamental recognition of the capacity of CI soldiers for growth in the face of adversity, for adapting to new situations, for fostering resilient selves such as when they ‘construct their identities and develop their lives within the network of these dehumanizing relations’ (Martin-Baro, 1996, 125).

  When I met her in Gulu, Miya Aparo, like the other former CI soldiers, was on the path to repair, to a better image of herself in Acholi civilian society, where she had a new-found voice as a community counsellor for other child combatants who, like her, had returned home from the bush. However, in talking to Miya, it seemed as though the main challenge she faced in returning to civilian society was not forgetting war and the violence associated with it. To the contrary, she still had vivid memories of war, and told of her participation in it as if it happened the day before the interview. She and the other former CI soldiers seemed to accept that war was a part of their life experiences, something they could not forget, unlearn, or let go of. Her principle struggle, rather, seemed to be in learning how to cope with a society that did not understand her and her colleagues from the war. All spoke sadly, even bitterly, about their reception back into civilian society. Rejection by family and by a society that viewed their former lives as stigmatized posed huge social and psychological barriers that many felt they had to overcome. Said Miya, ‘For this reason, my children do not have a clan, they do not have extended family, I am now their father, aunt, and whoever else, all rolled into me.’ Similarly, Ringo Otigo recalled the hostility he experienced from the community, ‘The way people looked at me – truth be told, people talk too much and we all have different intentions – when I returned home was not always with good intentions, especially neighbours whose homes were nearby.’

  Indeed, in this concluding chapter, I explore the idea that for many former LRM/A CI soldiers, dwoogo paco, translated as ‘returning home,’ expresses the deeply held desire to return to their ancestral homes. It is the place where ancestral kith and kin have lived over a period of time, and often it is where abila pa kwaro (shrine of the ancestors) is located (Ocitti, 1973, 13). It is at these shrines that people offer prayers for the welfare and well-being of family members as they travel away from home, asking the spirits of the ancestors to protect them and give them good fortune until they return safely.

  I further suggest that it is critical for community providers (educators, social workers, policy makers, resettlement workers, community leaders, and the like) who are helping to reintegrate returning CI soldiers to recognize, support, and nurture the incredible personal resourcefulness that surviving former child combatants used as protective factors to overcome adversities of war (Werner, 2000; Werner & Smith, 1992; West, 2000). I also suggest that, as part of the process of returning home, Acholi cultural practices that survived the war ought to be revived to support and encourage former child combatants to reclaim their desired identities even as they shed their aggressive and violent stigmatized war identities. In this sense, dwoogo paco reverses the process of liminal repurposing of culture by which CI soldiers were forced to live as soldiers.

  Kic ii Ogo (Honey in the Hollow Trunk of a Tree)

  The Acholi phrase kic ii ogo expresses the possibility of overlooking or forfeiting something good because of its appearance. The inexperienced honey hunter who pays little attention to the bees hovering around a tree may not realize that rich honey is inside the hollow trunk. For my informants, and I suspect for many other CI soldiers who were abducted by the LRM/A, the years of precarious wandering in the bush and the horrendous violence to which they were subjected, and in which they participated, were bearable only because of the hope of dwoogo paco. Embedded within the notion of return was the idealized dream of a welcoming, loving, and supportive family and community waiting to reunite with the long-lost child; this dream became a source of hope in the midst of despair, constructing resilience in moments of grave self-doubt. As Jola Amayo put it, ‘for the first six years, all I could think about was home.’ Similarly, the thought that ‘children my age are at school and here I am wasting away’ prompted Payaa Mamit to embark on an ill-fated attempt to escape that almost got her killed by pursuing LRM/A.

  The hope of returning home seemed to allow the abductees to sharpen their culturally endowed gift of resilience in the face of traumatic setbacks during the transitional period in the bush. These qualities have been observed and studied in different cultures and circumstances, such that children who bounce back from adversities to become well-adjusted adults are said to have resilient qualities (Antonovsky, 1987; Garbarino, Dubrow, Kostelny, & Pardo, 1992; Garmezy, 1985; Garmezy, 1991; Luthar & Zigler, 1991; Masten, Best, & Garmezy, 1990; Safyer, 1994). More recent studies have sought to link resilience to favourable outcomes among children confronting severe adversities or deprivation (Luthar, 2006; Masten, 2004; Masten & Coatsworth, 1998; Masten & Reed, 2002; Wright & Masten, 2005). Children who confront adversities and maintain self-esteem in the face of catastrophic events are also seen as survivors (Apfel & Simon, 1996; Cairns, 1996; Beristain, Valdoseda, & Paez, 1996; Masten, 1994; Masten, 2007). In the literature, resilience is, therefore, defined as the ability to control potentially life-altering adversities (Feldman & Masalha, 2007; Luthar, 2006; Masten, 1999; Masten & Obradovic, 2006) while ‘achieving desirable outcomes in spite of significant challenges to adaptation or development’ (Masten and Coatsworth 1995, 737) and as resistance to the adverse effects of risk experiences (Rutter (2000a, 2000b).

  Acholi culture is especially rich with words and phrases like kanyo (coping), ciiro peko (overcoming problems), and kayo lak (gritting the teeth) to express the experiences of coping with and overcoming pain or setback. Meanwhile, diiyo cwiny, which literally translates as ‘suppressing the heart or soul,’ means keeping emotions under wraps, going into an existential cocoon to ward off further wounding to the soul in difficult times. Implicit in the act of diiyo cwiny is self-sacrifice, holding back the fulfillment of one’s immediate needs either because of a lack of resources to fulfil those needs or because it is prudent and beneficial for the individual’s overall welfare to defer fulfillment to a future time.

  But diiyo cwiny also carries the message of hope in the sense that holding down one’s heart allows it to be lifted up later. Acholi children are taught from a young age to learn the act of diiyo cwiny, suppressing the heart through the promotion of protective fact
ors like wat (relational attachment), the ability to establish and sustain relationships with family members, caregivers, extended kin, and others; tek cwiny (self-regulatory skills), the ability to muster control over one’s emotions such that one can act with courage when the occasion demands; and kwiri (self-efficacy), the confidence, independence, and keenness required to assess or size up situations, select the best possible options for overcoming an obstacle, and purposefully initiate action to achieve one’s goal. Through communal play, children learn to negotiate, to give and take, to resolve conflicts, and even to identify danger such as okutu lango (needle tree), twol (snakes), and ayila, the tree whose hairy brown fruit causes a serious itch. Empathy and sensitivity towards the needs of others within the community is fostered through activities such as communal sharing of food from the same dish.

  By anticipating, embracing, and accepting suffering through diiyo cwiny, so that their awful experiences could not affect their hope for tomorrow, the former child combatants in this book persevered and made their suffering a part of the daily rhythm of their lives. In this sense and meaning of survival, each of them gazed directly upon suffering without allowing it to affect their motivation to survive and return home. Miya, for instance, was able to survive when she was raped by a much older man to whom she was given for a wife. She also survived the most intense suffering when her bush husband was accused of trying to escape and was executed by firing squad. ‘We were taken and divided up among senior officers. You went silently to live in his home. There was a lot of suffering. We lived a terrible life. After that, we were given to another officer. When your husband died in battle, suitors were allowed to woo you, instead of simply being handed over to an officer. In my case, I was given to another officer when the officer I was living with was executed. This was done by force, whether or not you agreed with it, you were given away to an officer.’ This suffering almost broke her, but, through diiyo cwiny, she came through it.

  Compelled by the need to survive captivity, but also imbued with the hope of dwoogo paco, the child abductees constructed dual identities, one rooted in the Acholi culture that the LRM/A manipulated and turned violent, the other stemming from their previous lives within the families they left behind in their villages. In effect, the separation of their bush identities from their home identities seemed to serve the psychological needs of child combatants by allowing them to retain their original, culturally constructed, and desired identities as dano adana, human persons, even as they deployed their stigmatized identities in the perpetration of extreme violence and atrocities. By keeping the two identities, they were able to rationalize their actions in the bush. In Acholi culture, after all, dano adana could not possibly inflict so much suffering on other human persons without simultaneously losing their humanity. Only a lapoya (pl. lupoya) (mad person) could commit such acts without feeling guilt or remorse.

  In combat, their hidden home personas as dano adana enabled the CI soldiers to resolutely draw a tight veil of innocence around themselves in the face of mounting violence and atrocities. Whatever happened in the bush was divorced from who they felt they really were and how they were perceived back home. For Jola Amayo, dual identities enabled her to distance herself psychologically and emotionally from the violence of warfare by reminding her that she could never do such things back home. ‘What you did at home was beneficial, but in the bush you were used – go and forcibly take someone’s property, rob with violence. You realized you were being forced to act,’ she explained.

  Ringo Otigo elegantly contextualized his dual identities this way: ‘In your normal existence as a person living where you were born, you could not stay from morning till noon without drinking water. There, however, you could stay from morning till sunset without putting water to your lips because there would be no place to collect water. I learned all that, withstood it, knew it, outlasted it, concluded it, until the moment when I got up and returned home in the manner that was planned for me.’

  To the child combatants, therefore, returning home to a welcoming community would liberate them from their stigmatized existence as child combatants who committed crimes considered taboo within Acholi culture (killing, cutting off lips and limbs, burning homes, and in some cases rape). Yet, once back home, Ringo Otigo, like the rest of my informants who served as child combatants with the LRM/A, was confronted by a civilian population that viewed him not as a returning child survivor and hero but as a killer who committed atrocities. He discovered that the communal disdain for olum, those from the bush, ran deeper than mere anger directed at common criminals.

  Invariably, former child combatants were blamed for all the atrocities and suffering that the Acholi had endured for so many years. Indeed, the persistent use of the stigmatized label of olum to refer to returning child combatants was itself a stark reminder that, in the eyes of Acholi civilian society, they were no longer dano adana. The subtext of the accusation was that only a dano gang, a home person who remained within the community, acting in a predictable manner that the community understood, and who was integral to the daily routines and rituals of that community, could pass as a human person. By being labelled olum, former LRM/A child combatants were rendered separate from the Acholi community’s experience; they were relegated to the periphery as rejects, untouchables, discarded, as it were, on the wii oduu (garbage heap). Effectively, they had become strangers within their own families, community, and culture.

  The realization that, in the eyes of their communities, they were considered outcasts created emotional turmoil for all my informants. Jola, for instance, was not prepared for her community’s venomous attacks on her and her children. She was told to her face that she was an evil rebel who had done many bad things, and that she could not stay in the community because she was possessed by cen, the vengeful spirits of those she killed in battle: ‘[When] I got home, there was some anger directed towards me. When it happened, I mostly kept to myself, staying silent.’

  Furthermore, the former child combatants felt especially bitter after experiencing rejection from family members whom they trusted and respected. Ringo Otigo, for example, was deeply hurt by the accusation from an aunt that his presence in the village was a liability since nobody could predict what he was capable of doing: ‘My aunt said that nobody really knew my mind and nobody could predict how my life at home could turn out. Perhaps, with the type of life I had led in the bush, I could hurt someone or perhaps commit a serious act against neighbours, thereby creating enmity in the home.’

  Far from being an isolated case, Ringo’s experience with unwelcoming family members was a common one for the other former child combatants as well. Both Payaa Mamit and Miya Aparo experienced similar rejections from family members. Payaa was especially bitter about the attitude of her father, whom she had respected and idolized while growing up and, ironically, whose teachings had helped her through unspeakable suffering as a child combatant. She could barely hide her intense anger and sense of betrayal: ‘What worries me the most and makes me very sad to this hour is the manner of my return. Instead of welcoming me home with [such words of] encouragement [as], “My child, now that you have returned, be firm, and take care of the three children you returned with,” my father never said that. Instead he said, “You know what people say, that you have evil spirit inside your head. Because of the evil spirit that is said to be inside you, you cannot stay at home; you must return to the bush.”’ Moreover, without acknowledging her existence, Payaa’s father showed up one day with Payaa’s siblings, who were born after she was abducted and had been orphaned when Payaa’s mother died: ‘When my father saw that I was settling well, and living peacefully, no fights, no evil spirit to disturb me, he showed up with the two children, my two brothers that my mother left behind as orphans. He left my brothers in my hands.’

  Miya Aparo faced a similar situation in the village where she grew up. She was looked upon as a returning rebel rather than as a child who had been forcibly removed from her home. The
hatred was so intense that she beat a hasty retreat to an anonymous existence in the community on the outskirts of Gulu town: ‘I went home to my mother, and found unwelcoming stares. Some people hated me; others hated the children that I returned home with. Truly, life was very hard. It finally dawned on me that I needed to live independently by myself. I started living in Ariya-Agaa, not far from here, all by myself.’

  For Miya Aparo and former child combatants like her, rejection by family was the ultimate act of betrayal within a culture that already viewed her and other former child combatants as unclean, unstable, and possibly possessed by cen. In essence, the community had turned its back on her and those like her. It had deliberately chosen not to honour her as dano adana, pushing her away to live alone like a person without wat (extended family and kin). Left searching for new identities because the ones which they held close to their hearts for many years as child combatants, and which they had imagined as legitimate, were contested and rendered invalid in the eyes of the communities to which they had returned, most former child combatants reacted with anger and confusion.

  Miya, Ringo, and Jola felt betrayed twice. The first time was when they were abducted by the LRM/A and grievously harmed and placed in harm’s way. The second was when, upon return to the village, having come through what many described as the jaws of death, they discovered that society no longer cared or wanted them.