{UAH} IDDI AMIN NEVER TARGETED LANGIs/ACHOLIs, THEY TARGETED HIM {---Series One-Hundred and forty-seven}

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"Don't cross the Karuma bridge before 9 a.m. or after 3 p.m. Most incidents are early or late, when the army is crossing the road from east to west. You don't want to run into them -- you can't negotiate with 12 -year- old soldiers."  "The soldiers are 12," he said again, his voice rising to a scandalized pitch, "and the officers are 15!"  The Karuma over the Nile is on the dividing line between the stable south of Uganda and the embattled north, where the rebel LRA, whose soldiers are largely abducted children, has held the Acholi people hostage for 18 years. Andrew Moss is professor emeritus of epidemiology and biostatistics at the Universityof California at San Francisco. He wrote this piece and it got published as a special to The Chronicle.

Ugandans we need to discuss Acholi violence  candidly.

 

Children across Uganda are running for their lives, fearful of being abducted. One man is trying to make a difference.

Andrew Moss

2004-03-25 04:00:00 PDT Gulu, Uganda -- Andrew Moss is professor emeritus of epidemiology and biostatistics at the Universityof California at San Francisco. He following the progress of AIDS treatment into thedeveloping world. This is the first in an occasional series..

Children are walking down the road -- some ragged, others neatly dressed, boys with hoops, others with bicycles, girls carrying baskets on their heads, very young mothers carrying babies on their backs.

We watch them 2 kilometers outside Gulu, capital of Northern Uganda, parked on a red-dirt road that leads to land controlled by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army. We are watching the children as night comes on.

The trickle of youngsters becomes a stream, and as the light fails, the stream becomes a river that fills both sides of the road -- a dark, quiet mass of orderly children surging steadily away from their homes and toward Gulu town.

They are avoiding abduction. They are running from war.

"You can drive to Gulu," people in Kampala had said, "as long as you don't drive at night."

The British security official had been more precise:

"Don't cross the Karuma bridge before 9 a.m. or after 3 p.m. Most incidents are early or late, when the army is crossing the road from east to west. You don't want to run into them -- you can't negotiate with 12 -year- old soldiers."

"The soldiers are 12," he said again, his voice rising to a scandalized pitch, "and the officers are 15!"

The Karuma over the Nile is on the dividing line between the stable south of Uganda and the embattled north, where the rebel LRA, whose soldiers are largely abducted children, has held the Acholi people hostage for 18 years.

An epidemiologist from San Francisco, I had been working on the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief -- PEPFAR in the capital, Kampala. In the south, few seemed to care much about the war.

So I decided to head north. I wondered if any of the American AIDS treatment money flooding into the country was going to the north, where the long-running civil war seemed to be heating up again.

Christopher Orach, a doctor and a native of Gulu, is my guide to Acholi country.

The two of us reach the Karuma bridge over the Nile at noon.

"You are now leaving Uganda A and entering Uganda B," Christopher says.

We cross the bridge, and the road surface disintegrates. Christopher weaves the car around potholes and we slow to a crawl. The country is flat, a savannah stretching north to the Sudan. Two-man army patrols hump toward us along the road.

On this side of the Nile, 1.3 million people, mostly Acholi, are living in Internally Displaced Persons camps, moved there by the Ugandan army to keep them from being co-opted by the LRA. The army has a policy of shooting those who don't move into the camps.

The Acholi are a Luo-speaking tribe from the Sudan, different from the Bantu tribes in the south and west. They have tended to be on opposite sides in the bitter Ugandan civil wars. The current southern-dominated government fought an Acholi regime to take power.

Joseph Kony, the leader of the LRA and an Acholi himself, has declared war against his own people. Some 20,000 children have been abducted -- for porterage, for sexual slavery, many to be trained as fighters in the LRA base camps in Sudan and sent back to fight against their neighbors.

In last year's offensive in Teso district -- a strike to the south that made the government's claim that the war was ending sound disingenuous -- the army exhibited the body of a 27-year-old LRA Brigade commander named Charles Tabuley who had begun his career as an abducted child.

We arrive in Gulu, the capital of Acholi country, just before nightfall and check into the Pearle Afrique hotel, a three-story concrete building near the police barracks and the Church of the Holy Rosary.

Gulu was laid out by the British in the 1930s on what was then the Uganda Railway Line. The British shipped cotton from here to Mombasa on the Indian Ocean but the line has long since disintegrated along with the roads. Gulu is now a frontier town on the edge of bandit country, heavily invested by the Ugandan army. It is surrounded by a ring of IDP camps, where the Acholi population is festering in enforced idleness and discontent.

I have an annotated map of the camps given to me by the medical director of the Swiss branch of Medecins sans Frontieres -- MSF-Suisse. North to Pabo Camp is marked "OK" all day, but beyond Atiak, near the Sudan border, the going is "tricky." West of the north-south highway is mostly no, no and not so safe, and northeast of the highway is "mostly not safe" or "careful." South back to the Karuma falls is the only direction which is generally "OK."

Afteer checking into the Pearle Afrique and go exploring. In Gulu City Hospital, a sprawling complex of mildewed colonial-era buildings, a half-naked and deranged mother feeds her baby in the entrance to the medical ward, and two epileptics keep her company.

"There is nowhere for them to go," Christopher says.

In the medical ward are victims of family violence and LRA-inflicted gunshot wounds in equal numbers. There are also many wasted and prematurely aged patients, undoubtedly HIV-positive, who make up most of the inpatients in any African hospital.

The broken operating room doors flap, and an orderly tells us the rats run in and out. A nurse tries to repair a child's prolapsed rectum in a dirty procedure room with no electricity and no running water. Christopher, outraged by the lack of resources, is about to do the procedure himself when a clinical officer finally appears.

Out behind the hospital, children are coming through a gap in the wire fence. These are the "night commuters."

Abduction of the young has become a way of life in northern Uganda, so, every night, thousands of children and young mothers with babies walk into town from the outlying villages to bed down.

At first they slept in the bus park and on the deep verandahs of the crumbling Indian shops in the center of town, relics of Gulu's trading past. But now churches and the omnipresent NGOs have channeled the children into shelters and other safer places.

NGOs -- nongovernmental organizations -- are the international groups that fill the service gaps in poor countries and disaster situations around the world. There are 58 NGOs in Gulu -- from the World Food Program, the enormous U.N. subsidiary that is feeding the entire north, to the do-it- yourself local organization that Christopher's Acholi medical students set up for their Australian sponsors. There are so many NGOs in town that newcomers can't find houses to rent.

Here at Gulu District Hospital, MSF-Suisse is running a scabies treatment center for the night children -- scabies and ringworm are problems when people are crowded together in shelters and a reminder of the more dangerous epidemics that can break out in IDP populations.

As darkness falls, more and more children straggle down the road and through the gap in the fence into the hospital grounds. MSF wardens in long plastic aprons and rubber gloves grab them and funnel them into a production line that takes them through a shower, a brisk scrub at the hands of a cheery collection of public health nurses and a change of clothing.

I help a small girl as she comes through the fence and ask the aproned warden to find out why she is there. The girl says something in a tiny voice.

"Aringo mony," the warden says. "She says, aringo mony."

"What?"

"Aringo is 'I am running' and mony is soldiers or military. So it means she is running from the war."

"Ask this one," I say, bringing the next one through the fence.

"Aringo mony," she says, faintly.

More and more children come through the gap in the fence, straggling off to bed down in the hospital grounds. A couple of unused wards have been emptied out for them to sleep in. They will leave in the morning, Christopher says, and go back home to be fed.

In northern Uganda, 80 percent of the population is being fed by the WFP, which brings food only to the camps.

We go off to eat at the Acholi Inn, the only first-rate hotel in town. We don't have rooms there because a group of politicians are in town on a junket. Gulu is the center of the war industry, if not the center of the war itself (this year the war has shifted to the district to the east, Lira).

"First I will show you the children," Christopher says. We drive out two kilometers along the road to Paicho, his home village, now a displaced-persons camp like every other village in north. The road past Paicho to Awach is marked "not safe" on my MSF map, the next section to Patiko is labeled with a question mark, and the section beyond that to Palaro is marked "careful."

On the road, the children move toward town. They are cheerful, quiet, contained in the private world of childhood, surrounded by companions, and all marching purposefully forward, as if being pulled away from their homes by some reverse pied piper in the center of the city.

We watch for 10 minutes as several hundred of them troop by. In a house near us a family prepares its daughters for the trip. The house is just two kilometers from Gulu center but still not safe from the LRA.

Aringo mony, I say to myself.

In the huge walled garden of the Acholi Inn, with its widely spaced tables under broad, spreading trees, there is only one small group of diners far off in a quiet corner. Christopher says it's better we are staying at the Pearle Afrique, that the Acholi Inn is the wrong kind of place, that it is owned by the military commander of the district.

I know that Christopher is an Acholi nationalist and that he, like many of his people, is ambivalent about the government's conduct of the war against the LRA. Many Acholi fear the Ugandan military, which has a long record of brutality in the north.

Christopher and I had met at the Institute of Public Health in Kampala, and soon afterward he invited me for lunch.

"There are two places to eat," he said. "The Golf Course or Olel. At Olel, they have Acholi specialities ... It is peasant food" (peesant food, he said). "It is very simple."

I knew this was an offer I shouldn't refuse. Over lunches at the Olel, we worked out a plan to look at the HIV problem in the camps. We would try to see how bad the situation really was.

Acholi politicians who met for lunch at Olel liked the idea that we were going north. Most foreigners stayed in the stable south of the country, where the war was a distant but manageable itch that wouldn't go away.

I gradually realized that the long-running war was a three-way problem, with the Acholi population held hostage between the LRA and the government army -- an outsider army, shifted north from the Congo after the peace agreement there last May and one that many Acholi feel regards them all as rebels.

Finally Christopher invited me to a social event. The Makerere University Acholi Medical Students Association, MAMSA, was holding a reception for its Australian sponsors. Christopher was the Patron of the association. "I think you should come," he said casually.

Between performances by an Acholi dance troupe the medical students' leaders made speeches thanking their sponsors. But they also talked about the 18-year civil war in the north. The chairman of the association, an intense young man in badly fitting formal clothes, rose to speak:

"Over the last 18 years, the children and the people of northern Uganda have endured and witnessed things beyond belief," he said. "Eighteen years of massacres, atrocities and dying made all too banal. Eighteen years of dehumanization, discrimination, humiliation and the destruction of schools and hospitals, which has condemned generations of children to a life of underdevelopment, disease and disadvantage."

He continued his list of horrors: The north, he said, had been reduced "to an existential shadow of a once vibrant society."

At the end he turned to the visitors -- the Australian sponsors, the Norwegian ambassador and myself -- and gave us his credo:

"It's not those who are taken by force and sold as slaves who are real slaves, it's those who will accept it physically and morally. We are not going to be slaves.

"For God and my country ..."

All speeches end with God in this highly religious country. Even the Lord's Resistance Army began its career invoking the Ten Commandments. But nobody believes it now. The army of Kony was built on child abduction and operates through massacre of civilians. They have no apparent political program and seem to have no purpose.

The LRA exists to terrorize civilians, I thought as I listened to the impassioned medical students that night, and they terrorize civilians to exist.

As we finish dinner at the Acholi Inn, half a dozen soldiers in crisp camouflage fatigues appear suddenly out of the shadows around the edge of the garden and advance toward us like dream figures, AK-47s in their hands.

At the far table, the only other group of diners has gotten up to leave.

Four soldiers flank them as the others comb through the rooms on either side.

The waiter tells us, "He is the commander of the Fourth Division."

At the Church of the Holy Rosary near the Pearle Afrique Hotel, the last children are straggling into the church compound before the gates close for the night. I make Christopher stop and we wander in.

They are separating the boys from the girls, something that Father Dismas, the tiny Italian parish priest, insists on.

Father Dismas spent 22 years in Kitgum, the other principal Acholi town, east and north toward the Sudan border. You cannot drive to Kitgum because of LRA ambushes on the road. It is like going to Fort Apache, far out in Indian country. As father Dismas talks, I realize that I am beginning to think of Northern Uganda as Vietnam in about 1964. The IDP camps are like the "strategic hamlets" the South Vietnamese government herded the peasants into to deny them to the Viet Cong.

In the camps, Father Dismas says, the parents have lost all authority because there is no work and no money, and the girls are prostituting themselves to the army, the only source of cash. And if that weren't bad enough, he says, the shelters in town are not separating the children.

But here there will be order. The girls go to one courtyard of the sprawling church outbuildings and the boys to another. In the girls' courtyard, candles provide the only light.

We listen to the girls singing quiet hymns in Acholi for a moment, then follow Dismas to where roughly 500 boys are sitting on the ground.

Some are clutching blankets and plastic bags, but many have arrived with nothing.

As we approach, all 500 upturned faces swivel toward us. Dismas pulls Christopher -- a boy from the villages who went to Kampala and became a doctor -- into the light and asks him to talk to the boys in Acholi.

Christopher speaks to them paternally, and, I think, a little sternly, telling them, I imagine, what they will have to do to make something of their lives in this poverty-stricken war zone, where hospitals and schools are barely functioning, where the population has been driven off the land, where half the children are running from the war.

He finishes and Dismas leads the boys in the Acholi version of the Lord's Prayer. Then the lights go out and the boys bed down on the bare earth.

"What did you tell them?" I ask Christopher as we walk back to the hotel.

"I told them they should have hope."

 

Stay in the forum for Series One hundred and forty eight on the way   ------>

EM

On the 49^th Parallel          

                 Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja and Dr. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda is in anarchy"
                    Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi
"Pamoja na Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja na Dk. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda ni katika machafuko"