{UAH} IDDI AMIN NEVER TARGETED LANGIs/ACHOLIs, THEY TARGETED HIM {---Series two-Hundred and ten}

Friends

"Everybody talks about reintegration, but no one gets to the heart of the matter," said Joann Pacoto, a local commissioner, who was just last week dealing with a case of a former child soldier, a girl, who had returned home to her village, snapped, and killed her father with a machete. "It's very complex. To get people who've spent 10 years in the bush to come back to regular life and be accepted, that is a problem. It's not like 'Oh, Joann is back' and that's that."

Joan Pacoto makes a very statement that is pushing the series forward, the series is not about going after particular people for I have the time to do so, but to raise a very red flag of what we have neglected in Northern Uganda. There are very many people that got involved into this war,  and they became mobile killing machines. Then we have very many people that got directly or indirectly affected by the war, they had their families destroyed, they got their children taken away, they had relatives murdered in front of them, they had babies raped in front of them. All these issues have caused a psychological effect on a  huge number of Langi and Acholi population. This girl came back and lived a normal life, but when she snapped she got a machete and split her father's head into two pieces. How are we going to live with these huge  numbers at the future Uganda? Stephanie McCrummen with Special correspondent Rebecca Harshbarger travelled to Uganda and filled a piece entitled For Abducted Ugandans, An Elusive Reintegration , it was published by The Washington Post.

 

Ugandans we so need to discuss Acholi violence candidly.

 

For Abducted Ugandans, An Elusive Reintegration

 

By Stephanie McCrummen

Washington Post Foreign Service

OCULOKORI, Uganda -- He had escaped alone, running for his life through swamps and grassy savannas, leaving behind seven years of captivity in one of Africa's most sadistic rebel groups, the Lord's Resistance Army.

But of all the horrors Samuel Ogwal endured -- being forced to teach children to kill and to watch them die, to deliver beatings and conduct ritualistic murders -- he was now facing a new kind of terror: returning home to the uncertain judgment of family and friends who had been brutalized by rebels like him.

"I was afraid they might kill me," Ogwal said, recalling the weeks he spent last year deciding whether to head home to his village or start an anonymous life someplace else. "I was ashamed of what I had done."

Thousands of other escaped abductees -- women coerced into sexual slavery, children forced to become soldiers and grown men such as Ogwal -- have faced similar decisions in the past couple of years, as life across this lush, green northern region of Uganda has slowly returned to some version of normal.

With a 2006 cease-fire holding, although peace talks between the government and the mysterious rebel leader Joseph Kony have stalled, many Ugandans are debating the question of justice: whether Kony and his top commanders, who still have a small army holding out in Congo, should be tried for war crimes at the International Criminal Court or in special Ugandan courts.

But for the rank and file, thousands of former abductees coerced into a brutal 20-year war with their own people, there are no courts or lawyers, no formal steps toward reconciliation. Instead, there is a certificate of government amnesty, followed by the long, day-by-day process of repairing relationships with parents and children, husbands and wives, friends and neighbors.

"Everybody talks about reintegration, but no one gets to the heart of the matter," said Joann Pacoto, a local commissioner, who was just last week dealing with a case of a former child soldier, a girl, who had returned home to her village, snapped, and killed her father with a machete. "It's very complex. To get people who've spent 10 years in the bush to come back to regular life and be accepted, that is a problem. It's not like 'Oh, Joann is back' and that's that."

At least 20,000 children, women and men were abducted into Kony's army over the years and forced to take part in horrific killings as a way of brainwashing them into a culture of violence. What began as a vaguely ideological war against perceived ethnic discrimination by the government degenerated into something close to madness under Kony, a former Catholic catechist who allegedly keeps 30 wives and claims to be God's spokesman.

Kony turned the rebels on the people he was supposedly trying to liberate, accusing them of betraying his cause, raiding villages for children and killing others at will.

The majority of surviving abductees have escaped, with most heading to camps or rehabilitation centers for psychological counseling and more recently, home. Hundreds of thousands of displaced people have also been returning to villages and towns across northern Uganda, where streets are crowded with bicycles and markets are once again full of buyers and sellers.

But as many aid groups pull out of the region, others say the real recovery has barely begun.

"To us, this is the most important stage," said Anthony Kerwegi, a coordinator with the Concerned Parents Association, a Ugandan group that works with former abductees and their families. "The most important part is to get people home and begin to normalize."  Samuel Ogwal, who is 30 now, escaped the way many abductees have, during a government bombing run that scattered his rebel settlement in southern Sudan. He made it to a Ugandan military camp, where many former rebels have found refuge, and was tormented by the prospect of being rejected by his community. At the same time, he said, he wondered whether his parents, his wife, his four children and other relatives had survived the war. He wondered about his farm.

"I had some big trees I had planted before I was abducted," Ogwal said. "Neem trees. And I would focus my mind on that. My friends, I kept thinking of them . . . Nelson, Ambrose, Solomon, Peter."

Finally, one day last year, he decided to go. He climbed with no possessions into an army truck that drove him to the red dirt road leading to this village of mud-brick huts, sprawling mango trees and tall yellow grass, where people had only recently returned from years in displacement camps.

He walked along the hazily familiar terrain, and the first person he recognized was an uncle. He froze a moment, then saw that his uncle was running toward him.

"He carried me on his back all the way home," Ogwal said, recalling a sense of profound relief. "He greeted me in his arms. He welcomed me and thanked me for reaching home. It felt good."

Ogwal began asking about the whereabouts of others. His parents were killed in the war. His friends? "So many had died," he said. His wife had waited for him, and his four children -- two girls, now 12 and 10 years old, and two boys, 8 and 6 -- were fine, though he hardly recognized them. His constant worry these days is how to support them.  People in Oculokori say they worry about how to support their newly returned neighbors, who include several abducted children, and other former LRA commanders such as David Amar, who came back a few months ago.

Like Ogwal, he was afraid of being viewed as a killer but found that the ties he had established before his abduction remained more or less intact. "I felt so relieved," Amar said, recalling his welcome. "I really felt life was now changing."

Neighbors said they remembered Amar and Ogwal as men who enjoyed dancing and reading, not as the people they became in the bush. They gave them seeds and what little money they could to get them started.

"I just gave him one of my blankets, said Amar's old friend Leion Okwany. "I told him: 'People go through problems, but since you are back, be encouraged. Just be close to us, and we shall support you where you are failing.' "

Other villagers have not been as pleasant. Amar and Ogwal said that when some of their neighbors drink, they often taunt them and call them names. "They call you 'rebel' and things like that," said Amar, sitting under the cool shade of a mango tree. "I just try to ignore them and go on with my life."  He farms most days: cassava, corn and beans. Ogwal is replanting his neem trees, as all but one were destroyed during the war. There is often an air of tentativeness around the men. Villagers said they try to speak to them calmly. Lilly Atim, who lives next to Ogwal, said that she sometimes hears him screaming at night and that he hallucinates at times during the day. She does not ask him what he sees. Other times, he and Amar simply fall quiet, or isolate themselves.

When that happens, Atim said, she tries to coax them into conversations about their children or farming, anything to reestablish a connection.

"Slowly by slowly, I try to lure them into talking," she said. "I want to show them we support them. I tell them to be strong, that this is your home, and to be very free."

She and others said that although they feared and loathed the Lord's Resistance Army, they never fully transferred those feelings to their old friends. "We were really crying for them to come home," she said.

A recent survey by the Refugee Law Project, an advocacy group based in the capital, Kampala, found that although some returnees have been stigmatized, there have been few revenge killings, as was feared.

"What is remarkable is that such intimidation, unkind as it is, has not been translated into violence," the report said.

It is too soon to say in general how the process of reconciliation is going in northern Uganda. Mostly, progress is measured in individual stories, some horrifying, some just sad. Many young women who were forced to "marry" rebel commanders, and often came home with children, have been rejected by their families, for instance. So have many former child soldiers, who now roam the streets of towns here, homeless.  But there is also Beatrice Aciro, who was held in captivity as a rebel "wife" for 10 years. She had two children before she escaped, eventually making her way back to her village.

She was worried about how her father would react. But when she saw him for the first time since she was 16, "he just kept quiet and looked at me like this," said Aciro, holding her hands to her face. "My crying made him cry like a child. Then he said, 'That's enough.' What he wanted was me. My children, he carried them, and he looked at them, looked at them. I told them, 'This is our dad.' "

Special correspondent Rebecca Harshbarger

 

 

Stay in the forum for Series two hundred and eleven 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"