First Kill Your Family

Child Soldiers of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army

By Peter Eichstaedt

Chicago Review Press Incorporated

Copyright © 2013 Peter Eichstaedt
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61374-809-1

Contents

Maps,
Preface,
Chronology,
Prologue: Richard's Story,
1 Faded Luster of the Pearl,
2 The Lips Are Not There,
3 Anatomy of an Attack,
4 God, Grace, and the Aboke Girls,
5 Witch Doctors, Rattles, and Unholy Ghosts,
6 A Game of Blood and Spiritualism,
7 The Arrow Boys,
8 Degrees of Darkness,
9 Back to the Land,
10 The Call for Peace,
11 Armed Conflict Is a Health Risk,
12 In Search of Joseph Kony,
13 Jungle Rendezvous,
14 The View from Kilimanjaro,
Epilogue: Metamorphosis,
Afterword: Bring in the Drones,
Acknowledgments,
Notes,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

Faded Luster of the Pearl

Winston Churchill visited Uganda in 1907 and was so taken by the country that in his memoirs of the trip, My African Journey, he wrote, "Uganda is the pearl." A relatively small country, Uganda is one of three nations, along with Kenya and Tanzania, composing the heart of East Africa. About the size of Oregon, it sits west of Kenya and on the northern shores of Africa's largest body of freshwater, Lake Victoria, thought to be the headwaters of the Nile River. The country straddles the equator and is bordered on the south by Tanzania, on the southwest by Rwanda, and on the west by the Democratic Republic of the Congo. To the north is Sudan. Like the other East African countries, Uganda boasts a dramatic terrain. The snow-capped Rwenzori Mountains, also known as the Mountains of the Moon, form the western boundary. In northwestern Uganda, Murchison Falls National Park offers visitors lions, antelopes and gazelles, elephants, giraffes, hippos, and troops of baboons and monkeys. Among the park's famous visitors were writer Ernest Hemingway and his wife Mary, who were injured there in January 1954 when their single-engine plane crashed on the crocodile-infested banks of the Nile River after it swooped low over the torrent of white water and snagged a telegraph wire. Uganda also has the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, which contains several hundred of the endangered mountain gorillas, the country's biggest tourist draw.

A British protectorate for the first half of the twentieth century, by all appearances Uganda is an African success story. The weather is moderate, the terrain green and varied, the soil rich, and the people educated and eager to reap the benefits of globalization. English is the official language of this country of twenty-eight million, and it has a 66 percent literacy rate. It is predominately Christian, with the Catholic, Protestant, and Pentecostal churches sharing about 60 percent of the population. The remainder are divided between Islam and animistic beliefs. Unlike some other parts of Africa, Uganda has controlled the AIDS epidemic and has lowered the infection rate to single digits. The economy has thrived, due in part to a steady flow of foreign aid, which has made up about half of the Ugandan annual national budget. It is also bolstered by the presence of an enterprising Indian business community.

Despite the appearance of stability and prosperity, Uganda has rarely experienced a sustained peace within its borders. The atrocities committed by the seemingly undefeatable Lord's Resistance Army only underscore Uganda's inability to free itself from a brutal and bloody past.

Two months after I arrived in Uganda in August 2005, the LRA was international news. On October 14, 2005, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands, unsealed indictments against the army's leader, Joseph Kony, and his top four commanders. They were charged with a total of eighty-six counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, largely based on evidence collected by the court investigators during the previous couple of years from LRA defectors, escapees, and legions of victims. It caused a surge of excitement in Uganda that finally, just maybe, the international community might do what no one has been able to do: put an end to the LRA. The initial excitement was quickly replaced by the sober realization that it was not up to the court, but the court's member countries, to arrest Kony. Uganda's president, Yoweri Museveni, had appealed for ICC action in late 2003, just two years earlier, and now that the indictments had been handed down, it would be up to Uganda to deliver the LRA commanders for trial. Despite decades of war, however, the Ugandan army had been unable to kill or capture Kony, who at the time was in South Sudan. Sudan had not signed the accord that created the ICC and was under no legal obligation to lift a hand against Kony. And Sudan was unlikely to act because it had found Kony very useful in the past; they had used him as one of their proxy militias to fight rebels in South Sudan. And further, the bulk of the LRA was in the jungles of northeastern Congo, led by Kony's second in command, Vincent Otti, and beyond the reach of the Sudanese army. Though the Democratic Republic of the Congo was a member of the international court, it had been unable to control or contain the myriad rampaging militias already inside its borders and depended on a massive UN force of some seventeen thousand peacekeepers for a modicum of stability. Many wondered what would change with the issuance of these indictments. In short, nothing changed.

But the court action was a step in the right direction. The indictments said the LRA "has established a pattern of brutalization of civilians by acts including murder, abduction, sexual enslavement, mutilation, as well as mass burnings of houses and looting of camp settlements; that abducted civilians, including children, are said to have been forcibly recruited as fighters, porters and sex slaves and to take part in attacks against the Ugandan army [UPDF] and civilian communities." Kony topped the list with thirty-three counts, including "enslavement, sexual enslavement, inhumane acts of inflicting serious bodily injury and suffering, murder, cruel treatment of civilians, intentionally directing an attack against a civilian population, pillaging, inducing rape, and forced enlisting of children." Otti had thirty-two counts of similar crimes; Okot Odhiambo had ten counts; Dominic Ongwen had seven; and Raska Lukwiya had four.

This was not the first time that Uganda had been thrust onto the international stage by bizarre and bloodthirsty characters. During the 1970s, the notorious Idi Amin blazed onto the scene and quickly developed a reputation for living large and conducting a loathsome campaign inside Uganda to purge it of his perceived enemies.

Before Amin, there was Milton Obote, a schoolteacher who rose to prominence in the 1950s as one of Africa's early progressive leaders. While much of the African continent was mired in civil wars — the inevitable and bloody process of shaking off decades of European colonial rule — Obote forged a coalition called the Uganda People's Congress. Attempting to incorporate the traditional tribal system spurned by the colonialists, he formed the country's first government after Uganda achieved independence in 1962. The king of the dominant Buganda tribe, the country's largest ethnic group, was given the office of president, and Obote became the prime minister. But this attempt to merge Uganda's tribal past with its present was doomed. Uganda's traditional ethnic and tribal rivalries...