Evelyn Amony. Credit: Erin Baines / UN Women

By Aruna Dutt
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 20 2016 (IPS)

Evelyn Amony’s bravery not only helped her survive and escape captivity from the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), but has made her an advocate for thousands of abducted women and children who face long term consequences after returning home.

Raised in Amuru District, northern Uganda, Evelyn Amony’s family, neighbours, and friends were bound into a close community. Her happiest memory was when she received the second-highest grade in her class. “When I was a child, my biggest interest was my education,” Amony told Inter Press Service.

“When my father heard the news, he slaughtered a goat and gave me the liver,”  says Amony in her memoir, “I Am Evelyn Amony: Reclaiming My  Life From The Lord’s Resistance Army.” But the next term, she was abducted by rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), and did not get to attend Primary Five.

IPS spoke with Amony ahead of the launch of her book at the UN, organised by UN Women, the International Center for Transitional Justice, the Liu Institute for Global Issues, the University of British Columbia and the Permanent Mission of Canada to the UN.

She recounts her 11 years in captivity – being trained as the personal escort of the notorious LRA leader Joseph Kony, wanted by the International Criminal Court. Too young to know that childbirth would be painful, Amony was forced to become Kony’s wife and bore him three children from age 14.

“I remember how hard it was to be forced to walk long distances from Uganda to Southern Sudan, to the point where my feet were swollen and I would ask God to just let me rest, and that if I was abducted for the purpose to be killed, then God should let them kill me as fast as they could,” she recalls.

Amony tried to convince Kony to end the war. She tried escaping for years, eventually succeeding ten years later. Shot at many times, surviving a violent ambush, Amony began her journey to freedom from Southern Sudan. “It was at that moment I knew God was really there,” Amony told IPS. On reaching Uganda she was reunited with her family and two of her daughters, one is still missing.

War of Reintegration

For Amony and thousands of formerly abducted women, leaving war did not mean the war was over. In northern Uganda, coming back from the bush to communities where the LRA committed atrocities, meant facing further violence and discrimination.

Reintegrating into the community after over a decade of war, having missed school, meant finding a job was unlikely. Yet many women struggle single-handedly to raise their children.

One of these women may have to see the commander that abused her at the community market daily, says Ketty Anyeko of the Uganda Fund, an organisation that has helped reintegrate some 2,800 war-affected women.

“Uganda has a culture of forgiveness, so these LRA commanders can live freely. But for sexual violence, it is not easy to forgive and forget,” said Anyeko. These women are also often rejected by their families, so do not have access to land or resources needed for them and their children to survive.

Of every five children in northern Uganda, 3 were born during the war in the bush, said Amony. More than 66,000 children have been abducted in the Uganda region by the LRA, according to UNICEF. Only about 6,000 have returned. Many are physically impaired. Amony’s younger daughter, Grace, has hearing problems because of loud gunfire; her elder daughter Bakita’s eyesight is affected. That is in addition to the trauma and experience of war.

“When I ask male children what they want to do when they grow up, many say they want to be soldiers. When I ask why, they tell me that if you are a soldier you have the power to do whatever you want to do, you can get whatever woman you want, because you can use the gun. This is what they have been taught,” Amony says. It is not surprising then that children who returned are viewed negatively and seen as likely to take after their fathers who were part of LRA. In schools, children suffer stigma because some teachers refer to them as the “children of Kony.”

Unable to continue in that environment, many give up education. Girls are becoming pregnant as teenagers and male children are ending up on the streets, Amony says. In short, children are punished for the crimes of the LRA commanders.

When a war-affected woman remarries, the husband often does not show love for the children born in conflict, and even refuses to pay school fees. For Amony, all these are challenges to be overcome.

“I love to speak to children to the point where on holidays many of the kids spend time with me,” she says. They ask her questions to which she has no answers. They want to go to school but Amony does not have the resources to help them. “There are so many of Kony’s children, and they have an impression that I know where their father is,” Amony says.

Women’s Advocacy Network

It was tough for Amony to reintegrate also. After her escape, she attended a tailoring school, where there were 7 other formerly abducted women. When they went to get food, the other students would leave the serving table as they didn’t want to sit with them.

Because they shared similar hardships, Amony and the 7 women decided to start a small group to help each other. Their efforts soon expanded to organizing women in the larger community. But the LRA’s massacres had caused conflict between the communities. The group was sometimes pressured not to go to one community or another. But they persisted, angering one group or the other. Some in Amony’s group were very afraid. But when Amony told them her story, they cried. Amony knew she had won the battle.

In Gulu District, they established three groups of survivors. The Transitional Justice experts Ketty Anyeko and Erin Baines, stepped in to encourage the work. “We started getting involved in community theatre exercises to narrate our experiences in a very visual way,” Amony said. “This was when we started telling the deeper stories about our lives and the war, and we would all cry together.” In 2011, more survivor groups were formed and Amony was elected the chairperson of  the Women’s Advocacy Network. They began radio talk shows reaching out to the grassroots. They visited district offices to raise awareness. “It was not easy for me to introduce myself as the chairperson of Women’s Advocacy Network because whenever I went, they would say “Oh, you are the wife of Joseph Kony”. They would reduce me to “rebel wife” and not see me as a “woman advocate,” Amony said.

“I come here as Evelyn Amony to explain to you what women who suffered the conflict want,” was her response. Today, there are about 16 WAN groups, growing from 20 to 900 formerly abducted women in the last three years.

But it was not easy. “When we introduced ourselves as children who were formerly abducted, their initial reaction would be that we were the ones who committed atrocities.” The survivors explained that they too were victims and that the community must join hands and work together.

“What can we do to ensure Ugandan children live a normal life?” Amony wants to know.

The Comboni missionary-run hospital in Nzara, South Sudan provides counselling to former abductees of the Lord’s Resistance Army who were traumatised by the war and provides antiretrovirals for those living with HIV/AIDS. Credit: Raymond Baguma/IPS

By Raymond Baguma
NZARA, South Sudan, Mar 19 2013 (IPS)

Sungu Mizele, a Congolese national living in Yambio, in South Sudan’s Western Equatoria state, earns a living selling the fruit and vegetables that she grows in her backyard, at the local town market. On average, she earns nine dollars a day. But on a good day, when she has fresh supplies, she can earn up to 31 dollars.

She may not have much, but as someone who once lived in the Makpandu settlement camp, which houses some 5,700 refugees, she is at least able to support herself and her late sister’s six children.

Her family’s story is like that of the thousands of others in the camp – they were attacked by Joseph Kony’s rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), which has spent the last two decades reportedly fighting for a biblical state in Uganda, and has been accused of recruiting child soldiers, killing, maiming and taking sex slaves.

The rebel group, which originally operated from Uganda and now operates mostly from the Central African Republic (CAR) and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), attacked Mizele’s home in Dungu, in northeastern DRC, in November 2010.

Mizele and her six nieces and nephews were released, unharmed, by the rebels a day later. However, her elder sister, the mother of the children, was shot dead as she struggled to flee from an LRA commander who tried to rape her.

While living at the camp with the other refugees, Mizele was determined to give her family a better life. She kept aside some of the food and cooking oil rations given to them by relief agencies and resold them. She also scavenged in the bushes near the settlement camp for firewood to sell. Eventually, she was able to earn enough to rent, for six dollars a month, a grass-thatched hut in Yambio, some 44 kilometres from the camp.

“I moved out of the camp and came to town where I started a small business for survival and to support the kids,” Mizele tells IPS.

The family is one of the many who are trying to pick up the pieces of their lives as attacks by the LRA on South Sudan have decreased over the last few years. From the DRC and CAR, the LRA reportedly carried out attacks in South Sudan’s Western Equatoria state, especially around harvest time.

In Nzara, a frontier outpost in Western Equatoria state, families have returned home to cultivate maize, pineapples, sorghum and peanuts. At local trading centres, business is brisk. Groceries and local pubs, which sell items imported from Uganda, are open till late, powered by solar or diesel generators.

Life here has been more peaceful of late. The LRA Crisis Tracker Report, released on Feb. 5 by the United States non-governmental organisations Invisible Children and Resolve, shows that out of the 275 attacks carried out by the LRA in 2012, none were carried out in South Sudan, while 225 occurred in DRC and the remainder took place in CAR.

Many here believe the drop in attacks was largely due to the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF) opening a base in Nzara in 2010.

“We are glad that Uganda came. Without them, we would not have planted our crops and harvested,” Reverend Samuel Enosa Peni, of the Episcopal Church of Sudan, tells IPS.

In addition to the Ugandan military presence here, the Regional Task Force (RTF), which was created last September by the African Union, has been tasked with hunting down the LRA leaders in the region. The RTF is comprised of troops from South Sudan, DRC, CAR and Uganda, with the latter contributing 2,000 troops that are supported by 100 U.S. military advisers.

Peni, who is also the bishop of the Nzara diocese, which oversees 33 parish churches, says that the local community is still grappling with the traumatic effects of the conflict and the church is counselling them.

“We were born in war, grew up in war, and rehabilitation needs to be done,” Peni says. “People have no hope for the future and our job as the church is to reach out to them. Many have died, but those of us who are alive need to forget the past and go forward.”

Former abductees often require psychological counselling before they are integrated back into the community. Many of them are traumatised by the rejection they face upon returning home, he says.

Raphael Reba lives with the fact that her family may never accept her and her son, whose father is one of the LRA rebels who abducted her seven years ago from her home in Gangura Payam, which lies southeast of Yambio.

She was forced to become part of the LRA and was handed over to a rebel commander, who she only calls David, whose child she later conceived.

In 2010, she and David escaped from LRA captivity with their child. He returned to Uganda after surrendering, and she and her son came to her home in South Sudan.

Today, Reba lives in her brother’s house with her now four-year-old son. She cultivates other people’s gardens for a living.

Still traumatised by the atrocities she was forced to commit, including being ordered, during an attack in Aba in DRC’s Orientale Province, to kill and drink the blood of two babies, Reba says she is being ostracised by her own family. Even her father, Thomas Yepeta, cannot accept her or her son.

“If it (the insulting) continues, I will walk to the UPDF camp in Nzara so that they can take me to the father of my child,” Reba tells IPS.

She has undergone counselling from different NGOs here, but is worried that even though her son is innocent and undeserving of the anger directed at him, he will be forced to endure it as he grows up.

At St. Daniel Comboni Primary School in Nzara, missionaries look after formerly abducted children. The administrator, Sister Maria Teresa Carrasco, tell IPS that about 200 of the school’s pupils are ex-abductees brought to them by the Ugandan military, and that many are still traumatised by what they were forced to do while in captivity.

The Comboni missionaries also run the Rainbow Community Centre, which helps over 3,000 formerly abducted children rebuild their lives.

At the centre, formerly abducted mothers infected with HIV/AIDS during LRA captivity come here with their babies for psychosocial counselling and antiretroviral therapy.

“But we have challenges with antiretrovirals because Juba provides the drugs and they don’t arrive in time. We don’t have enough supplies of drugs,” Carrasco says.

Elia Richard Box, the Nzara County Commissioner, tells IPS that until Kony is caught, they will continue to live in fear of a resurgence of violence. “We feel the continued presence of Kony in the bush will not bring peace. Our fear is that the LRA is in DRC and could one day return.”

*Additional reporting by Joseph Nashion in Yambio, South Sudan.