Small Wars Journal

Kidnapped as Children, They Escaped from Kony’s LRA to be Reunited with Their Families in Uganda

Tue, 08/14/2018 - 12:18am

Kidnapped as Children, They Escaped from Kony’s LRA to be Reunited with Their Families in Uganda by Sally Hayden – Washington Post

GULU, Uganda — Kidnapped when he was just 16 to fight for the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army, Stephen Okot found his way to freedom and back to his family years later through a rare friendship made in the bush.

Trained to kill and always fearing informers and punishment by his own comrades, Okot had long kept to himself, until by chance he started talking with Oryem Bosco, a short, shy man a few years younger, about their childhoods in northern Uganda. “I told him my ancestral place only to realize we came from the same district,” Okot said.

From that day, Okot and Bosco began sharing food. As they ate, they huddled together, contemplating the decade they had been away from their families, whispering about what they saw around them — the killing without mercy, the lack of education among the fighters, the bleakness of their future.

The LRA, a cultlike rebel group led by Joseph Kony, terrorized northern Uganda for almost two decades, killing 100,000 and displacing 1.7 million with the stated intention of imposing a rule based on the Ten Commandments.

Its fighters kidnapped tens of thousands of children, turning them into killers who carried out rapes, torture and massacres, before the group was driven out of the country in 2006…

Read on.