Ugandan child soldier returns to terrorised boyhood village
When he was 13 Edward was kidnapped by Ugandan rebels and forced to become a soldier in the Lord's Resistance Army. He survived the longest–running guerrilla war in modern history by being a trusted confidante of Joseph Kony, the chief architect of the brutal insurgency. Fourteen years later, with Kony on the run, Edward is returning to his childhood village, nervous about the reception he will receive after his role in terrorising his own people.
For more than two decades about 30,000 children abducted from northern Uganda provided the fuel for Kony's cult-like LRA. A self-styled mystic who claimed to channel a host of spirits, his hazy aims of seizing power and ruling Uganda according to the biblical 10 commandments collapsed after his forces were chased across the Nile and out of the country in 2006. Since then he has roamed east central Africa's forests with a band of a few hundred children kidnapped from neighbouring countries.
While all but a handful of abducted Ugandans have now escaped, a generation of children is traumatised by war. Edward, now a wiry 27-year-old, was one who got away. By the time he fled Kony in April he had spent so long in the bush that he had forgotten what a bank was. Because he became so close to the LRA chief, his story provides a rare first-hand glimpse into the spiral of paranoia one of the world's most wanted war criminals. "In the middle of the night the rebels came, and surrounded our homes," Edward said, recalling how the LRA rampaged down the same pot-holed red dust road now leading him back to his village. "Until then I had never heard the sound of a gunshot."
Jeering rebels rounded up dozens of boys whose mud huts were within shouting distance; the youngest was eight. Most died during the forced five-day march to neighbouring Sudan. There the LRA trained the remaining boys to kill, using trees for target practice.
Speaking softly, fingers knotted on his lap, Edward said fear made his first kill easier. "If we had done a bad job, [our commander] might have killed us instead." Then, his voice barely a whisper, Edward explained how the abducted were repeatedly forced to kill other children who attempted to escape, and warned they would face the same fate if they tried it. "So many times it happened," he said.
For a quarter of a million child soldiers globally, the disorientating experience of returning home is exacerbated by deep stigmas and missed education opportunities. Girls kidnapped as "wives" often return with children born in captivity, or remain with the men they were forcibly given to even after liberation. In Liberia, unable to find jobs, some former child soldiers from Charles Taylor's notorious "small boys unit" have resorted to raiding graveyards to survive. After the genocide in Rwanda one study found more than 60% of children, many of whom were child soldiers, said they did not care if they ever grew up.
"I know [going home] won't be easy. Some people may think …" Edward left the sentence unfinished and looked at the passing scenery. Coming home means coming to terms with a decade spent in a child army fighting against his own people. A neighbour kidnapped alongside him was forced to kill his parents.
A balmy breeze ushered in the morning on which Edward was returning to live in his village after 14 years... read more:
