CAPE TO CAIRO - 13

Faith Kitara is a courageous young woman. Without any outward display of emotion, she is telling a German school class in Grimma via telephone about the terrible things she experienced while being held captive by rebels belonging to the Lord's Resistance Army. The telephone call is part of an Africa project run by Germany's Centre for Political Education. Yet when she starts to explain how the rebels forced her to shoot a pregnant woman - she had the choice between shooting or using a machete, tears well up in her eyes. I too found myself swallowing hard as she handed the telephone back to me.

"... collapsed from exhaustion were shot"
Faith was 13 when she was kidnapped. She was on her way to spend the school holidays with her grandmother when the rebels attacked the bus she was travelling in. Those passengers who were not shot on the spot were taken by the "Lord's Resistance Fighters" into the bush. Faith remembers weary marches without a break during which she and the other children ate leaves and drank their own urine. Those who collapsed from exhaustion were shot, either by the rebels themselves or by fellow prisoners - a favourite initiation rite practised by the LRA. Faith was then allocated to one of the commanders as his "wife" - an euphemism for months of sexual abuse. At the age of 14 she was lucky that she only caught syphilis and not AIDS and did not become pregnant like so many of the soldiers' "wives".

She was able to escape during an attack on the rebels by the Ugandan army. After spending four days lost in the bush, she was found by Ugandan soldiers and after being interrogated was handed over to the relief organisation World Vision in the provincial capital Gulu. She was given medical treatment and psychological counselling and is now learning once again to cope with town life.

"I didn't recognise her !"
Today Faith (seen below with her father) is a lively young woman - "call me on my mobile phone" - who has started going to school again. She would like to make teaching her career. She is also an enthusiastic supporter of World Vision's drama group. Her plays have one central message: "Don't ostracise child soldiers, instead welcome us back into the community when we return from the bush". Faith is speaking from experience. When she returned home after sixteen months in captivity her father (her mother had been killed by the rebels in the meantime) could not believe that it was his daughter standing in front of him. "She looked like a dog, she was injured all over, I didn't recognise her". But disgust quickly gave way to outpourings of joy. "We all wept because we were so happy to have her back", David Kitara recalls. Other children were less fortunate. Their parents turned them away.

A conversation with Samuel, the child psychologist with World Vision, put me off food for the whole day. He showed me drawings (left) done by the children in which they try to come to terms with their trauma. He tells me about pregnant women whose stomachs were split open and of children forced to play volleyball with decapitated heads.

What is the Lord's Resistance Army and why does it take such malicious delight in raiding schools and villages and maltreating children in the worst manner imaginable? In the mid-1980s, one Alice Lakwena founded a pseudo-Christian sect called Holy Spirit Movement. When Yoweri Museveni came power, members of the opposition gravitated towards this sect. Then one day it was outside the gates of Jinja, two hours by car from the capital Kampala. In the meantime the gang -- by now numbering some 2000 rebels -- had changed its name to Lord's Resistance Army. It is led by a psychopath called Joseph Kony who wants to topple the government and replace the established order with a new Uganda based on the ten Commandments. Is it perverse, cynical or just plain mad that a man of God so brazenly transgresses the admonition "Thou shalt not kill!" ?

Mediation needed to resolve the conflict
Ugandan president Museveni once referred to Kony disparagingly as a tick. "But the bite of a tick can kill" says Michael, manager of World Vision. "It is a long and terrible death". More and more Ugandans are asking why the government troops that are receiving military aid from the United States haven't succeeded in putting down the rebels. It's even been suggested that the President isn't really interested in resolving the conflict. A number of his generals have become very wealthy amid all the chaos. Others point an accusing finger at the United States. The instability in the north gives the Americans the perfect excuse to sell weapons to the SPLA rebels in neighbouring southern Sudan. Whatever the truth of this may be, it is certain that the Sudanese government is continuing to support the LRA in order to destabilise the Uganda government. This is war by proxy and it can be ended only by mediation through the African Union or the IGAD (Intergovernmental Authority on Development ) which groups Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, Uganda and, nominally, Somalia. So far however, President Museveni has turned down all offers of mediation, even though, ironically enough, he himself is mediating in the conflict in Burundi.

A social time bomb
The war in northern Uganda is now in its 18th year. "We are all hostages here", one man tells me. The pattern of life as hostage can be witnessed every evening at 6 p.m. when as many as four thousand children flood into Gulu from outlying villages (right). They are seeking protection: a kilometre long procession of small figures in torn clothing, some have sleeping mats balanced on their heads. They sleep in guarded, but overcrowded, camps (left) and the next morning they walk home again, a journey which can take up three hours. They miss out on schooling, a social time bomb for Uganda.

Crying out in indignation
On the afternoon of my third day in Gulu, I meet its Catholic archbishop, John Bapiste Odama (below). He is chairman of the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative, a coalition of Muslims and Christians and constantly travelling, mediating between the government and the rebels. In June when the LRA were terrorising Gulu and the surrounding villages, Odama symbolically spent a night with the children of Gulu out in the open air. "We were crying out in indignation", says Odama in his residence on the outskirts of Gulu. "Rebels - why are your killing us; government - why are you not helping us, you in the West - why have you not come to our aid?!"

"would poison them when they got to Gulu"
Back in World Vision, a group of new arrivals are waiting outside the office of Samuel, the social worker. The young men were freed two weeks ago, but they are unwilling to talk about their experiences. Later Michael tells me that rebels were able to dispel any ideas the children might have had about fleeing - initially at least - by telling them that World Vision and other aid organisations would poison them when they got to Gulu. Brainwashing could hardly be more perfidious.

"She has a future"
My time in Gulu is now over. This afternoon I catch the plane to Kampala. There a truck is waiting that will take me to Nairobi. I say goodbye to Faith. "She has a future", her father says, telling her in the same breath to work hard at her studies. Psychologist Samuel is also optimistic. "Once the children start wanting to go to school again, then they're over the worst". Faith is well on her way to recovering from her traumatic experiences. She has already taken part in a traditional northern Ugandan Acholi return ceremony. She trod with her foot on a raw egg which had been placed on the threshold, driving out the evil spirits of the past. Before she finished her telephone conversation with the school students in Grimma, she had one request for far-away Germany. "Pray for me and the children of Gulu".

Gulu, 18th December 2003.