Gender, Conflict and Reintegration in Uganda

Abducted Girls, Returning Women

Allen Kiconco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000402742
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores what happened when the tens of thousands of girls (now women) abducted by Lord's Resistance Army and inducted into their campaign of violence against the Ugandan government, returned home.

Drawing on extensive original research, the author considers the challenges which the formerly abducted women have encountered upon their return, the strategies which have been used to aid their reintegration, and the enduring stigma of abduction which they continue to suffer from. The author demonstrates that 'home', a place of hope and comfort, can also be a hostile environment which leaves formerly abducted women in precarious and vulnerable situations. The many shortcomings in the reintegration process have serious implications for the prospects of post-conflict reconstruction.

Analysing reintegration as a long-term and dynamic process which involves complex negotiations and exchanges between hosting communities and formerly abducted women, this book will be of interest to scholars, policymakers and practitioners working in the fields of post-conflict reconstruction, African politics and gender and conflict.

1 Introduction

Ten-year-old Akello¹ was abducted in the dark of night in 1994 during a Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) attack on her community in Pader District, Acoli,² a sub-region of northern Uganda. Akello lived with her parents, three brothers and other relatives. Her father was a government soldier, and her mother a nurse. She was in her fourth year of primary school, while her two elder brothers were in their sixth and seventh years, respectively. The one born after her was in his third year. On this fateful night, her father was away from home, attending to military work. Almost two decades later, Akello’s abduction is still fresh in her memory. ‘I was picked up alone, and the events of that night were tragic. First, the rebels shot dead my brother, whom I followed. My mother immediately collapsed and died because of the shock caused by the sight of my brother’s gruesome killing’.³

Four years later, in 1998, the LRA rebels also abducted eleven-year-old Acen. While the rebels abducted Akello asleep at night, Acen met them as she and her paternal uncle were returning from a visit to the adjacent Lira district. They were ambushed, and the rebels abducted her. Fourteen years later, Acen reflected on the events:

They [rebels] randomly sprayed the vehicle in which we were travelling with bullets. Then the car caught fire and was being reduced to ashes. I was thrown unconscious on the bank of the road by what I suspect to have been the force of the bomb that hit the moving car. I later regained my consciousness and woke up to a scorching heat emanating from the burning car. The rebels spotted me as I tried to crawl away into hiding. They instructed me to get up and walk with them into the bush. Most of the passengers died on the spot. I was abducted alongside some two other women from the car. I had never seen a car being attacked or people being killed as I witnessed on the day of my abduction. Some passengers who were already injured and wailing for help off the car were finished off by shooting as they struggled for their lives.⁴

As Acen followed her captors into the bushes of northern Uganda, ‘I thought about my uncle. I thought he had been killed in the car’. But the uncle was rescued, rushed to a hospital and survived, with some injuries.

Although Akello’s and Acen’s abductions were several years apart, they share important similarities. The rebels forced both girls to march to South Sudan, where they held them in different settlements/camps for several years. Upon arriving in Sudan, they underwent mandatory cleansing rituals to purify them of any potential witchcraft carried from their families. The girls then moved in with their captor-commanders to serve as ting ting, which is Acoli for a pre-adolescent girl working as a domestic servant. They spent the initial period of time in the LRA camps babysitting the commanders’ children and doing household work for their ‘wives’.

After their menarche, the girls were deemed ready for marriage and childbirth, so the commanders turned them into wives. Acen reflected on her experience of LRA forced marriage and stated, ‘When a girl comes of age [after menarche] in their [LRA] camp under a commander, the way it happened to me, it was the responsibility of the commander to decide what to do with them. He would either take you for himself or hand you to his escort to become his wife’. However, ‘in my case, the commander was killed for allegedly conspiring to kill LRA leader Joseph Kony. They then told me that no one knew the plans he had for my life’. Left in limbo, ‘I was accorded the liberty to look for a man for myself. I then courted a fighter who later became my husband in the year 2000. It was through mutual agreement and consent’. As his only wife, Acen and this junior fighter had a child before he died on the battlefield. Now a widow, Acen had to find another man ‘to support my life in the LRA’. She married another junior fighter and had two more children before he also died on the battlefield.⁵

In contrast to Acen, Akello’s experience was especially brutal, as she tried to resist. One day, her captor-commander:

came telling me that I should become a housewife. I had never been told about such a thing before or what takes place there [marriage]. I was shocked when he came later that night to pick me up from our room, where I slept with other minors. He carried me to his bedroom, where he raped me. I never thought he was going to rape me because I had never been told that girls are forced into relationships and sex in such a manner.⁶

This rape initiated Akello’s journey as this commander’s 16th wife. She later conceived a child, before Ugandan army forces killed him during an ambush in early 2002.

Akello and Acen were forced to serve as ‘wives’ to these men. They also received several months of basic military training ‘on how to stage, and escape from ambushes, dismantling and reassembling the gun after cleaning, target shooting and parade’, as Acen reported. Akello eventually took up arms, fighting alongside her commander husband. Indeed, she progressed through the ranks and was accorded the rank of corporal, commanding a crew of eleven fighters. Meanwhile, Acen performed a supportive role in the LRA forces, executing different missions including ‘carrying military weapons and hiding in the bush and on other days going to loot food from civilian communities’.⁷

In 2002 Akello, a few months pregnant, escaped, taking along with her eight members of her squad. Eight years later, in 2010, Acen also escaped with her three children. Following eight and twelve years in LRA captivity, respectively, their time and suffering with the rebels finally ended. Having been abducted as girls, they exited the LRA as women and mothers. They now faced the difficult task of returning home to their communities and re-establishing familial/kinship relations, along with additional challenges involved in becoming economically independent.

Initially, both benefitted from Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programmes to access counselling, resettlement packages, skills training opportunities, family tracing and community reunion. Akello returned to find that her father had died, leaving a mentally unstable elder brother and a younger brother struggling to survive on their own in Gulu town.⁸ Kitgum Concerned Women’s Association (KICWA), a reception and rehabilitation centre in Kitgum town, reunited her with her grandmother in an Internally Displaced People’s (IDP) camp in the district.⁹ However, life back at home became problematic; she struggled to survive life in the camp, owing to stigma and scarcity. After giving birth, Akello sought refuge with her paternal aunt in Kitgum town. However, stigmatisation and pressure from the aunt and extended family relatives to enter into a marriage exacerbated her situation. Akello remembered that:

It was so painful for my aunt to push me into marriage. She used to challenge me to find a man to marry, saying it was bad to stay home or wait. She used to say all her daughters had been married off asking me why I was waiting. I felt she was forcing me against my will into getting married, but I never paid attention to the pressure.¹⁰

With nowhere else to go, Akello continued to ignore the pressure and stigmatisation. However, the aunt persisted. Akello reflected further on the events:

Seeing that I was never mindful of what she was saying, she started saying people were speaking a lot about her for keeping someone who returned from the bush. She said she was afraid that people would kill her someday for keeping me in her home. She even advised that I find an alternative place to live. I had to leave her home.¹¹

Akello traced her younger brother and relocated to Gulu town to live with him. She later got married in Gulu town and had two more children. However, her husband subjected her to abuse, forcing her to abandon their three-year marriage.

Acen was reunited with her family in Lamwo district via the Gulu Support the Children Organisation, another rehabilitation centre in Gulu town. During her captivity, her parents had separated. Her father’s job as a government soldier led him to Jinja district with his new family. Her mother also remarried and moved to her new husband’s community in Lamwo district. Acen and her children were reunited with her mother and stepfather. However, like many women returning from LRA captivity, they received poor treatment in this household. They felt obliged to move once again and began living with her paternal grandmother in a neighbouring community.

Like Akello, Acen found life back home difficult. She reported:

there was no support and encouragement in the community. Even my parents/relatives never sat me down to guide me on how to forget the past and move on. No debriefing and no one would come to converse with me. Even those I considered great friends never came to spend time with me. I think this is why coping was so hard for me.¹²

Indeed, life back home ‘made me very afraid, and I wanted to find a new home for myself [marriage]. I considered moving away to live with a distant brother in another community or finding a man who would accept me with my children’.¹³ Because ‘I was presented with a situation of rejection …, I felt useless and was forced to reflect on life in the LRA, where I would have food in my luggage packed ready for use anytime I wanted’. The situation forced her to find a man, less than a year after returning home. They got married, and she relocated to his home in a neighbouring community.

I met Acen in 2012 in her new household, two years after she had left the LRA. I found the now 29-year-old mother of four children in a marriage where the husband and in-laws stigmatised and abused her. Like many of her peers, she enrolled in a training programme to learn tailoring. However, without the means to buy a sewing machine, she did not benefit from the programme because she could not practise her trade in Kitgum town, which forced her to return to her rural community in Lamwo district. There she relied on the harvest from subsistence farming to sustain herself and her family.

In 2013 I met Akello in Gulu town, eleven years after she left the LRA. The now 28-year-old was living as a single mother of three, taking care of her children and other dependants. Having benefited from skills training services provided by KICWA, she had found work with a local organisation as a professional tailor. In this tailoring job she earned sufficient money to sustain herself and her family. As a woman, the clan elders denied her access to the clan land in her home community in Pader, which forced her to buy a piece of land on the outskirts of Gulu town. In 2013 she was planning to construct a family house on this land.

The central argument

These two stories have many features in common with the experiences of other formerly abducted women in northern Uganda.¹⁴ Gender ideologies and patriarchal values played key roles in ensuring that women and girls were left vulnerable in numerous ways prior to the conflict and their abduction. These values similarly defined their experiences of abduction, sexual violence and forced marriage and further defined their opportunities when they returned home as unmarried women, mothers and formerly abducted persons.

Returning home meant returning to patriarchal communities in northern Uganda, where men hold the greatest power, moral authority and access to assets, including in the family. In these settings, structures are designed to benefit men and constrain women’s life decisions, choices and opportunities. Indeed, Akello and Acen reunited with communities that attach violence mainly to masculinity, and their personal histories of military recruitment challenged numerous social, cultural and spiritual norms. Notably, communities viewed them as having violated traditional gender norms and as a threat to the patriarchal order. They were characterised as lacking personal and feminine qualities of purity, innocence, peacefulness and obedience. Now their communities viewed and classified them as having lower social status, suggesting that abduction and sexual violence placed them outside the Acoli social harmony (Porter, 2017). Yet it was in these contexts that their reintegration had to take place.

While their families and communities welcomed their return, at least initially, there was often limited appreciation or empathy regarding their rebel experiences, creating tensions between them and their communities. They experienced what Goffman (1963) terms stigma. The ‘never-abducted’ populations, as I call them, viewed them with suspicion and fear, and placed them on the periphery of community life. This exclusion denied...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Culture, Spirituality and Cleansing Rituals
• 3. Abduction and Forced Marriage in the Context of Conflict
• 4. Stigmatisation not Reintegration
• 5. Post-Captivity Marriage
• 6. The Process of Returning Home
• 7. Conclusion
• Index