Youths sit in the Baka Youth Training Centre in Gulu, Uganda, March 29, 2018. PHOTO | THOMSON REUTERS FOUNDATION
As a young boy chasing chickens on his parents’ farm in northern
Uganda, Louis Lakor dreamed of becoming a teacher. But when he finally
set foot in a local primary school, aged seven, it was as an armed
killer.
Abducted in a night raid, Lakor was forced to
become a child soldier with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebel
group, which terrorised northern Uganda for nearly two decades before
being driven out of the country by a military offensive in 2005.
Clutching a gun handed to him by his kidnappers, Lakor was ordered to “shoot everything you see”. He did.
“Otherwise
they would have killed me,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation some
20 years later, looking out on the lush countryside near his home
village of Awach, about 60 km south of Uganda’s border with South Sudan.
The
LRA, which has retreated to a jungle straddling the borders of South
Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African
Republic, was notorious for kidnapping children for use as fighters and
sex slaves.
It has massacred more than 100,000 people
and displaced 2 million over the past three decades, according to the
United Nations (UN), and its leader, Joseph Kony, has been indicted by
the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.
Poverty and stigma
A
year since a controversial decision by the United States and its
African partners to suspend the hunt for Kony, his victims are battling
poverty and stigma – while their tormentor remains at large.
Lakor
pointed to the school he attacked with a tormented look, amid fields
dotted with mud huts. One memory stands out from the four years he spent
as a rebel: he was coerced into killing his best friend when he lagged
behind on a long march.
But Lakor, now a smartly
dressed 27-year-old, is putting the horrors of the bush behind him, and
helping other ex-child soldiers learn skills, from vehicle repairs and
carpentry to tailoring and hairdressing, to get back on their feet.
“When
I train youths here, I tell them my story,” he said, pacing around his
noisy workshop where lanky teenagers welded, sawed and hammered.
“I tell where I came from - that I’m like them, that I’m still an orphan looking for a way to survive.”
Vengeful
The
UN estimates about 35,000 children were abducted by the LRA. Uganda
offered amnesty to fighters who abandoned LRA ranks and renounced
violence, paving the way for ex-child soldiers to start afresh - at
least in theory.
But stigma persists, said Sasha
Lezhnev, founding director of the Grassroots Reconciliation Group, which
runs projects bringing together villagers and former child soldiers.
“One
of the LRA’s strategies was to have their soldiers kill people in their
own communities so that they wouldn’t be able to go back,” he said.
Lakor
escaped from the LRA, aged 11, when his guards were distracted, and
returned to his village, where he found his parents were dead, and his
relatives and neighbours vengeful.
“I tried to stay in
the village but life was so hard,” he said. “There was no money ... no
food. I was living with my uncle but then he chased me away, saying he
cannot keep a rebel with him.”
While the government
gives aid to ex-rebels, the chairman of the Amnesty Commission, Justice
Peter Onega, said those who were less than 14 years old when they
escaped - the legal age of criminal responsibility - did not qualify.
“It’s the families who are supposed to look after them,” he said.
Lakor ended up on the streets of Gulu, the main town in the region, sleeping rough and begging for money.
He
had not eaten for two weeks when he was introduced to Peter Owiny Mwa,
owner of local business Baka General Motors, who decided to give him a
chance, at first employing him as a cleaner, and later training him as a
mechanic.
Even then, Lakor could not find work, with prospective employers dismissing him as a “rebel”.
His experience of hunger, hatred and destitution nearly drove him back into the hands of the LRA – this time willingly.
“You just ... get your gun, shoot people, rob people – that’s how we used to get money,” he said.
Lakor was stopped by Ugandan soldiers while trying to find the rebels’ base and sent back.
Reconciliation
In
2013, he returned to the workshop and proposed a different strategy to
Mwa: to let him train and employ ex-LRA youths, selling what they made
to keep the enterprise running.
Today, the workshop - a
cluttered open-air courtyard surrounded by dilapidated wooden buildings
- assists about 60 boys and girls each year, with little external
funding.
Lakor drives a motorcycle-taxi to keep up with the rent.
Ex-LRA
youths, some with limbs scarred by machete and gun wounds, sleep two to
a single, stained mattress on the floor of a filthy room with peeling
paint and no mosquito nets or glass in the windows.
Former child soldier Denis Ochen, 21, said he witnessed LRA prisoners being cooked alive and served up as food.
Another
student Godfrey Oloya, 18, was born in LRA captivity and still has a
bullet lodged in his arm, a “souvenir” of his escape under gunfire when
he was seven.
Back home, his mother could not afford to keep him in class, so he worked in the market with her, selling pancakes and shoes.
“When
I finish here, I want to drive a taxi or a lorry,” he said, as budding
mechanics trained on the rusting remains of a pea-green Volkswagen
Beetle from the 1970s.
While life remains hard, Lakor’s
work is producing results. Trainees have gone on to set up workshops in
their villages, enabling them to start new lives, despite years of
missed schooling.
For Lakor, his work is also a path to reconciliation - meaning he is once again welcomed in his home village.
One
of his former students is Nelson Luwum, the cousin of his murdered best
friend. Today, the 19-year-old works in a village car repair shop.
“Now
I call him my teacher,” Luwum said of Lakor, “but also a friend.”
Funding for this story was provided by the International Women’s Media
Foundation.
— Reported by Thomson Reuters Foundation.
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