They mothered Kony’s children

By Chris Ocowun     

FLORENCE Adokorach has endured a long and traumatic journey from school to the bush and back to school. Suffering is all she has known since that morning in 1992 when rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) raided Akonyibedo village in Bungatira sub-county, Gulu district and captured her and other children. She was just 10 years old.

As soon as Adokorach reached puberty, Kony forced her into serving as his wife.

After 12 years in captivity, Adokorach escaped. “I walked for a week from Palabek in Kitgum to Pajule in Pader. I then went to the army barracks with my daughter, Amono because the UPDF had already rescued my son, Ayella.”

Today, 27-year-old Adokorach is in S5 at Gulu Central High School. however, she is scared that without a source of income she cannot provide for her two children. She has difficulties paying hers and her children’s fees. “Sponsoring Children Uganda is giving us only half the tuition.”

She lives with her old parents, who cannot support her.

As if the economic hardship is not bad enough, Adokorach has to endure stigmatisation by the community. They call her “dwogo paco”, a phrase with negative connotation referring to those who have returned home from the bush. “Others say that after killing other people’s children, we are living peacefully with our children.”

Adokorach is not alone. At least 26 girls who were forcefully ‘married’ to Kony have returned home. Many were counselled by World Vision, Gulu Support the Children Organisation and Rachelle Rehabilitation Centre in Lira before being reintegrated into the community.

The returnees who initially settled in Gulu, Lira, Kitgum and Pader have had to leave their villages for peri-urban areas to find income-generating activities. Majority of them are living in rented mud-and-wattle houses. Some of them told Saturday Vision they were not receiving assistance from either the Government or non governmntal organisations so they had difficulties in paying fees and feeding their children.

The situation is worsened by the fact that men do not want to marry women who bore Kony’s children, the most dreaded Ugandan. However, there are some lucky few women who were re-married.

Evelyn Amony, is one of them. She has three children from Kony. She is taking a tailoring course at Kampala Pentecostal Church – Gulu.

“I had done a tailoring course sponsored by Rachelle Rehabilitation Centre, but I did not get a sewing machine.

“So I enrolled with KPC for the same course to get a sewing machine,” she said.

Amony lives with her three children Abia, 11; Alanyo, 7; and Aloyoto, 4 in Olai-Long village in Gulu. She says the landlord is good, but other tenants look at those who returned from the bush as rebels who killed their relatives. “They used to refer to our children as demon-possessed. But now they have stopped due to the intervention of the landlady.”

Nighty Arach, another of Kony’s former wives, who has remarried, says she was welcomed at her home in Atyak-Palukere, when she returned in August 2004. “My husband and I live with my eight-year-old son, Gum, whom I had Kony.” The Italian organisation AVSI, is paying her son’s tuition.

Arach was abducted by the rebels when she was 14 years old in 1995.

Margaret Abalo has three of Kony’s children namely Ting, 12; Nyeko, 9 and Okene 4, with whom she lives in Gulu town. She fled a land dispute at their home at Ogoro-Pii in Lamogi sub-county, Amuru district.

“I am doing tailoring work with KPC but they have not yet paid us,” Abalo said.

She adds, “Since I returned from the bush in 2005, Kony’s relatives have not come to see the children. I am looking after these children with the help of good Samaritans. St. Monica Girls’ Tailoring Centre is sponsoring my son, Nyeko at Unifat Primary School.”

Her only complaint is that the community complicates their lives by reminding them of the past.

Given such treatment it is not surprising that Cecilia Akullu, who escaped from Kony in 2005 after getting children with him, returned to the bush only a year later.


Love in the bush

Angela, a 19-year-old mother now under the care of Rachelle Rehabilitation Centre, Lira, says she was abducted by LRA when she was 12 and repeatedly raped. She says at the time she was in the bush, Kony had 52 wives and that many young abducted girls became his sex slaves once they reached puberty.

Angela, a short, soft-spoken woman, guesses that she was Kony’s forty-sixth ‘wife’. Today Angella is the mother of Kony’s three-year-old son. She says Kony loves his children and names them according to circumstance in which they were born.

The view that Kony loves his children is reinforced by other former abductees. Kony’s children are said to receive preferential treatment. They are given better food and receive primary school education from abducted teachers. “While we were in Sudan, Kony’s children and his commanders were going to school. They ate food from Juba. The rest of us only ate the beans and millet we cultivated,” says Bernard Ochan, a former abductee.

“During droughts, the rest of us had to attack Sudanese villages to get food, while Kony’s children continued to be well-fed,” the 17-year-old added.

However, the rebel chief has sired so many children that he doesn’t know some of them. Ochora narrates that during the 2006 Juba talks, he took Kony’s son, Lubagatek. “When I told him, ‘Joseph, this is your son’, he could not believe though he was happy to see him,” Ochora said. Lubagatek, one of Kony’s elder sons, is in Senior Six vacation and lives in Gulu.