1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2017
Summary
I have sisters, but I do not remember what they look like, so I cannot look for them … I was young when I was abducted. I came back when I was older and a mother.
LilyWhen I was released from the rehabilitation centre, I went to my village to find my father. He rejected me. He told me that I had just returned from the bush and I have that bush mentality so he doesn't want me.
RVLife at home is very hard. Even when you are humble, people talk about me wherever I go. They say, Obeno pa meni tek [the cloth your mother used to carry you with on her back was strong] because I managed to return yet other people's children died. Many people have died. They were killed. There is no way out.
AdongWhen the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Luis Moreno Ocampo announced his intention to focus his first investigation on the war crimes committed by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) against civilians in northern Uganda in January 2004, I was with a group of Uganda civil society activists in New York City. The delegation had arrived at the United Nations (UN) several days before the announcement, hoping to appeal to influential states and UN bodies who could pressure the Ugandan government to enter peace talks with the rebels and uphold an amnesty put in place some years earlier. One of the civil society members was Angelina Atyam, co-founder of the Concerned Parent's Association (CPA), a network composed of hundreds of parents whose children had been abducted by the LRA, and most of whom were still missing. Over the course of the long war, tens of thousands of children and young persons had been captured by the LRA and forced to porter, work, fight, kill or harm civilians, or even abduct other children and youth. Atyam's daughter had been one of them. She was gravely concerned by the prosecutor's announcement, and by how it might affect the chances of her daughter returning home safely. The indictment, she feared, would legitimate the military campaign; but when the army engaged the rebels, their bullets did not differentiate between a rebel and an abducted child. Even if she did return, Atyam asked me, how would the community view her?
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- Information
- Buried in the HeartWomen, Complex Victimhood and the War in Northern Uganda, pp. 1 - 30Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2016