"... �I knew he was dead. I could not cry - I simply couldn�t for fear of breaking down... the time he fell, we couldn�t stop. We had to carry on because we had to cross that bridge. We dedicated our very souls to the NRA, to Museveni, but it is all for nothing,� she says. ..."
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Subject: ugnet_: CHILD SOLDIERS THAT MUSEVENI USED SPEAK UP
Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2003 18:53:14 -0500
China, War Child
Date : 02 September 2001 Producer : Susan Puren Presenter : Ruda Landman Genre : Africa
At only 24 years of age, she has long lost count of those she'd seen dying in the name of freedom. In fact, she can't even recall how many of those she'd killed herself. It's a summer's day in Denmark and at the world-famous Tivoli in Copenhagen people are streaming through the gates. Apart from the Danes, tourists from all over come here for some fun and entertainment. But this visitor is no tourist, she speaks Danish and lives here.
Looking so relaxed and happy, no one would believe that for most of her life she'd been caught up in a spiral of violence in Africa. At only 24 years of age, she has long lost count of those she'd seen dying in the name of freedom. In fact, she can't even recall how many of those she'd killed herself.
"It's hard to say, and I usually say to myself, 'It's not me who has killed them, it's the gun'. That makes it a little easier for me to go on with my life," she says.
It's these horrid memories that she's now put in writing - in what's probably the first book of its kind, written by a former child soldier in Uganda. One evening about 16-years ago, an eight-year-old girl got lost in the bush near her home in western Uganda. She came across two men who offered the tired child a place to sleep. When she woke up, her whole life had changed.
"When I woke up there were different ages, younger than me, older than me. I heard kids... someone training... 'left, right, left, right'. That's what it was - a beautiful game. I couldn't wait to join in," she explains.
It was 1984 and in Uganda the National Resistance Army of the young Yoweri Museveni had been fighting for three years against the tyranny that the country's president, Milton Obote, had unleashed upon the Ugandan nation.
She soon realised that it was not beautiful and not a game: "He took me out of the parade and asked me my name. I told him my name and he couldn't pronounce it and then I looked down and he said to me, 'Look at me you, with your small Chinese eyes'. I looked at him and then he said, 'China left right, China left right'."
And from that day on, her name was China: "I wasn't the only one with China, for example. There were others with names of 'Suicide', 'Chuck Norris', 'Rambo', 'Strike Commando', and you feel with that name that you can kill the entire battalion alone."
China had inadvertently landed herself in the NRA - an African rebel movement of which some soldiers were barely eight-years old. "We were told that the gun was our mother, is our friend, is our everything," she says.
Many of these children were orphans - their parents had been massacred by the Obote government's troops or thrown into jail. For five years, as they were progressing towards the capital, Kampala, the NRA simply just took these children into their ranks. And because so many of them were destitute, they had no other option - they had to become soldiers.
Those taken captive by the NRA were not only tortured. Back at the camp the commanders would order them to dig their own graves and then they were told how they would be killed.
"Some of the kids wanted to practice by using a kakumbi to hit them on the forehead and the back of the head. That was a terrible death because you could see the whole forehead going inside, but the person still not dead. And then a stronger guy would come and finish the men," she says.
It's hard to imagine, but the eight-year old China was exposed to these horrors before she took part in her first battle, at a time when she was still physically too small to carry a gun. What confused the child most was that she was feeling sorry for the enemy.
"But I had to get rid of that, somehow to say, 'I am now a killer because this is what I came to do here'," she says.
After surviving two major battles, China and her fellow child soldiers were taken into the NRA's 5th Battalion. The Entebbe International Airport was their next target. But first they had to cross a narrow bridge called Katonga - a mission many thought to be suicidal. Among the fallen on that day was China's best friend, a nine-year-old boy called Strike Commando.
"I knew he was dead. I could not cry - I simply couldn't for fear of breaking down... the time he fell, we couldn't stop. We had to carry on because we had to cross that bridge. We dedicated our very souls to the NRA, to Museveni, but it is all for nothing," she says.
In January 1986 the NRA took over Uganda's government. Six months earlier a military coup had seen Obote ousted and Tito Okello Ludwa coming to power. The NRA leader Yoweri Museveni had hardly been inaugurated as president before the retreating Ludwa forces were massing on the Sudanese border in the north.
"Museveni said that there was a life with no gun for us kids, a life where we would go to school. So much promise," she says.
Life in the army only got worse: "Our instructors had been given our souls and if we wanted them back we would have to pay a heavy price. The older girls had more problems than any other soldier because they had to pay with their own bodies. It's terrible, a 12-year old to sleep with a 37-year-old man. And you ask yourself, 'Doesn't Museveni see this or hear about this or think about it?'. I blame him because he's responsible for having women in his movement, for having children in his movement. It hurts me that I loved him, that I hated civilians talking bad about him.
In 1991, at the age of only 14, China gave birth to a baby boy, but within months she was forced to go back to war - this time to join the Ugandan forces in the north of the country. Lt Col Moses Drago Kaima - the baby's father - wanted to support his child so the boy went to live with his family. But then Drago suddenly died. The last time China saw her son was eight years ago. By then she had become a hardened soldier and had risen to the rank of sergeant. But she was also a young woman. She was 17-years old. One day she rejected the sexual advances of a senior officer. In return, he accused her of selling guns to the enemy.
"I don't know about those guns, but he said I'd taken them," she says. Threatened with death and torture, she knew she had to escape the country. For this purpose, she obtained an illegal Ugandan passport with an American visa listing her as a honoured guest to the Special Olympics in Atlanta in 1995.
She had already paid for her ticket in Uganda, but before she could pick it up she needed a letter from the American Embassy in neighbouring Kenya. Like most embassies, the one in Nairobi had some questions that needed to be answered.
She decided to tell the truth: "Then I started to cry. that was the first time I'd cried. I showed him my photos where I'm in a military uniform and told him my story. How old I was when I went to the army... everything. But after looking at those photos over and over, I saw him take a stamp and he cancelled my visa."
She knew she couldn't stay in Kenya. She had to get as far as possible from Uganda. Another option was to leave with an old friend from the army - a man called Boxer - and he was going south. For the next 10 to 11 days, China and Boxer travelled by bus from Kenya, through Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe, to South Africa, where they arrived in August 1995.
They spent the first night in a seedy hotel in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, and applied the next day for refugee status at the Department of Home Affairs in Braamfontein. She joined the queue of hundreds of people who come here every day from all over the continent to seek asylum in South Africa. One wouldn't think that the officials who work here would remember individuals, but they do.
"Her big problem was that she was from Uganda and at that stage we didn't know much about that country. There was the possibility that she could be turned down if we didn't have the background," says Thinus van Jaarsveld, the immigration officer who interviewed China on arrival.
Little did he realise then what a significant role he would eventually play in her future.
"I spoke to an Afrikaner. He was a good, good man. When he helped us, I asked Boxer, 'What do you give people like this?' and then Boxer told me, 'Flowers'. The next time I went back, I already knew the difference between what was happening between South African blacks and South African whites. But then I couldn't find where was the racist. In a very short time we had our visas, our permits to stay in South Africa."
Within a day, China got a job at the hotel where she and Boxer were staying. When China was 18-years old the trauma of the previous 10 years started taking its toll. She lost her job at the hotel and moved from place to place, at one point even pretending to be Muslim in order to get a job with a Muslim family.
After four difficult years in South Africa the yearning for her country and her people became too much to bear and she just had to make contact with other Ugandans. It was a moment of weakness that she would regret forever...
She accepted an invitation to a party at the Ugandan Embassy and from there she was abducted by three men thought to be members of the Ugandan Secret Service. The men wanted information about a Ugandan rebel group with offices in Johannesburg. They held China at an unknown place in Gauteng, where they tortured her for the next six months.
"They wanted to take me back to Uganda they said. I was weak, having bread and water. So when we got to the traffic lights I managed to jump out of the car and run," says China.
The only safe place she could think of was with Thinus van Jaarsveld at Home Affairs: "The day that she arrived here I saw these marks on her... on her body and her face when she jumped out of the vehicle to get away from the people from her country who took part in the alleged attempted kidnapping."
"I told him what had happened and I will never forget the expression on his face. He's an incredible man, I'd say... he took my hand and took me to another office and told me to tell that lady everything," recalls China.
Six months of torture and rape had left China with a pregnancy, which ended in a therapeutic abortion. Shortly thereafter, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in South Africa offered to relocate her to Denmark.
The last two years in Denmark have brought some healing: "Denmark has helped me clear my head, take out all those strange ideas I had about people. It's like they have tried to share my pain. I have come to realise that there are so many people in the world who care. I don't work and give to Denmark - they have given me so much. Thanks is not enough because they have made me find myself."
And it's this new life that gave her the courage to write her book: "I am now in a democratic country. I feel free like a bird and I taste the air I breathe. Why should I have to hide? If I don't write this because Museveni is going to kill me, as I hear, then no children or no justice, will be ever done. We need to protect the children, because I have been there and it's hell."
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: While every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, Carte Blanche or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. This transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.
The Mulindwas communication group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Uganda is in anarchy"
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