Confessions of an LRA girl soldier Thousands of young `wives' forced to fight
Ruth G's escape makes her one of few lucky ones
KAREN KLEISS TORONTO STAR
Ruth G. was lucky.
Rebel soldiers simply plucked the 8-year-old from a road outside her village, while she was walking alone to get water.
Other child abductees were forced to use pangas � curved, broad-blade machetes normally used for farming in northern Uganda � to kill other villagers.
Sometimes, they were even told to hack members of their families to death.
Most of the children were abducted from the fields and dragged into their burning villages. Ruth G. was almost an afterthought: The rebels had all they needed when they snatched her.
That was the deceptively peaceful beginning of her initiation into the rebel army, says Dyan Mazurana, a senior researcher at Tufts University and co-author of a myth-shattering new report � Where Are The Girls? � published by Montreal-based Rights and Democracy.
Ruth told Mazurana her story in an extensive interview last year.
International observers and rights groups have long known that 300,000 children like her are forced to loot and kill for their captors every day in at least 30 conflicts worldwide.
Only recently, however, have researchers begun to understand just how many girl soldiers actually serve in rebel forces, and how very different their experiences are from those of boys.
Ruth was captured by the Lord's Resistance Army, a vicious rebel group that since 1986 has sought to overthrow the Ugandan government and establish a regime based on the biblical Ten Commandments.
At least 80 per cent of LRA fighters are abducted children, and Mazurana says about 30 per cent of those children are girls like Ruth.
That percentage, like the number of girl soldiers in most rebel and even some government armies, is far higher than previously thought.
"The general perception of a child soldier is a male," says Rachel Brett, representative at the Quaker U.N. Office in Geneva.
"People were assuming that the girls were anomalies. They weren't. We just didn't see what we didn't expect to see."
Though some girls tell researchers they "joined" the army willingly, experts caution that the vast majority make the decision in a context of war, domestic abuse and poverty that leaves them few other options.
Far more common is the unrelenting fear of abduction that, every night, drives 15,000 children from more than 300 northern Ugandan villages into the city of Gulu to sleep in safety, away from the rebel raids and abductions that take place in their villages.
Ruth did not escape abduction.
She was forced to join other captive children and march for four days to LRA camps in southern Sudan.
Trekking across the arid mountains of northern Uganda with little water and almost no food, carrying loot from the raids on her back, Ruth was fortunate again: She lived.
Had she fallen ill or been injured, like some other children, she would have been left to die.
She was lucky, too, because the journey was uneventful.
The LRA is usually attacked during these long trips, either by Sudanese rebel forces or by the Ugandan government army.
So, Ruth arrived alive at a place where she didn't want to stay.
But every rebel army has ways of making children stay.
She was tied up every night so she couldn't escape.
Other children, those who'd committed atrocities in their villages, believed they could never go back, so they didn't try.
Some of the captives were forced to break taboos � eating while the blood of their victims was still on their hands; drinking from their victims' skulls.
Mazurana says this makes the children feel they've committed unforgivable crimes and can never be part of normal society again.
Those who still try to escape, and are caught, are killed � by the other children.
So, they stay. And so the military initiation begins at the camp, where Ruth and the others are awakened at dawn and forced to jump, sing, clap and dance for hours, then to run through open fields and up rocky hills.
"There was beating during military training, lots of beating, and forced starvation," Ruth told Mazurana.
Given just one plate of beans and one cup of water to share among 25 kids, Ruth's group foraged for food to survive. After one month, she said, three of every four were dead. Only then did combat training begin.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- `Many assumptions
about girl soldiers . . . have been very wrong.'
Iain Levine, Human Rights Watch
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The children are expendable," says Mazurana. "Nobody survives this experience who isn't incredibly resilient. You've never seen such strong children."
Most reports on female abductees suggest they become nothing more than sex slaves and captive "wives." But Ruth, like nearly all girl soldiers, was trained for combat.
She learned to use an AK-47 and rocket propelled grenade launchers. She served as a front-line fighter, though she never was given advanced military training, like some other girls.
All were expected to fight when LRA camps were attacked.
Ruth was also a porter, a cook, a messenger and a teacher; girls in other armies are spies and even intelligence officers.
About half of female abductees in the LRA are forced to act as captive "wives." Ruth was one of them, too.
Like the other captive "wives," she had to be cleansed before sexual contact. In a long ritual, she smoothed shea nut butter on her head and chest before being given as a reward to her captor "husband."
After initiation, only the captor "husbands" are allowed to rape their captive "wives." Some have as many as 70 wives.
Consequently, Mazurana says, rates of sexually transmitted diseases among girl soldiers are staggering, while numbers among boys remain relatively low.
Nurses in northern Uganda report that nearly 80 per cent of the girls returning from captivity test positive for STDs.
And the need for health care is dire. The few STD facilities that do exist are simply not designed for girls, so few get treatment.
But in a way, Ruth was again lucky. Captor "husbands" can provide some protection from broader sexual violence, gang rape and sexual torture.
Because the stigma of rape is a harsh one, girls seldom report the crime. But like Ruth, most have no choice: Her two sons, both born in captivity, are proof that her captors raped her.
Mazurana says that about 30 per cent of abducted girls have babies while in captivity.
"Girl mothers are the most vulnerable of all these groups."
With this evidence of sexual abuse, few marketable skills and usually a sexually transmitted disease, they have few prospects for work or marriage � if, that is, they are lucky enough to escape.
Rebel groups seldom release captives at all, but when they do they almost never release girls.
"Their productive and reproductive labour really underpins the resistance armies," says Mazurana. "They don't want to let them go."
Some girls, however, do manage to escape.
Ruth was on the move with her commander-captor "husband" after Ugandan troops advanced north into southern Sudan to push the LRA from its bases there.
As she crossed into Uganda, a government gunship attacked.
In the chaos, Ruth told her oldest son, then just 4 years old, to hang on to her neck. She scooped her baby to her chest and told her co-wife's 2-year-old boy to climb on to her back.
And then she ran.
Six days later, she was sitting in a shelter telling Mazurana her story. She had taken her friend's son, she said, because they'd made a pact that if ever one had the opportunity to escape, she would take the other's children.
With no resources and little hope, Ruth said she would raise the little boy as her own.
Unlike most former girl abductees, she found her way into a rehabilitation clinic, where she took part in cleansing rituals, received counselling and was given clean clothes for herself and her children.
But, says Brett of the Quaker organization, "very, very few girls go through the demobilization process. They're just not recognized."
Adds Iain Levine, program director for Human Rights Watch and a noted authority on child soldiers: "Many assumptions about girl soldiers, until now, unfortunately, have been very wrong.
"The challenge now is to take the new research and turn it into real services on the ground."
Mazurana agrees.
"We need to respond to their desire to move forward with their lives," she says. "There's got to be explicit emphasis on getting these girls back."
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