Because many Uganda men are Gays.
EM
On the 49th Parallel
Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni and Dr. Kiiza Besigye Uganda is in anarchy"
Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi
"Pamoja na Yoweri Museveni na Dk. Kiiza Besigye Uganda ni katika machafuko"
From: [email protected]
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Gook
Sent: Sunday, February 16, 2014 2:14 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: {UAH} Remembering NRA's massacre at Namokora
Too painful even to read it! Why sodomize the people? Why rape men as though
there were no..?
Sent from Gook's iPatch!
"What you are we once were, what we are you shall be!"
An inscription on the walls of a Roman catacomb.
On 16 feb 2014, at 03:45, Ocen Nekyon <[email protected]> wrote:
http://www.monitor.co.ug/SpecialReports/Remembering-NRA-s-massacre-at-Namokora/-/688342/2207978/-/t842a4/-/index.html
By Jimmy Kwo
Posted Sunday, February 16 2014 at 02:00
In Summary
Survivors say government soldiers shot indiscriminately at the captives,
killing more than 35 instantly and those who jumped off the truck were followed
and also killed.
He was accused of being a rebel; he wasn’t. For having committed a crime of
“resembling a rebel”, he nearly paid with his own dear life. But he could have
still paid dearly for his life even if he didn’t look like the alleged rebel,
or so it seemed.
Sunday, August 17 to Tuesday, August 19, 1986, are days that will forever
remained imprinted in the memory of Ventorino Okidi, 73, a resident of Palameny
Central village, Paluo parish in Omiya Anyima Sub-county, Kitgum District.
Until then, he was a dedicated teacher who looked forward to imparting
knowledge to the children who went to Lajok Ogayo Primary School. He taught in
the same school as his younger brother, Marshal Otto, the head teacher at the
time.
That Friday, the school never ended normally. Gunshots heard in the area of
Pella, a village a short distance from the school, prompted the school
authorities to disperse the pupils. “We sent back the children home early that
day telling them to return on Monday only if the bell is rung,” Okidi recalls.
By then, soldiers of the 35th Battalion of the National Resistance Army (NRA),
who had just arrived in the area shortly after the overthrow of Gen Tito
Okello’s government in January that same year, were combing the bushes in
search of the fleeing remnants of Uganda National Liberation Army (UNLA)
soldiers. The battalion was reportedly under the command of one Capt Matovu.
Unknown to them, the NRA soldiers camped in the vicinity of Omiya Anyima
trading centre the entire weekend. In the dead of one of the nights, they
stormed the home of one Obotto, a teacher in the same school as Okidi, whom
they allegedly instructed to go ring the bell Monday morning so the children
could come to class.
“When we heard the bell ringing, we were puzzled since there were rumours that
NRA soldiers were around and people were scared. But my brother (Otto) and I
took off to school to go find out,” Okidi recalls. But as they approached the
school compound, they spotted footmarks left by the boots of the NRA soldiers,
and they started getting worried; more so when they failed to hear the normal
noise made by school children.
They bumped on Obotto and Amos, a Senior Four student of Lango College in Lira
who was on long vacation at home at the time, trying to scoop sugar that had
scattered on the ground at the home of a clergy who had fled on sighting the
soldiers as he took tea.
Otto, the head teacher then suggested to them to proceed to the school, where
upon reaching they confirmed the pupils had not yet turned up. Shortly after,
11 soldiers emerged out of nowhere and proceeded straight to where they were
seated, moving in a curve formation and eventually engulfed them in the middle.
“They asked us in Kiswahili who we were and what we were doing there. We told
them who we were but they again asked where the pupils were if indeed we were
teachers. They ordered us to produce our identity cards,” Okidi reminisced.
When they did so, Amos was arrested with the claims that he was a rebel from
Lira hiding in Kitgum. Pained by the kicks and slaps heaped on the innocent
student, Otto tried to stop the soldiers telling them the boy was not a rebel,
but Obotto restrained him saying he was inviting trouble to himself.
As they walked Amos for a short distance, one of the soldiers who appeared to
be their commander ordered that all be arrested but to their surprise, they
handed Obotto his identity card and told him to return home. “They tied some of
my colleagues ‘three-piece’ with ropes (tying both arms tightly behind the back
in such a manner that the chest protrudes outwards, producing searing pain)
while I was also tied with my hands behind me, but raised up in the air,” Okidi
recalls.
“Up to now I still feel pain in my neck especially when I try to bend,” Okidi
says about 27 years later since the nasty incident.
It was at this point that the soldiers started accusing him of being “Ojuku”,
as Stephen Odyek, the then renowned UNLA Captain was popularly called. He is
better remembered for keeping at bay marauding Karimojong warriors who sneaked
to Acholi to rustle livestock in the early 1980s.
He was also one of the UNLA fighters who put up a spirited resistance to the
advances of NRA to northern Uganda shortly after the takeover. Okidi, like the
late Ojuku, wore long bushy beards, perhaps the reason for the NRA soldiers’
suspicion.
Their identity cards were removed from them and they were ordered to stay under
a tamarind tree at the trading centre from about 9:30 am to 2:30 pm as they
waited for a vehicle from Kitgum Town to take them to Namokora.
“As we sat, about 10 other civilians were arrested and brought to our group.
Among them was a woman called Atto who emerged from a grass-thatched hut in the
company of some soldiers. Judging from her appearance, it was obvious that she
was raped,” Okidi said.
They were later sorted out, the elderly were released, while the able-bodied
-about eight of them-had their hands tied up behind their backs while at the
same time were connected to each other using ropes. The soldiers got words that
the vehicle would not be coming for them so they ordered them to trek towards
Namokora, more than 10kms away.
Despite being tied thus not enabling easy movement, the soldiers further forced
them to carry along heavy luggage consisting of household effects like sacks of
edibles and livestock, which the soldiers looted from the villagers. When they
reached Pella, a village midway between Omiya Anyima and Namokora, they sighted
some fleeing civilians crossing the main road towards Onyala Hills to hide.
The soldiers, thinking those could be rebels planning on ambushing them,
stopped the captives as they moved cautiously in a curve movement towards the
centre of activities.
Reaching there, they fired at the fleeing civilians who ran into disarray. It
was difficult to tell if there were casualties.
“During the shooting, four captives who were perhaps tied loosely took off and
succeeded in escaping. When they returned and found out, they straight away
blamed me; that I was the one who untied the escapees since I was a soldier
(Ojuku),” recalled Okidi adding he was beaten in retaliation.
Hell in place of God
Luckily, a military truck they were waiting for arrived from Kitgum Town and
carried them for the remainder of the journey. They reached Namokora at about
6pm and were herded into the Catholic chapel, where they joined other civilians
arrested earlier. More than 80 of them crammed in the rather small church hall,
competing for oxygen and fighting heat.
“When we arrived, the soldiers shouted to one another in Kiswahili that ‘today
we have arrested Ojuku’ as the excited soldiers came in large number to look at
me,” Okidi says. In the ensuing excitement, one of the soldiers stubbed his
private parts with a bayonet, piercing and injuring his testicles in the
process.
The now elderly Okidi says he had hope that he would survive or at least not be
mistreated if he met the overall commander, since he was the ad hoc committee
secretary for security, the precursor of the Resistance Council then, and the
two of them knew each other.
Shortly after the beatings, Capt Matovu reportedly asked him if he was a
soldier, to which he answered in the negative. That was the only word he would
hear from the man he thought would rescue him as he disappeared into the night.
As if the acts of torture and inflicting life-threatening injuries on him were
not enough, that Monday night, two soldiers came into the church hall and
dragged him outside and performed sodomy on him in turns. “Yes, they did it to
me,” he said without much change of emotion on his face.
Perhaps the many years that have elapsed since that nasty experience has numbed
his sense of shame. “I still have difficulties up to today when passing stool;
I don’t need to take long otherwise I would feel a lot of excruciating pain,”
Okidi reveals.
On Tuesday morning, his brother Marshal Otto, together with other captives, was
sent to fetch water from a nearby stream. When they returned, they were forced
into a single line as the soldiers recorded their details; names, their village
and what they did and so forth.
Those with identity cards had them removed and were kept by the soldiers. When
his turn came, Okidi was again asked if he wasn’t a soldier, still he denied
and got more hitting with gun butts for saying so. He remembered he was the
83rd captive on the list as they took his particulars while one more person
remained behind him.
Done with the registration, the soldiers led them in a single file to the
parked army lorry and ordered them to climb inside. As they did so, the
soldiers indiscriminately rained blows, kicks and gun butts on the captives as
they struggled to climb, hampered by the ropes tied around their hands.
Then one of the soldiers remembered that two captives had remained inside the
chapel. The commander ordered that they too be brought to join the rest. They
were; Yesaloni Yona Okot, the first RC3 chairman of Namokora to be elected in
1986, and one Achola, said to be a sister to Ali Kiseka, a former Chua Member
of Parliament.
They were told they would be taken to Kitgum Town, so the truck took off a few
minutes to 9am. Okidi recalls that Achola somehow got wind of the mischievous
plans the NRA soldiers reportedly had in store for them.
She told them in a conspiratorial tone in the truck that they were not meant to
reach their supposed destination of Kitgum Town. Achola told them there was a
section (11 soldiers) of the 35th Battalion deployed somewhere along the road
and given the express orders to waylay the truck in an ambush.
The arrangement was such that the soldiers on board would jump off the truck
from an agreed spot, leaving the civilian captives on their own, then the
soldiers who had laid an ambush would open fire with the intention of killing
every single occupant in the lorry. It was meant to look like an ambush, so as
to make it easy to blame the incident on the then marauding remnants of the
UNLA ‘rebels’.
Leap of death
About a kilometre from Namokora trading centre, at Wii-Gweng in Oryang village
in Pogoda West parish, along the road going to Kitgum Town, Achola jumped off
the truck as it negotiated a corner. Others followed suit despite pleas from
other captives urging their colleagues not to jump, insisting they would talk
themselves free from the bondage once they reach Kitgum. Okidi did not hear
that plea; he too jumped off the truck and like the rest, rushed into the
bushes to take over.
On realising what was happening, some of the soldiers started shooting at the
fleeing captives but as the lorry came to a halt, the soldiers became more
accurate as their bullets mowed some of the fleeing captives, killing them
instantly. Those that remained in the vehicle were herded down and shot at
point blank, killing them like insects.
However, Okidi, Achola and others managed to escape to safety, even though the
soldiers reportedly followed the fleeing captives into the thickets, killing
those injured mercilessly. Okidi remembers that the gunfire rained for nearly
the whole day, beginning from around 9:30 am to 6pm nonstop. A total of 13
captives are said to have survived this particular massacre.
“The soldiers started shooting indiscriminately at the captives, killing more
than 35 instantly and those who jumped off the truck were followed and
painfully killed like tired chickens. An estimated 15 to 17 people died in the
bush with sustained injuries and were never discovered up to date,” states part
of a document about the massacre written by the victims and reportedly
delivered to President Museveni by State minister for International
Cooperation, Mr Henry Oryem Okello, who also hails from Namokora.
It is important to note that nobody seems to know the actual number of people
who died in the massacre. But according to Okidi, there were at least 84
registered captives who all boarded the ill-fated truck. If 13 out of those are
said to have survived the killings, then it is a safe bet to say at least 70
civilians could have perished at the hands of the government soldiers.
The victims hailed not just from Namokora area alone, but also from other
sub-counties like Orom, Omiya Anyima, Lagoro, and Kitgum Matidi in Kitgum
District, as well as Wol and Omiya Pacwa sub-counties in Agago District. Most
had come to Namokora to attend the market day, referred to as “auction”, that
weekend.
Aside from the killings, residents also lost many household belongings and
unspecified number of livestock such as cattle, sheep, goats and chicken that
were looted by the NRA soldiers shortly after carrying out the heinous act.
Ochola’s story
We are seated at Gil Gal Restaurant in Kitgum Town to conduct this quickly
arranged interview this late Monday evening. Ventorino Okidi is accompanied by
Alfred Ochola Omenya, 49, a resident of Pakumu Jang-yat ward, Ibakara parish in
Kitgum Matidi Sub-county, who also lost two brothers in the carnage. They had
travelled for a radio talk show on a local FM station in the town to update
listeners on the preparations to mark the massacre day. I have to hurry with
the interview because they must ride back home, more than 35miles and it is
getting late.
Ochola’s brothers, Obwona George and Opio Ventorino, had that fateful weekend
travelled to pay a visit to their sister Atto Christine in Orom, a sub-county
neighbouring Namokora. But while there, they heard about the arrests in
Namokora. So while returning, they took a detour and meandered through the bush
skirting the dreaded Namokora from a distance towards Kitgum Matidi. But as
fate would have it, the two brothers lost direction of where they were going
and instead found themselves in Omiya Anyima trading centre on Sunday, from
where they were arrested together with other captives.
Home at last
Days later, Okello Kenneth, one of the survivors of the massacre, managed to
reach home and informed them that if his brothers don’t show up in the next few
days then they should rest assured that they had also been killed at the
massacre site. More than two weeks or so after the massacre when the risks
eased a bit, Ochola stealthily trekked to Wii-Gweng where he could not believe
what he saw.
“Body parts were lying strewn everywhere and most bodies were badly decomposed
already. Dogs had feasted on the bodies and carried some parts away, so it was
difficult to identify the bodies,” Ochola said. He eventually managed to
identify the remains of his brothers from the under pants they had put on. “I
collected the remains and took home to accord my brothers decent burials,” he
said.
Nearly three weeks or so after the massacre, the Roman Catholic parish priest
of Namokora, Fr Tarsicio Pazzaglia, an Italian priest given an Acholi name-
Luyaramoi, together with the help of locals collected what remained of the
bodies of the slain civilians and buried them in a mass grave at the present
site.
Survivors and family members of the massacre victims recently came together
under a unifying body: Namokora Survivors and United Relatives Association
(NASURA), to organise for the first time a memorial prayer for the victims.
Members recently contributed funds plus donations from some non-governmental
organisations and well-wishers that were used to erect a monument at the
massacre site in Wii-Gweng.
The chair of NASURA, Charles Onen Sali, who is also the Namokora Sub-county LC3
chairman, said they decided time was now ripe to organise remembrance of the
victims of Namokora massacre. He explained that the memorial prayer could not
have been organised earlier because as LRA war still raged on, people were more
concerned about their own safety than trying to remember the dead.
“We are not inciting people, or mobilising the people against the government
for what its armed soldiers did here. We just want to remember our people who
lost their lives and try to push government to address the plight of the
survivors,” Onen said.
The survivors want the government to build a memorial polytechnic school at the
massacre site to train youth, especially formally abducted children, on formal
and informal business and vocational skills. Their last appeal to the
government is that it grants a special education support to two children of the
late Okot Y.Y, the first elected RC leader in Namokora, who was also killed.
For the elderly Okidi, the planned annual memorial prayers could be part of a
healing process from the trauma he suffered from the events of the three days
of August 1966, as opposed to it reminding him of the pains he suffered. He
says people have not yet been able to accord the dead a befitting send off,
given the many years of LRA insurgency that have only ebbed.
[email protected]
Ocen Nekyon
Democracy is two Wolves and a Lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is
a well-armed Lamb contesting the results.
<http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/b/benjaminfr109066.html> Benjamin
Franklin
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