Six-year-old walks 400 km in rebel captivity

A six-year-old boy abducted by rebels was made to walk about 400 km barefoot in a forced march before escaping last week and being brought to a rehabilitation centre. The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels seized Simon Atenon at the end of June after ambushing a bus he and his father were travelling on, killing most of the passengers. Atenon’s father, a well respected headmaster of a school in the northeastern town of Soroti, was killed when the LRA sprayed the bus with AK-47 bullets. They abducted Atenon, along with a few other survivors, forcing him to carry a heavy bag through the thick scrubland of northern Uganda for weeks on end, stopping only to sleep each evening. He escaped last week after the rebels abandoned him in the bush, the wounds on his feet having made it impossible for him to walk any further. "I walked all the way from Soroti up to the mountains in Sudan and then back again into Gulu, in Uganda," Atenon told IRIN at the new Racheleri child rehabilitation centre in Lira town on Wednesday. "I got so tired and my feet were sore. I thought I was going to die, but they just said ‘keep walking’. You can’t stop or they beat you," he said. On one occasion, Atenon was beaten with a cane after accidentally dropping his bag. He witnessed the rebels killing an elderly man who had become too tired to walk. When Atenon's feet became too swollen to continue, they left him in the bush. "I slept there the whole night, and the next day the government soldiers found me," he said. Ells de Temmerman, the founder of Racheleri and author of Aboke Girls, an internationally acclaimed account of child abduction in northern Uganda, said Atenon was the youngest child at the centre, apart from those born in captivity. "When we got him, he was in a terrible state. From his route, I calculated he must have walked hundreds of kilometres," she told IRIN. Children at the centre who are younger than Atenon, who were born in captivity but recently rescued after a Ugandan army ambush, spoke of being glad to be out of LRA control – the only life they had known by then. "It was not nice in the bush. They [the Ugandan army] are always chasing you with guns and you have to run. The sounds of the guns are loud and people die; they are all blown to pieces with their stomachs and blood on the grass," said five-year-old Ali, the child of an LRA commander and one of his "wives" – an abducted girl. Ali was found by the army after both his parents were killed in a gun battle between the soldiers and rebels. He had seen many children abducted. "They were called kuruts [recruits in the Acholi dialect]. They were crying because they didn’t have any food or water. But I would always have enough food because my mother gave [it to] me," he said. De Temmerman said children born to the LRA were harder to reintegrate back into society. "His parents were killed, so we have to find a home. But his father was an LRA commander, so he can’t stay in his mother’s village. He effectively has no relatives – a hard thing in Africa," she told IRIN. She noted that the centre was seeking foster parents for Ali. "We have found them before in cases like Ali’s," she said. "And he’s a fairly normal child, all things considered." The Racheleri rehabilitation centre was founded in October 2003, funded by the Belgian government and individual sponsors. The cult-like LRA have been waging war in northern Uganda for 18 years. Led by a reclusive mystic, Joseph Kony, they say they want topple the government, which is dominated by southerners, and restore power to the Acholi people. Yet observers note that the victims of the group’s atrocities are mostly defenceless civilians, usually fellow Acholis. Kony claims to have magic powers derived from the Holy Spirit and manipulates beliefs in witchcraft to instil fear in his followers. Virtually all LRA recruits are abducted children, who are brainwashed by fear and forced to commit violent acts. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that the rebels abducted 8,500 children in 2003 – many of them never seen since.