This is the story of three young Ugandan women, H.N., who is 23, R.L., 22, and M.K., 19. They have never met, but all three arrived in the United Kingdom (UK) within the last six months and asked for asylum. What they have in common is torture: two were raped, over a long period of time, first by the rebels who abducted them, and later by the government soldiers who freed them and did not chose to believe their stories. The third was raped by government soldiers. Today two of the young women are pregnant, beyond the stage where abortion is an option.
The youngest, M.K., was abducted by rebels when they attacked her village in December 1999. She was then 17. Together with a number of other young girls, she was taken to their camp, where she spent the next 21 months cooking, fetching firewood and water, and doing the washing for the men. When she was slow to carry out orders, she was beaten and kicked. She was often hungry, being given only leftovers to eat; and she was raped, repeatedly, by many of the men.
“One day, I was sent off to fetch wood with two other girls, and just one soldier to guard us. From the forest, we suddenly heard shots and shouts coming from the direction of the camp. The soldiers left us and went back to see what had happened, and we ran off and hid.”
Later, M.K. was able to make her way back to her village. Her parents had both been killed and her brothers and sisters had disappeared. She was soon picked up by the government soldiers now in control of the area. They took her back to their barracks where they accused her of being sent home as a spy for the rebels. For four days, she was held in a small room, her food put down on the floor that was kept wet with urine; she was repeatedly beaten and threatened. She told them all she could remember about the rebel camp, about the guns she had seen and the numbers of men. They refused to believe that she did not know more.
“After about four days, I was transferred to a military compound in Kampala. There one of the guards raped me. But then he took pity on me, and one night, he helped me to escape.” Later, friends helped her to leave Uganda and make her way to Britain. Not long ago, she heard that she has been refused asylum.
Though the National Resistance Movement of President Yoweri Museveni came to power in 1986, bringing to an end 15 years of massive human rights violations by the governments of Idi Amin and Milton Obote, restrictions on political activity continue in Uganda, as does widespread violence against civilians, carried out both by rebels and government forces. Kidnapping, mutilation of suspects, looting and rape are common. The Lord’s Resistance Army, in particular, wages a campaign of terror in Northern Uganda. Human rights groups estimate that in a single district, between August 1997 and April 1998, 1200 children were kidnapped.
H.N. has also been told that she will not be able to stay in Britain, but as she is now eight months pregnant, and is appealing against the verdict, she prefers not to think what may happen to her if she is forced to go home. H.N. too was abducted by the rebels, but she does not know whether the father of her baby is one of the men from the Lord’s resistance Army (LRA) who held her for five months, or one of the government soldiers who held her for a further five.
“My mother was ostracized by her family after she married my father, because he was of mixed race, half-Portuguese and half-Ugandan. She died in 1995 from an Aids related illness because we did not have enough money for treatment. I watched her die slowly, over many months. I was the eldest of five children. After her death, her family accused my father of having killed her, and would not let us go to her funeral.”
In 2000, H.N.’s father moved to Gulu from Kampala to start a wholesale and retail business, taking the younger children with him. H.N. stayed in Kampala, where she was studying design and dressmaking and where she had met and fallen in love with Alex, a young man working as a campaigner for the opposition politician Dr Kiza Besigwe. Together, they put posters on the walls of the city’s buildings. When Museveni won the elections in March, the two young people sold clothes imported from Dubai to retail businesses in Kampala.
In the summer of 2001, they set out by car for Gulu to stay with H.N.’s father. “When we had been travelling for about two and a half hours we heard gunshots. A tree had been cut down across a road to block it and we were forced to stop. We were surrounded by armed soldiers, who forced us from the car and marched us into the forest. I was crying because I was sure that we were going to be killed”.
After some hours’ walk they reached a camp deep in the forest where they found many others like themselves, kidnapped in road blocks by the rebels. H.N. was separated from Alex and ordered to help the other women collect wood and cook.
“Later that night, one of the soldiers dragged me into his tent and raped me. I believe all the women were raped that night. I soon discovered that we were being held by the Lord’s resistance Army and that our job was to steal provisions from local farms and to care for the rebel soldiers. Every night the soldiers took us to their tents and raped us. I had a friend called Joanne, and one night she tried to escape. The soldiers caught her, brought her back and shot her dead in front of us.”
As the days passed, more and more people who had been kidnapped were brought to the camp. “Every time there was an attempted escape someone was killed. A month after we had been abducted, Alex decided that he was going to try to run away and get help. They caught him. I saw the soldiers cut his lips and ears off as an example and then I watched him die slowly from loss of blood and because he could not eat. It took him about two months to die. The rebels mutilated a lot of people if they did not obey orders or if they tried to escape. Some of the men were castrated.”
One morning, H.N. woke to the sound of guns. Government soldiers attacked the rebel camp and H.N. and some of the other women prisoners ran into the forest towards the attackers. After the fighting was over, and the rebels were either dead or had fled, she was told to get into a truck and that she would be taken to safety. Like M.K. she found herself instead in a military prison, where the government soldiers accused her of having been a member of the Lord’s Resistance Army. “I cried, but they refused to believe what I told them. Every day for about a month they questioned me, and while they questioned me, they kept hitting me. Then one day, a soldier poured a pan of boiling porridge over my stomach. My dress was very thin, and I was badly burnt. The wound went on blistering for many weeks. The soldiers also forced me to drink urine.”
When H.N.’s burn was better, one of the soldiers singled her out and took her every night to his room and raped her. He gave her food and as she was always hungry, she took it. One night, he took her out of the prison and to his own house where he got very drunk. While he slept she stole money from his pockets, and some clothes, and escaped.
She got a lift to Kampala and went to the house of a family friend. He told her that her father was dead and that though he had tried to trace her brothers and sisters they appeared to have disappeared. Because H.N. now knew that she was pregnant, the friend was afraid to let her stay long in his house, but he agreed to help her to escape abroad. An agent brought her to the UK.
H.N.’s baby is due in June. Her stomach bears an enormous scar from the boiling porridge. The Home Office has rejected her application on the grounds that, though the Lord’s resistance Army is indeed brutal and violent, and the security forces “heavy-handed” in their treatment of those they suspect to be LRA supporters, there is no danger in her going home as she has never actually been charged or convicted of being a LRA member. Furthermore, they doubt in the first place that guards raped her, and claim that, being five months pregnant at the time of her supposed escape, she would never have been able to get away as she did. They do not even accept that she was kidnapped by rebels. Her fear of returning is, they say, not well founded.
R.L. has been in the UK a little over three weeks. She, too, is pregnant. The baby was conceived after she had been raped repeatedly over four months by many different Ugandan government soldiers. She hoped to abort. But by the time she reached a doctor after her arrival, she was told that it was too late. She has no choice now but to give birth, and offer her baby for adoption. She views the coming months, alone, with no friends, with extreme anxiety.
R.L. was a student when she decided to join an opposition student group and volunteered to spend her December 2002 vacations in Northern Uganda, taking supplies of food and clothing to an area where many people have been made refugees by rebel forces. One night, she was sleeping in a tent when four soldiers arrived, dragged her to a truck and took her to a “safe house”, a deserted building used to question suspects. They accused her of supporting the rebels. “They gave me the option: to cut off my private parts or to rape me. In the end all four of them raped me. Then they brought four male prisoners to my room and killed them in front of me. They told me to kiss the dead bodies and pretend to have sex with them.”
Over the next four months, R.L. was often left for days at a time in rooms with dead bodies, with the floor slippery with blood. In her case, freedom came with the rebels, who attacked the safe house, released those left alive inside and told her to run. She was taken in by friends who helped arrange a passage to the UK. She has no news of her family, beyond the fact that her mother has since been kidnapped.
These three girls are not unique. There are many others like them, arriving in the UK when they are fortunate enough to have friends or family able to help them escape; and many more, unable to leave Uganda, for whom the fear of being kidnapped and raped again is something they never get away from.
