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These are the daily conditions in which Amos, his peers, surrogate family members and the larger community endure in Pader Town Center IDP camp, which accommodates 24,000 people. Like many youth in the camps, Amos is an orphan and has no parents to look after his needs. Also, like other youth in the camps, Amos is an orphan because he was forced, during his abduction, to kill his parents. This is the method LRA uses to traumatize and brainwash children into rigid obedience – forcing children to kill family members, friends or neighbors as a ritual of abduction. LRA also mutilates and dismembers civilians during raids, cutting off lips, noses, eyelids and ears, and hacking off hands, arms, legs and feet, beating elders and raping women and girls. This leaves the survivors of a raided village or small town in a state of terror and shame. The defacement and disabling of people, young and old, has become a signature of LRA. Most of the mutilations are perpetrated by LRA child soldiers using knives, axes and machetes.

Amos’ Pader District village was raided four years ago when he was 12. He was dragged to his parent’s house. With guns blazing and soldiers shouting, his parents were told to make a choice who should live or die – Amos or them. His parents said they would be willing to die if Amos could be spared. Amos was handed a panga (machete) by LRA soldiers and told to kill his parents. At first he refused, so they bought a young neighbor boy Amos’ age and killed him with a machete, stating that if he refused again, he and his parents would be slaughtered together. Amos took the panga and hacked away at his parents, killing them both. He and other young boys and girls from his village were marched to training camps in Southern Sudan where they learned to kill and mutilate. Some of the training in murder was carried out on local Dinka cattle farmers. The killing was done for practice and the cattle were stolen for food. Amos and his abducted peers quickly learned if they were disobedient, became sick or were perceived to be weak, they would be killed. Amos was forced to participate in the killing of some of his peers, other young boys from Uganda, who were accused of disobedience or of trying to escape. Amos participated in vicious beatings of other young boys and burying them alive as they pleaded for their lives. This reinforced the concept that any deviation from blind obedience was equal to asking first to be tortured, and then killed.

Amos and other child soldiers in his unit were also subject to brainwashing, especially around the notion that LRA’s leader Joseph Kony was a Holy Spirit. Children are told by commanders they were chosen to participate in this holy war and are protected from harm. Children are taught to remove their shirts, rub oils on their chests and stand up in battle. Bullets, they are told, will bounce off their chests. Hence, children believe they are invulnerable to harm, and lose their fear of dying. Kony also guarantees their holy salvation if they are killed, so some children believe either they will not die or if they do, will wind up in holy salvation. This brainwashing, combined with their fearful obedience and the fact children are made to use machetes and axes to murder and maim, makes them more terrifying to both the civilian population and UPDF soldiers. During his two years as an LRA soldier, Amos participated in the killing and mutilation of mostly rural villagers in Sudan and Uganda, and the looting and burning down of villages. He did all he could to put out of his mind the circumstances which resulted in his abduction and to stay on the right side of his commanders. After two years, when he was fourteen, he used the trust he had gained to plot his escape. For most abducted children, their average stay is between 2-3 years before they escape or are rescued by UPDF during armed pursuit and battles with LRA. Amos was taken to a reception center for former abductees where, for the first time since he was twelve, he was free to be a young boy again. He went through a regimen of medical tests, had regular meals, and received counseling. Amos says most of his counseling was group counseling and he had three personal counseling sessions before being sent to Pader Town Center IDP camp where he has lived for the past two years. This short duration of counseling was not enough, he emphasizes, and he still has a hard time dealing with how he misses his parents and the fact that he was forced to kill them.

Many, but not all, escaped and rescued children wind up in reception centers for various periods of time, such as those run by World Vision in Gulu and GUSCO (Gulu Support the Children Organization) supported by Denmark Save the Children, also in Gulu. At reception centers, former abductees receive psychological and medical care. Many children carry bullet wounds, and suffer from other physical injuries. Many are suffering from a wide range of infections, including skin and hygiene-related ailments, and sexually transmitted diseases.

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