(IRIN) - Thirteen-year-old Adong B fought for the rebel movement, the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), for two years after being kidnapped in 2002 from her village in Koch Goma, in northern Uganda’s Gulu district.

In February, she was rescued by the Ugandan army and placed in a rehabilitation camp in Gulu town, 380 km north of the Ugandan capital, Kampala.

Speaking to IRIN on Monday in Gulu about her ordeal as a child soldier, she said: "Those who couldn’t carry on walking because of swollen feet were battered to death. I was forced to kill one girl who failed to walk."

Beatrice A, 14, was abducted in February 2004 and made to work as a porter for the rebels. "We walked for long hours, and when you failed to walk you were beaten," she told IRIN on Monday in Gulu. "Those who failed completely to walk were killed. Because of thirst, we sometimes had to drink our own urine to survive."

The use of child soldiers in northern Uganda's 19-year-old conflict has ripped apart countless families and destroyed innumerable childhoods. Relief agencies have testified to children being recruited both by the government and the LRA, as well as being civilian victims of violence.

However, the Ugandan government has vehemently denied the existence of child soldiers in its ranks, and insists that the Uganda People’s Defence Force (UPDF) has never knowingly recruited any children into its ranks.

"The UPDF does not have a policy of recruiting underage soldiers," Maj Shaban Bantariza, a UPDF spokesman, told IRIN. "We have never knowingly hired a child to serve in our ranks.

"We have had occasions when telling somebody’s age is difficult, and we have taken up recruits who are slightly underage," he admitted.

In such cases, Bantariza insisted, the UPDF had done everything in its power to prevent these children from entering the army.

"Last year we got 30 recruits who had been duly recommended by the community councils, but after scrutinising them [we found] they were underage, and their applications were turned down," he said.

NGO officials disagree. Father Carlos Soto, of the Justice and Peace Commission in the Gulu archdiocese, told IRIN that it was public knowledge in northern Uganda that the UPDF was using child soldiers to fight the LRA.

"The Acholi [ethnic group in northern Uganda] in the IDP [internally displaced persons] camps say these are destitute boys who have nothing to do – it is a way for them to have a job," said Soto, who has lived in the north for over 15 years.

Chulho Hyun, a spokesman for the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), told IRIN the organisation was concerned about the use of child soldiers in the country.

"Uganda is a signatory to international protocols and, therefore, efforts should be intensified to ensure there are no children in the armed forces," Hyun said.

"We are particularly worried about the recruitment of children into LDUs [local defence units], and are actively involved in discussions with the government about [the] prevention of child recruitment," he added.

In 2003, Human Rights Watch (HRW), a New York lobby group, found evidence of Ugandan children being recruited into LDUs, supposedly to provide security to local villages, but reportedly used to fight alongside the UPDF against the LRA.

A report in January 2004 by a London-based NGO, Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers, carried similar findings: "On a recent visit to Lugore training camp 120 children [were identified] among the recruits. Reliable sources also identified UPDF recruits among demobilised child soldiers in Yumbe."

The report added that international organisations had not been granted access to many military training camps where it was suspected that more children were held.

Hyun said, however, that the LRA was by far the worst offender when it came to the abuse of children.

Childhoods of abuse

According to the UN in 2004, more than 80 percent of LRA fighters were abducted children - the rebel group has kidnapped more than 20,000 children since 1988. This has left a gaping hole in the traditional family system of northern Ugandan society.

"Thousands of children have been raped, brutalised, drugged and forced to inflict unspeakable violence on others. The result: a generation whose childhood has forever been stolen from them," wrote Jan Egeland, UN under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs, in the foreword to the 2004 book published by IRIN: "When the Sun Sets, We Start to Worry: An Account of Life in Northern Uganda".

In a 2004 report, HRW said rebel commanders considered child soldiers "cheap, compliant and effective fighters".

Former child soldiers report that children are frequently killed or left for dead if they are either injured in battle, become too weak to keep up with the rebels or refuse to perform tasks allocated to them by LRA commanders.

Another survey in November 2004 by the UK-based scientific journal, the Lancet, found that more than half of 301 child soldiers surveyed – all of whom were abducted by the LRA, at an average age of 13 – had been seriously beaten.

Seventy-seven percent had witnessed another person being killed, 39 percent had killed another person and 39 percent had abducted other children. Sixty-five percent of the children had been forced into military training. More than a third of the girls had been raped, and 18 percent had given birth while in captivity.

Of the 71 children who agreed to complete a questionnaire to assess post-traumatic stress disorder, 69 had clinically significant symptoms, the Lancet reported.

"Since these former child soldiers are often blamed and stigmatised for the countless atrocities they committed – mostly against their own people – their psychological recovery and reintegration can be seriously complicated," the journal warned.

Relief workers in Uganda say children are most susceptible to abduction at night, when the rebels carry out their raids.

Each night, several thousand children, known as “night commuters”, leave their homes for the relative safety of larger towns such as Gulu. They sleep in hospitals or schools; failing that, they sleep rough on shop verandas.

Albert, a father of seven who lives on the outskirts of Gulu, takes care of a total of 18 children, all of whom join thousands more on the nightly trek to the heart of town for safety.

"I am always worrying about the children," he told IRIN. "They are too young to be on their own. There are also a lot of dangers at night. Some have been bitten by snakes, the older girls are disturbed by men and sometimes they are attacked by robbers."

The LRA, led by Joseph Kony, operates in northern Uganda, reportedly from bases in southern Sudan. In 1988, it began its campaign to remove the government of President Yoweri Museveni, ostensibly to replace it with one based on the Bible’s Ten Commandments.

Over the years, however, the rebel group has gained notoriety for its brutality, and it has regularly used torture, rape, mutilation and abduction as weapons of war.

Observers believe that the use of children by the LRA is a deliberate strategy - as the most vulnerable members of society they can be forced to become sex slaves, porters, domestic servants and soldiers.

Various NGOs have set up programmes to try and demobilise, rehabilitate and reintegrate former child soldiers, but the children are at times rejected by their communities as murderers. HRW reports that the children are frequently re-recruited by rebel forces.

Olara Otunnu, the UN’s Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, said in February that the international community needed to move its focus from developing standards on the protection of children to ensuring they were actually enforced on the ground. The tens of thousands of child soldiers in northern Uganda are just a fraction of the global total, which the Lancet puts at 300,000.

In years past, when the slavery of the children of Africa was carried out by chain and whip instead of uniforms and patrol cars, black people in Brazil had only two places where they could be – in the Senzala or the Quilombo. The Senzala was a small hut placed outside the master's house, a shack in which the slaves would stay from after sunset to before sunrise, chained to the walls and behind locked doors. The Senzala was their home; there they raised their children and grew old. In secret, they practiced their language, religion and culture away from white eyes. The window of the senzala would always face the main quad of the plantation where a single post could be seen emerging from the earth's belly. The Pelourinho – the mast in which rebellious slaves where tortured into submission or death, whichever came first. This was the Senzala.

But, every once in a while, a laborious and dedicated group of slaves would defect from the generosity of the slave master's whips and chains and senzalas, and go into the jungle. They would run, day after night after day after night, into the mata, deeper into the forest; away from the treacherous Capitaes to Mato, the black or mulatos overseers responsible for capturing escaped slaves. In the jungle, they looked for hope. In the jungle, they looked for freedom. In the jungle, away from the white man, they looked for the Quilombo.

Quilombos were city-states created in the heart of the mata by escaped slaves. The most famous - the largest and the one whose name was whispered in secret in the dark by those in search of freedom - that was Palmares. Palmares had a estimated population of twenty to thirty thousand, structured in eleven different villages. In Palmares, as in other Quilombos escaped slaves held the majority. Natives and poor whites were also accepted into the Quilombo, with and shared the same rights and duties as anyone else. Decisions where made by village assemblies, in which every adult, man or woman, of every race, could (and most would) participate.

No, Palmares was no utopia. It was no communist society in which the decisions where as horizontal as possible and in which all were seen as equal. Palmares had chiefs, one for each village. The chief of the capital, Macacos, was the king of Palmares. But this is neither here nor now. The now is the quilombo as opposed to the senzala.

Palmares died in flames. It fought until the last person was dead. It had been fighting for its sovereignty and independence for over one hundred years. It gave its blood to defend what it cherished most – its freedom and its self-determination.

Whatever drove the Palmarinos to fight is what I am interested in talking about. A friend of mine said something that struck a cord in me. He said: “People are always talking about dying for this or that. You gotta die for the cause if you are militant enough, if you are really bad ass you should die for your beliefs. But nobody asks, what are you living for? Not dying, but living – what is your life for?”

The Palmarinos were living for something. They were living for their freedom and their collective autonomy. They were living for their right of self-determination, to do away with the chains that held them slaves in the past and to decide by themselves the path of their life. If they died fighting for that, they died for what they were living for. They died the death of free people.

We now call ourselves Anarchists. We say we want the end of all chains and the extermination of all oppression. Yet, in the Anarchist “movement”, black folk and other folks of color are still in the senzala. We are still having to disguise ourselves, call whitey “Massa” and chain ourselves to the wall. No, don't talk about racism unless is in that very abstract sense of “we-are-all-equal-let's-sing-kumbayas-and-pretend-the-color-of-our-skin-does-not-matter” racism. While there might be nobody yelling “die, nigger, die!*”, you can hear a very clear “shut the fuck up, nigger, just shut the fuck up.”

We pretend that racism is just a minor problem, something that, like the Leninist State, will wither away if we will it to. The intrinsic racist characteristics that infect Anarchism, specially North-American Anarchism, cannot be questioned without one being seen as some kind of authoritarian nationalist, or even worse, a Maoist. Red-baiting, of all things!

Like in the real senzala, our resistance to racism needs to be covert. It needs to be hidden and made like it is something else. It cannot be what it needs to be, it cannot do what needs to be done, or the senzala would break apart and the master's house would be set aflame. No. Like capoeira, our fight against white supremacy inside North American anarchism needs to disguise itself as a dance in order to become a martial art.

And you know how the rap goes: if we talk about empowerment we are power hungry. If we assert our self-determination, we are authoritarian nationalists. When we expose how white Anarchism is, elitist white Anarchists generally come with excuses like “Hey, I saw a black anarchist once!” or the classic, “well, we need to outreach to communities of color.”

Let me tell you something, the reason why the masses are not flooding to your Anarchism is exactly that one – it is your Anarchism. It is a white, petty-bourgeois Anarchism that cannot relate to the people. As a Black person, I am not interested in your Anarchism. I am not interested in individualistic, self-serving, selfish liberation for you and your white friends. What I care about is the liberation of my people. The collective liberation of the children of the African Diaspora, those that have been beaten down and treated worse than dogs all across the world.

So, no, we are not interested in your anarchism. We need to create our own. Understand this, if the whites in Palmares were allies and died with the blacks and the natives it is not because they invited the blacks and the natives into their structure, into their society and said unto them: “We are all equal.” It was because the blacks and the natives created their own structure - their own society - in which power relations were different so that whites could not longer by the sheer force of their privilege impose their view of how the society should be run. To try and integrate people of color in your society or your movement, like there would be no culture clash and no confrontation – it is naive, senseless and can lead nowhere but into deception.

In the senzala of contemporary Anarchist theory and practice, the only place for Blacks and other folks of color is the chain in the wall or the Pelourinho. To question the structure of this “movement”, why is it really composed mainly of white suburban boys, is a invitation to the Pelourinho - or to the Quilombo.

Some escaped slaves decided to create their own Quilombo in the forest of North America, and they called it A.P.O.C. - Anarchist People Of Color. APOC was a necessary step on the beginning of the self-determination of people of color inside the movement. This self-determination we seek is to analyze the problems of race inside and outside the movement in our own perspective. To create our own analysis of authority and what it means for us to be Anarchists. What does it mean for those that have always felt odd at an Anarchist event while looking around and thinking are they made the wrong turn somewhere and ended up in a white only area of segregated Mississippi.

When an anarchist tells me about how the cops are fascist pigs, I stop for a second and think. A lot of times I'll of some experience in a protest against this or that corporate meeting or something, in which the cops tear gassed the crowd and whoop some ass and I think, man, you got it easy. I remember in my neighborhood in Brazil, where if you got only an ass-whooping, you would considered yourself lucky. I remember the day they shot my uncle dead. I remember this one cop that used to follow me around and scare the life out of me because I thought he was going to cap me and there no way in hell I was approaching no authorities to complain because then I would surely wind up dead. I remember the police invading my grandma's house, guns in hand, while my cousin was still a baby and was sleeping in my aunt's bed. Even here, in my neighborhood in East Palo Alto, you can always hear the cops fussing around at night and you know they are not looking for no black-bloc kid from some protest or another. So tell me again how the cops are fascists...

The fact is, we know oppression. We live it, we experience it. In one form or another, one extreme or another. We do not conceptualize it. We do not sit down and intellectualize about pain because our people have been hunted down and shot, and burned and beaten and we lost the need to understand pain philosophically when we learned it physically.

So why are the people not filling the ranks of the Anarchist movement? What it is that prevents those people of color that have been feeling the brunt of police brutality, and have been living off the scraps of what capitalism leaves behind, why have they not joined the movement?

The answer is simple: because is not their movement. It can never be their movement while it is being created by and for white middle-class kids with a Jesus complex who think they can save the world (or the ones with Buddha complex who think they can get wet by talking about water). You cannot hustle the movement and you cannot hustle the people. Revolution is not a game in which you can pretend to listen to the voice of the people of color only when is convenient and shut them off when they start questioning your privilege.

APOC, as any revolutionary step, spurned an immediate reaction, a counter-revolutionary step. The amount of voices in the Anarchist “movement” that have been raised to criticize, put down or, in any other form, discredit APOC (most, if not all of them, white, by the way) have been, if small, consistent and bold. To incur and cite these criticisms is irrelevant to today's discussion. I am not here to defend APOC. I am here to talk about why I don't need to do it.

APOC is our Quilombo. Our keep, our fortress, where we can meet as people from oppressed background and not only share our experiences and how they are relevant to each other, but also how they are relevant in the larger scheme of things. APOC is more than a safe zone for people to feel good about not being in a room without white folk, but is a conscious project of self-determination for people of color. It is a step closer to our freedom as a people and the materialization of the idea that community comes from something in common, something we can share.

No, APOC is no utopia. It is not even close. But that is neither here nor now. We may stumble, we may fall, we may even break our heads wide open. But at least we are walking on our own two feet.

It is pointless for me to try and convince white Anarchists of the need for APOC because white anarchists have not experienced what we a people of color have experienced. It is like trying to convince my boss of the need for Socialism – a more often then not fruitless endeavor.

And while there are white Anarchists out there who remember that only the oppressed can liberate themselves and the end of white supremacy cannot be brought about by white people – there are those that, in their arrogance and shortsightedness, will not yield and cannot tolerate the thought that maybe there is something that Anarchist people of color need to discuss that does not include white people.

And if, for a moment, I thought that APOC needed to be approved by the white anarchist scene that would be the moment in which APOC would lose its appeal to me. Because is not about being accepted, being cherished, being “on the good side” with the white Anarchists – that is the Senzala. It is about self-determination and it is about resistance. It is about creating our own culture, our own analysis and dictating our own future. APOC for me is not about seeking a way to make white people love us, or hate us.

I have to tell you a secret about APOC: it is not about white people at all. It is not, and it should not be ever. I am tired of talking about white people, thinking of white people, analyzing white people and worrying about white people. I want to know what I have in common with my Korean sister and my Guatemalan brother. I want to know about the great struggles for liberation in Uganda and how the Filipino resisted imperalism. What can we learn from each other as people of color? What does my bairro in Rio de Janeiro has in common with a Latino barrio in East Side San Jose?

This is something I wrote for my sisters and brothers at APOC. We need to understand ourselves in order to understand the world around us and be able to fight and destroy the bourgeois plague which eating away our homes, our lives and our cultures.

As a black person, my anarchism is Black Anarchism. As a member of the exploited class, my anarchism is Class-Struggle Anarchism. As a person who wishes for a better future, my anarchism is Anarchist-Communism.

Vamos a ela, porque temos muito, muito para construir.
Não tá morto que peleia!
Viva a Anarquia!

-- Pedro Ribeiro (Furious Five Revolutionary Collective)
San Jose, CA

By Solomon Muyita, Simon Kasyate, Charles M. Mpagi & Agness Nandutu

KAMPALA — Demonstrators protesting to what they called “unfriendly remarks against the sovereignty and independence of Uganda” yesterday stormed the British High Commission and the Parliament in Kampala.


The crowd of several hundreds, calling themselves Concerned Patriots, condemned remarks by a British minister who recently questioned Uganda’s commitment to democracy and Irish rock star and aid campaigner Bob Geldof who accused President Museveni of wanting to rule for life.

The demonstrators first marched through the city, before camping outside the British High Commission. They later moved to the Parliament, which is about 100 metres away.
Many were walking, while some clung to several trucks in a convoy.
They blew whistles, chanted slogans in support of the government and danced to music blaring from a truck.

Many were draped in dry banana leaves (essanja), the symbol of the campaign for a third term for President Yoweri Museveni.
The demonstrators carried tree branches, banners and placards denouncing remarks made against what is widely believed to be Museveni’s attempt to cling onto power through a constitutional amendment. “We support our system until 2011; Long Live Lt. Gen. Yoweri Kaguta Museveni,” one placard proclaimed.

The demonstrators denounced what they called attempts by Britain, Uganda’s former coloniser, to recolonise the country.
“We say NO to recolonisation,” read one placard.
“You never gave us democracy yet you colonised us,” another said.

Some others read: “You called Amin a gentle giant”; “Keep your donations, we retain our freedom”; “Cheap politicking should not be part of UK led economic commission”; “We fought for our freedom, we died as you looked on. Keep off.”
Mr James Mutumba, 35, who described himself as the Chief Operations Coordinator for the demonstration said: “We are here because the British are belittling us; they forget that Uganda is a state.”
Some of the placards were aimed at Geldof.

Geldof recently criticised Museveni at the launch of the report of the UK-led Africa Commission. He said, “The president of Uganda, who implemented poverty measures and AIDS measures that all worked with debt relief, is now trying to be president for life. Get a grip Museveni. Your time is up, go away.”

Some demonstrators’ placards read: “Geldof sober up and shut up”; “NO to drug addicts and Rock Homos”; “Geldof, Africa is not a drama theatre, let Museveni stay”; and “Geldof, know that Museveni is a freedom fighter not an actor.”

For about 30 minutes, the demonstrators interrupted movement in and out of the High Commission on Parliament Avenue. One of their leaders was let in to hand over a statement addressed to the High Commissioner, Mr Adam Wood.
The statement said the demonstrators had been offended by remarks made by Bill Rammell, a minister in the Foreign Office, and musician Geldof.

Rammell was recently reported to have told the British Parliament that his government was concerned about “countries like Uganda and Zimbabwe, where poor adherence to inernational human rights standards, and a lack of commitment to democracy, good governance and the rule of law, cause us particular concern.”

The demonstrators’ statement said, “We are citizens of Uganda who are deeply concerned and bothered by these remarks and the circumstances under which they are being made. We should like to request you to please kindly and urgently communicate to the government of the United Kingdom our extreme displeasure.”

The statement signed by Mr Paul Musamali and Mr Odur Byaruhanga, the chairman and secretary general of the little-known group, added, “We condemn the remarks in the strongest possible terms and dismiss them with the contempt they deserve.”
The demonstrators were later denied entry at Parliament, although Musamali and a few leaders were allowed in to present a copy of their one-and-a quarter-page statement to the Speaker, Mr Edward Sekandi.

In a brief address to the leaders, Sekandi called upon Ugandans not to panic adding that foreigners cannot influence Parliament’s decisions.
“I agree with the petitioners that Uganda has to be respected as a sovereign country. Uganda has its constitution and is able to handle the constitutional amendments,” he said.


He said MPs can ably handle the constitutional amendments and they will take national interests to guide them to do what is good for Ugandans. One of the demonstrators, Mr Moses Nuwagaba, a media coordinator for Makerere University Movement Forum said: “We are saying no to external influence from neocolonialists specifically UK. We are telling them that they ruled us for 100 years and we did not see any elections or term limits, so what moral authority do they have now to preach democracy to us?”

He said British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, was also seeking a third term in office.
Odwori Akwenda, 20, of Mukono University, said he participated in the demonstration because he was opposed to the British government’s interference in Uganda’s politics. “We are telling them that power [to decide on our governance] belongs to Ugandans,” he said.

Nakawa Deputy RDC, Mr Mpimbaza Hashaka, said the event was a “demonstration of the people’s power.” The donors are yet to see more, he added.
The demonstration appeared to be well coordinated. Some unconfirmed reports said the demonstration was orchestrated by forces close to the NRM and the government.

Students were ferried to the city centre on trucks and omnibuses from the universities of Makerere, Kampala International (KIU), and Mukono, as well as Kibuli Teachers College and various secondary schools in and around Kampala.
They joined other demonstrators ferried in earlier.
After the demo they were served with soda at the Constitution Square.

Re-published from www.monitor.co.ug