The Massacres of Uganda

On either side of the road are clean-swept living spaces, known as compounds, linked by narrow tracks. Deo sits in a clearing, explaining his work to a group of cautiously interested elders. One of them is Nekolina Lakot, a beautiful year-old woman in a shimmering green dress.

She listens with a particular numbed intensity. When he mentions the LRA, and 7 December, her eyes fall and she touches her heart. Once Deo has been granted permission to do his work, she sits down, smiling gently, and begins. Gunshots had been heard. Scared, the villagers picked their way into the hills. They slept that night in hiding. As dawn breathed through the sky, the tracks and compounds of Amoko were silent. It was cloudy at daybreak, the wind was still.

So along with her father-in-law the family crept back down the hill.

As they walked along the road they saw them. She doesn't remember how many. Most wore military fatigues. Some had boots, the younger ones were barefoot. They held AKs and wooden clubs that had been cut fresh from the trees. The eldest soldier was in his early 20s, the youngest about six. It was the elder boy who did the killing. With a log, he began beating Nekolina's father-in-law across the chest and back and continued until he was dead. Then he started on the children. As he worked methodically, smashing the life out of her family one by one, the soldiers laughed at their screaming and crying.

He reached Nekolina last, cracking his crude weapon over her head.

Leave her alive,'" she says. The other person dragged me away.

That's how I survived. When she woke up, swollen and bloody, three hours later, the first thing she saw were the remains of her children. An hour after these killings, at around noon, Dorina Adjero and her family also came out of hiding in need of food. Unaware of the LRA's arrival, her husband and son began preparing a meal in their hut. Dorina, approaching from a distance, froze at the sight of soldiers ordering them out.

I could hear them moaning. I couldn't even cry.

Afterwards, I had to flee. I would say that they were not interested in looting. They had come with the intention of only killing. It's a peculiar aspect of the Amoko massacre that the soldiers didn't appear to have been after food: But there were some opportunist abductions. By , kidnap had become the only way that Kony could sustain numbers in his army. With the Acholi largely refusing to co-operate with him, his soldiers would take children by force, often making them kill their parents so they had no home to escape back to.

Estimates suggest that, between and , the LRA abducted between 25, and 38, children. As they were killing people, and moving towards the west, my son jumped out. The boy tried to escape along the road to the place where he knew he'd find his mother. Before he could start climbing the hill, they intercepted. It was by now 2pm and the LRA had split into groups. It was a sub-team of six that pursued the boy.

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As they beat him, they mocked him. But haven't we caught you now? It rained all night. Sometime that afternoon, Martin Olanya and his wife returned to Amoko from a visit to a nearby hospital. The scene he discovered at his compound was shattering.

The bodies of two of his brothers lay on its boundary. Four were young babies who were still breastfeeding. He was fighting for his life. He died shortly afterwards. It didn't take long. When she saw what had happened, Martin's wife collapsed into crying. That gave me courage.

By the time he'd finished digging in the rain the pit was as deep as his waist. It would only fit the females. He had to return with help, the next day, to bury the men and the boys.

The village stayed quiet for a long time. Nekolina, desperately injured, remained in hiding for two days. Eventually, she picked her way back down the hill to cover her dead in grass then dig them shallow graves. Others did the same. When he'd finished making graves for his family, he gathered the people together and told them, "We can't protect you. We need to move away from the village.

Today, the survivors who speak to Deo worry about those rushed burials. For the Acholis, if a body isn't interred correctly, bad things can happen. Set up a giveaway. There's a problem loading this menu right now. Learn more about Amazon Prime. Get fast, free shipping with Amazon Prime. Get to Know Us. English Choose a language for shopping. Explore the Home Gift Guide. Amazon Music Stream millions of songs. Amazon Advertising Find, attract, and engage customers. Amazon Drive Cloud storage from Amazon.

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