The Gun (60 page)

Once the payments from Africa were posted in his offshore bank accounts, Minin dispatched planeloads of Ukraine’s weapons—made for the Cold War, cached in European bunkers, marooned by the Soviet collapse, and tended by government officials both incompetent and criminal—on their journey to Africa, thereby moving guns from a northern Cold War front to the postcolonial power struggles to the south. In this way, the Kalashnikovs and their ammunition, paired fuels for modern-day African war, were handed out to the thugs. These were not ordinary thugs. The RUF, among its many crimes, specialized in mutilation. In raids on villages along the Liberian border, it captured civilians and amputated limbs by hacking them off. It then released survivors and burned down villages as warnings to others. Its leaders with time were indicted on war-crime charges, as was Charles Taylor, who helped ferry them their guns. Sierra Leone and Liberia were not the only African countries to suffer from war criminals emboldened by excess Soviet guns, nor were they the only African countries that suffered atrocities and mutilations at such men’s hands. The list is long: Angola, Rwanda, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and others. And thus the
Avotomat Kalashnikova
earned another name. To Europe’s south, a busy destination for assault rifles made elsewhere, the acronym AK meant not just the Automatic by Kalashnikov. The letters stood for something
more: the Africa Killer, the gun that helped sink country after country into fresh cycles of blood.

Almost no one was moving on the red dirt track leading to the village of Ajulu. The dozen or so young soldiers from the Sinia Brigade, hiding in the vegetation a few yards off the road, had little to do as minutes stretched into hours. They lounged and paced with their assault rifles, chatting, passing time between crimes. All the while they listened, waiting for a car or truck.

The group had been in place since 5:00
A.M.
, on orders from their commander, Joseph Kony. Their mission was not a hard one, at least not physically. They had been instructed to waylay travelers and lead them into the bush. Another team, responsible for administering warnings and collective punishment, waited in a gully a short walk away, ready with their razor blades. Only occasionally would a victim appear. It was 1998. The people of Acholiland, the area of northwestern Uganda where these fighters roamed the forests, had been living in fear for more than a decade. The survivors had adapted their habits to avoid the horrors of the roads. Yet even the most cautious could not stay off the roads entirely. People needed to go to market or for medical treatment in Gulu or Kitgum, or to visit relatives in the displaced-person camps near the Nile. From the rebels’ perspective, the day had not been lost. They had captured several people, cut them, and released them to stagger home. One of the hidden fighters, Patrick Okwera, saw the next victim: a man about thirty years of age. He was pedaling toward them on a bicycle. The fighters prepared themselves. When the man came close, they would rush from hiding and seize him, too.

Patrick was fourteen years old and in his fifth year as a soldier of the Lord’s Resistance Army, or LRA, the Sinia Brigade’s parent command. His life, and that of his family, ran through Joseph Kony’s nihilistic and inexplicable war. Patrick’s parents had been abducted by the LRA when he was a small boy. The rebels released his mother. They chopped his father to pieces. Patrick’s own encounter with the LRA came in 1993, when rebels kidnapped him from a stream in which he was bathing. Later, his younger brother, Jimmy, was abducted, too. The boys were reunited in LRA camps in southern Sudan, where they were taught to kill.
They became child soldiers, molded for violence by commanders who led them back into the bush. Several years on, by the grisly standards by which the LRA judged him, Patrick Okwera was a success. He had been pressed into service as a nine-year-old and quickly sensed that survival required compliance. He had complied, becoming a killer within days of his capture. Now just past puberty, he was a veteran. He knew the tactics of the ambush, was experienced with the details of the kidnapping raid. He had fought in several battles and shown himself to be an effective supervisor of other children under arms. He had stormed enemy barracks, and helped cache weapons and ammunition throughout the countryside, so that if the Lord’s Resistance Army lost Sudanese support its war might go on. By Patrick’s own estimate he had shot at least thirty people with his automatic rifle. He had not hesitated yet.

Outside his depleted family, Patrick’s kidnapping and conversion were barely noticeable. The Lord’s Resistance Army relied on child abduction to maintain its ranks. Tens of thousands of children had been stolen from their lives, often under circumstances more spectacular than his, including raids in which children were roped together and led into the bush with wrists lashed behind their backs. Sometimes the miserable columns became death marches. Those who straggled risked execution at the hands of the other captives, who were forced to beat fellow villagers to death. The first ordeal ended only upon arrival at the rebel bases, where the survivors were reshaped. The boys became fighters. The girls were forced into lives as servants, cooks, and sex slaves. Awarded as wives to LRA commanders, they were repeatedly raped. Many bore children in forest encampments. Abducted children were the clay of the Lord’s Resistance Army, a guerrilla force summoned into being by Kony, who claimed to channel holy spirits and follow the will of God.

Patrick stopped the man on the bicycle. He and several other children led their captive at gunpoint into the forest. The man trembled as they walked. He was silent. Patrick understood: The man knew what to expect. Up ahead was the cutting team, and there, with a razor, boy soldiers would slice away the man’s lips and nose.
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The Lord’s Resistance Army, sinister and bizarre, descended from a mystical guerrilla movement founded by Alice Auma, a childless Acholi woman
who by various accounts was either Kony’s aunt or his cousin. In 1985, Auma returned from a period of isolation on the banks of the Nile claiming to have been possessed by the spirit of an Italian army officer, whom she called Lakwena. Lakwena, she said, spoke dozens of languages. His name meant Word of God. In the early months after her supposed possession, Alice passed time aimlessly, working as a healer and oracle in Gulu; an enchanted freak. The spirit Lakwena grew into a taskmaster. He upped the duo’s ambitions. Late in 1986 Alice announced that Lakwena had ordered her to organize a movement to overthrow the Ugandan government, which was led by Yoweri Museveni, a former guerrilla commander who had displaced a post-Amin Acholi president. At that, Alice Lakwena, a composite of personalities in the form of a young woman with no military experience, became as strange and underqualified a guerrilla leader as the world had known. Yet she found a following. Uganda was suffering, and the Acholi felt abused by Museveni. Her message of rejuvenation appealed.

Lakwena organized her recruits into a cultish military wing known as the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces, and channeled other spirits to assume each unit’s command. Wrong Element led Company A; he claimed to hail from the United States. Ching Poh, from China, commanded Company B. A spirit variously called Franko or Mzee commanded Company C. He was responsible for food. Alice was fresh-faced and often dressed in long white robes. As the spirits seemed to alternate within her, she whispered, then raged. With her followers ringed round, she sat on a lawn chair and promulgated the Holy Spirit Safety Precautions, rules that required her soldiers to fight standing and never to hide behind cover. Service in her war demanded faith. But the precautions were more than instructions for battle. They formed a code of social behavior, which Lakwena insisted would protect her adherents from harm. Among the prohibitions were bans on stealing, smoking, drinking alcohol, carrying charms, killing snakes, or shaking hands with anyone while traveling to a fight. Sex was forbidden, as was killing enemy prisoners. Some precautions would seem easy to satisfy, like not carrying a walking stick into battle. For the movement’s men Precaution Number Twenty was easier still: “Thou shalt have two testicles, neither more nor less.”
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Rituals arose around Alice’s invocations. Before battle, the soldiers attended purification ceremonies and were rubbed with shea butter oil,
which Alice said would render their skin bulletproof. Many Holy Spirit fighters did not carry rifles. Those who did, at least in the beginning, were ordered not to aim at their enemies, but to fire in the general direction and allow spirits to guide bullets toward flesh. Others believed that if they chose the right rocks, those rocks, when thrown, would explode like grenades. The Holy Spirit Mobile Forces were not a rational military organization. But their cultishness gave them an early power against their foes, some of whom believed Auma’s magic was real. Had she adopted classic guerrilla tactics, she might have led an effective insurgency. Instead, the mobile forces’ tactics were theatric, a show resembling a parade. Their order of battle ensured the movement’s short life.

The Holy Spirit soldiers took up positions and, as ordered by the spirit, began to sing pious songs for 10, 15 or 20 minutes. Then the time-keeper blew a whistle. On this sign, the troops began marching forward in a long line, shouting at the tops of their voices: “James Bond! James Bond! James Bond!” Lakwena’s chief technician was named James and called himself James Bond. The stone commanders led them and the line commanders ensured that the front line was maintained. Each stone commander carried a stone wrapped in cloth, which he threw at the enemy, at the same time calling to each company and leading spirit, “Ching Poh, Franko, or Wrong Element, take up your position, command your people!” This stone marked the limit past which the enemy bullets could not penetrate, thus creating a protective zone.
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After a few spectacular successes, the movement suffered its defeats. The ending arrived on the march on Kampala, Uganda’s capital, when the Holy Spirit soldiers, many without weapons and calling for James Bond, were subjected to assault rifle and artillery fire. They were cut down. The survivors were put to flight. Alice promptly announced that the spirits had abandoned her. She slinked off for Kenya, where she was granted asylum and faded from view, aside from occasional interviews with journalists, who documented her end as an exiled lush, hooked on gin, spiritless, vowing a return.

Her homecoming was unnecessary. Joseph Kony replaced her as the possessed guerrilla leader of Acholiland. The new commander had learned
what Auma had not. Kony did not ask his child soldiers to rest their faith on shea butter and stone grenades alone. He made sure to give them guns.

Joseph Kony raised Alice Auma’s millennial weirdness several notches, blending her mystical persona with more practical ways to kill. He claimed to inherit her otherworldly contacts in 1987, when spirits took possession of him. His spirits formed a troupe. Juma Oris was their chairman, and mandated that Uganda be ruled by the Ten Commandants. Silly Salindi, a female Sudanese spirit also known as Malia Mackay, set down a fuller set of rules: no smoking or drinking, and sex only when allowed. She required prayer three times a day from the LRA’s impressed conscripts, and ordered that whenever they crossed rivers or passed anthills they must make the sign of the cross. Who Are You, an American spirit, also had an alias: Zinck Brickey. He was in charge of intelligence. King Bruce controlled heavy weapons and kept alive the idea of the stone grenade as part of the army’s supporting arms. Dr. Salan organized medical care, and insisted he could bring fertility to the barren. Willing Hing Sue, a Chinese spirit, was said to make the enemy hallucinate, even to imagine that the LRA had armored troop carriers that floated in the air. There were many more. A former LRA captain described how the spirits appeared.

In the beginning he was possessed sometimes two or three times a day. . . . Kony would always be alerted by “Who Are You” that a spirit would come at a certain time to speak for a certain time (for example at 1400 hours for three or four minutes). Kony’s secretary (Chief to Lakwena) would make the preparations, and Kony would dress in a white robe. A glass of water, a bible, and a rosary were placed on the table. To start the possession Kony would dip his fingers into a clear glass of water. Multiple spirits would pass through Kony in a single session. On average at least three spirits would talk in a session. Junior spirits always talked first. After the session the LRA commander would address the crowd. No one corrected what the spirits said, nor did people dare question the spirits.

When Kony dipped his finger in glass [sic] of water he slumped forward for a few seconds, then sat up. Each spirit had a separate personality. His voice changed to a woman’s tone of voice when possessed
by Malia. Some spirits spoke faster than others. Who Are You was rude—quarreling—and he complained a lot. Chairman Juma Oris talked slow and calm with a flat tone like an “important person.” Malia gave morale and hope after operations, and would say that those injured would recover with help from Dr. Salan.
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Kony’s spirits set rules: Pigeons were sacred and not to be consumed; fish could be eaten as long as they had scales; eating pigs was forbidden, but warthogs were meat. Shea butter oil was believed to make LRA soldiers bulletproof; in time, this belief subsided, apparently overcome by facts.
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Setting aside Kony’s mimicry, there was an important difference between the movements. If Alice Lakwena had intended to purify Acholiland and then Uganda, Kony and his spirits had another plan—to subjugate it by force.

In almost any other setting or any other time, Kony would have been marked down as a barking madman, a person to be walked wide around when encountered on the street. But Acholiland was rife with cross-border intrigues, and across Uganda’s northern line, in Sudan, Kony found support. Sudan was willing to arm him and the abducted children with whom he crossed out of Uganda, and to use the LRA to undermine a neighboring state. With support from Khartoum, Kony encamped in southern Sudan and built an army of children with Kalashnikovs. The guns were issued from Sudanese government trucks.
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His soldiers carried thousands of rifles on raids back into Uganda, and to fight the Dinka, a Sudanese minority tribe that the government in Khartoum also wanted Kony to harass. They hid thousands more in the hills and forests along the border. In this way, Kony made his name. Acholiland burned. “The Sudanese government gave it a lot of firewood to make it cook well,” said Lieutenant Colonel Francis Alero, another of Kony’s former commanders.
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