Kwoyelo on how he lost his childhood innocence
UPDF soldiers escort Kwoyelo (centre) at Entebbe Military Airbase after his capture in 2009. Inset is Kwoyelo before he was captured. PHOTO/FILE
What you need to know:
- In the first instalment of a three-part series titled Kwoyelo: My Story, Tobbias Jolly Owiny recounts how the former LRA commander alleges he lost his childhood innocence, among others.
Besides protesting his innocence, if there is one thing that Thomas Kwoyelo has been clear about during his trial by the International Crimes Division (ICD) of the High Court, it is the objection to his association with a certain alias.
When the former Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) commander gave the ICD’s presiding justices Duncan Gaswaga, Stephen Mubiru, Michael Elubu, and alternate judge Andrew Bashaija an unwavering gaze on Monday, he had one wish.
“My name is Thomas Kwoyelo. I heard other names added to my name as Latoni, but I don’t know where that name came from. And that confused me because I thought this trial was about Latoni, and I am probably here in a mistaken identity as Latoni,” Kwoyelo protested.
Latoni is a pejorative that dilutes a defence that Kwoyelo and his team have been mounting since Monday. The former LRA commander’s defence at first glance hinges on projecting a sense of victimhood.
“My father passed away after he had problems. He was shot while bathing in a washroom, during which he sustained injuries that he later succumbed to, according to the information I got a little later through a local FM radio in Gulu while I was already in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC),” Kwoyelo told the court this week.
His childhood
There is a backstory to how Kwoyelo ended up in DRC, and, yes, it is deeply couched in victimhood. To understand it you have to go back to Kwoyelo’s childhood days in his home village—the backwater of Pogo. It was such an outpost that learning facilities were conspicuous by their absence.
Kwoyelo had to relocate some 40 kilometres to Pabbo Town to have a shot at having an education. In Pabbo, a young Kwoyelo lived with his maternal grandmother. He was enrolled in P1 at Pabbo Girls’ Primary School at age 10. That was in 1985. While Pabbo Boys’ Primary School was a preserve for older boys, Pabbo Girls’ Primary School opened its doors to boys aged between 13 and 14. The school, as Kwoyelo told the court this week, was entirely run by nuns.
“So when one of the witnesses told this court that we studied together in 1962, I rebuked that witness that they were lying; that was not possible,” Kwoyelo charged, adding of the witness, “He said that we studied together, and that I was a great footballer; yet I was too young to play competitive football among the big boys. I may be kicking oranges at home, and I maintain those were lies by the witness.”
Kwoyelo was also quick to deny a claim by another witness that they once moved rhythmically to Ayije in the yesteryear. Ayije is an erotic Acholi courtship dance.
“At that age, I was too young to even smell a woman. I know very well that those who went to dance Ayije were those old enough and were looking to settle in their homes,” he told the court, adding, “I was still too young, and there is no way I would have gone for those dances.”
Also questioned were accounts that he shared mangoes in Pogo with some individuals who took the stand in the court this week. “Looking at the distance from Pogo to Pabbo, did the witnesses have a vehicle to drive to our home to eat the fruits or the mangoes at our home were too sweet to warrant them to travel such distances?” Mr Kwoyelo retorted.
His abduction
According to Kwoyelo, he was abducted aged 13. A Primary Three pupil back then (1988), Kwoyelo was running back home from Pabbo Girls’ School when all hell broke loose. The former LRA commander said he always preferred to run back home unlike his fellow pupils who preferred walking at a leisurely pace in sizeable groups.
“I was asked to stop and questioned what I was running from,” he said of the group of armed men that reportedly intercepted him, adding, “I said I ran because I was hungry. One of them pulled me to the roadside, where he pulled a bag, opened it, and gave me biscuits to eat since I said I was hungry.”
As he nibbled at the biscuits, Kwoyelo further told court, the armed men—who it turned out were LRA rebels—asked him to help them navigate the village eastwards. Along the way, he said he could hear them discussing why he should be released to return home after showing them the way since his friends had seen how he was intercepted.
“We moved with them not very far, and then we found some people in some homestead with other armed men and other abductees, and this must have been part of their team,” he told the court, adding, “In my memory, the people who abducted us were about 15 in number, but the abductees could have been about 60 or 80 because I did not count them out of fear.”
The group of abductors was headed by Okwera Dulmony. It is the name that the young impressionable Kwoyelo reportedly picked out as instructions kept on being dished out.
“Upon arriving at the home, Okwera Dulmony started batching his men in groups and positioning them in different directions while we, the abductees, were tied with ropes in groups of 10,” Kwoyelo revealed this week, adding, “Our group was then locked up in a grass-thatched house under an armed guard, from where we were served raw cassava and unshelled groundnuts.”
Mr Kwoyelo proceeded to disclose thus: “That same night, they served us meat and mashed cassava. It was served in three bowls for the 10 of us. We ate the food, knowing that they were aware that we were hungry. We ate and slept in the same home.”
Powerlessness?
At daybreak, Dulmony led the group on another punishing trek that wound up at another home. Kwoyelo also told the court that he was powerless insofar as escaping was concerned. Joseph Kony, the LRA leader, much preferred young children like him. Kony’s predisposition was reportedly informed by the fact that young children’s memories about directions were weak, and, above all, they couldn’t easily escape.
Thomas Kwoyelo interracts with his lawyers during the court session on April 18, 2024. PHOTO/REGAN OCAYA
Kwoyelo said Kony was referred to as teacher by both the abductors and abductees.
Commanding something of a demigod status, Kony established his fighting force by absorbing deserters from the vanquished security apparatus of Tito Okello Lutua’s government following his overthrow by the Yoweri Museveni-led National Resistance Army. After crossing a river that Kwoyelo now barely recollects, his group of abductees settled in a homestead upon undergoing initiation rites. The group was further subdivided into three and assigned to different instructors or unit commanders.
“From then on, those teachers were to begin taking us through how to use a gun, dismantle and assemble it, and understand its different parts,” Mr Kwoyelo revealed, adding, “We learnt to dismantle it, but we were not allowed to dismantle the firing pin or the trigger since it was a preserve of senior soldiers but were only allowed to dismantle secondary parts.”
Per Kwoyelo, the LRA commanders always ordered the instant execution of recruits who attempted to escape.
He said: “We kept training there for about two weeks, and some of us recruits were ordered to go to a garden and harvest some tubers to be eaten by the team. In the garden, there was one of us who attempted to escape. He was slightly older than us. He escaped and disappeared in the bush, but the rebels realised one of us was missing and instantly started inquiring.”
He added: “We were immediately rounded up and asked to sit down. Some soldiers were left to guard us while others ran after the escapee to search for him. Unfortunately, they traced and intercepted him … They instantly killed him before us…”
Kony’s game plan
To guard against attempts to escape, Kony ordered that only young children be abducted. To add to their unquestioning obedience, Kony also dictated that once abducted from Kitgum, abductees be moved towards Gulu and those from Gulu are moved to Kitgum.
“Young children, even when they think of escaping, would not be able to locate the direction to their homes and would not attempt to escape, and if in Kitgum, you cannot even point the direction of Gulu, they told us,” Kwoyelo recalled, adding, “As a child once abducted and moved towards Kitgum, I was unable to point in the direction of Gulu, and I feared to escape.”
Kwoyelo recounted that he spotted several senior members of Kony’s command who formerly served in former President Tito Okello’s army.
“Even my unit commander, Okwera Dulmony, who had abducted me, was among those who were former soldiers in the Tito Okello Lutua army, and that is how I also learnt that Kony was an ordinary civilian [who did not know much about military science and guns],” Kowyelo told the court.
To instil discipline in the force, the LRA did not have ranks in their files. Every soldier was referred to as teacher ((lapwony in Luo). Kony inclusive.
His conscription
Once trained, Kwoyelo told the court that he was entrusted to the care of the outfit’s medic, named Lapwony Ocii. Mr Ocii taught Mr Kwoyelo the A-Z of herbal medicine, including treating common illnesses as well as performing crude surgical operations.
“This enabled me to learn medical work very well, and up to now, I can work in a medical facility. Once there is medical equipment, when I am asked to go and perform an operation to remove a metal stuck in someone, I can operate the person, remove the metal, and stitch it back. If a woman is in labour, I can ably assist and deliver the baby,” he disclosed.
When Kony sent Vincent Otti (RIP) for an operation in Uganda, “afterwards, Otti collected me and we returned to Sudan together.”
That was in 1999. Kwoyelo added that “at that time, Otti … went for an operation at Morulem General Hospital [in Abim District], after which he came and picked me up, and we returned together.”
Kwoyelo also disclosed that a week after he joined Kony’s camp in Jebelen in Sudan (now South Sudan), Kony summoned a high command meeting.
“At that meeting, he intended to promote some soldiers and give new ranks to others,” Kwoyelo recalled, quoting Kony verbatim as saying, “You see, Kwoyelo, the role he played in Uganda in our treatment units was great and hard work. For that, because his senior Major Ocii passed on, I, therefore, awarded him the rank of captain.”
Ocii succumbed to bullet wounds in an attack while in Uganda. So, while holding the rank of captain, Kwoyelo was taken to Juba Hospital where he was trained in modern medicine and its applications. After, he returned to Jebelen where he continued working on sick rebels.
Charges
Kwoyelo is facing 93 counts of charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity related to sexual violence, murder, kidnap, robbery, pillaging, enslavement and torture in connection with the two-decade insurgency in northern Uganda that was led by Joseph Kony.
He was one of the commanders of the LRA. He was captured by the Uganda People’s Defence Forces (UPDF) soldiers in Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo in March 2009. Subsequently, he was brought back to Uganda and detained at Luzira Upper Prison.
While at Luzira on January 12, 2010, Kwoyelo made a declaration before the officer-in-charge of the prison, renouncing rebellion and seeking amnesty.
In 2022, the Constitutional Court ruled in Kwoyelo’s favour since he had renounced rebellion before ordering his release. However, he was rearrested, with the Supreme Court overturning the Constitutional Court’s decision before ordering his trial before the High Court.
Continues tomorrow.
