Lydia Namubiru
19 September 2008
Kampala — While doing the study, Carlson and Mazurana were also able to gain deep insight into the deliberate and well orchestrated methods that the LRA used to sexually abuse the girls. "Our evidence reveals that the crimes committed against these females were not haphazard, but were methodically organised by the senior leadership of the LRA. The presence of forced wives in the LRA served to bolster fighter morale."
The report asserts that abducting girls and forcing them to marry and have children was a deliberate war tactic by the LRA and not a haphazard act as is popularly believed. From the testimonies of 103 former abductees, the researchers concluded that the abductions were often pre-planned and methodically executed.
"When abducted females died or escaped, the senior leadership ordered field commanders for replacements, often specifying the number required and the age, physical appearance and intelligence of girls to be seized. Better-educated girls were highly sought after."
While in captivity, their captors rigidly exercised absolute control over the girls' sexuality. They were distributed among the rebels with Kony getting his pick first, then the higher commanders.
One informant, whose job included observation and maintenance of Vicent Otti's forced wives told the researchers that Otti would come and choose the females he wanted based on their physical attractiveness and education levels. He (Otti) would then have them taken to a hospital in Juba and checked for physical and sexual illnesses, after which, he would take the healthiest among then as wives."
At one point, the higher commanders had an average of five wives each while the lower level fighters had one or two.
Former forced wives told researchers a lottery system which was sometimes used by LRA to distribute girls to the lower fighting rebels. Clothes would be collected from males and placed in a pile and girls would be ordered to pick one. Each girl would become the forced wife of whoever owned the cloth she picked.
According to the girls' testimony, bearing children was more or else mandatory once one had been allocated to a rebel as a wife. "Some women and girls reported that not all males wanted to have sex or beget children but, at times, they were directed by top commanders to have sex with their forced wives.
Our informants stressed that the reason for sexual activity was to produce children," the report says. The researchers deduced that forcing the girls to have children ensured their dependency on the captors and also lessened their chances of escaping. The girls also said that whoever was caught trying to prevent or abort pregnancies was killed.
Commanders reportedly kept record of female abductees to track the number of newly acquired females, escapees and the deaths of females and their children within LRA units and camps.
"One girl said she was pregnant at the time of her abduction and gave birth six months later," the report said. "She was not taken as a wife during this six-month period and was told after delivering her baby that it was a "useless civilian baby" because its father was not an LRA fighter.
"She was given little attention compared to the other girls who had had children with the LRA fighters. Unfortunately her baby died and she was given as a wife to a fighter with whom they had two children. She was his sixth wife and was disliked by the co-wives who physically abused her and reportedly conspired to tell lies to their captor husband, that she was stealing and wasting food and water. As a result, her captor husband beat her and withheld food".
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