• Tuesday, August 16, 2011
• Inter Press Service

Ester Abeja has experienced both physical and emotional atrocities. She was captured by Uganda's feared rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and was forced to join them. But not before the soldiers made her kill her one-year- old baby girl, by smashing her skull in, and then gang raped her.

It has been nine years since she was abducted, and almost five years since the country’s civil war has ended. But Abeja has never had medical treatment for the violence she had to endure.

In Ogur, Lira in northern Uganda, Abeja has come to a temporary medical camp run by Isis-Women’s International Cross Cultural Exchange (Isis-WICCE), a women’s organisation working with women in conflict and post-conflict settings.

The camp is specifically for women with reproductive health complications, which they have mostly sustained from being raped during the almost two decades of war.

For most of the women here it is the first time they have been offered special medical attention since the war ended in 2006, and for many it is the first time they have been treated by a doctor. It is also the first time that many of these women have ever spoken out about the violence they had to endure.

Abeja is one of the many women struggling to survive the horrors of the war. Her home is a few kilometres from Barlonyo, where the LRA massacred over 200 people in a single attack in February 2004.

The LRA fought in the north and north eastern parts of Uganda for 23 years. The war, which forced close to two million people into internally displaced persons camps for decades, was the most brutal that Uganda has faced since independence from Britain in 1962.

Thousands of people died as a result and the war was characterised by its use of child soldiers and the conscription of civilians into the rebel group. The LRA were forced out of the country in 2006 and are currently operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic and western South Sudan.

Abeja was captured in 2002. She was a wife and a mother of six children when the LRA abducted her with her youngest daughter and her son. 'When they abducted me I had my one-year-old baby girl and the boy. A few kilometres away from home, they forced me to kill my child,' she says tearfully. 'I hit her head on the tree and she died. The rebels immediately began to rape me.'

Abeja can’t remember how many men they were; she says there could have been 10 to 15. 'The group that captured me raped me right after (I killed) my child. They even pushed different objects inside me as they raped me. Others were cutting (me) with machetes as some raped (me),' Abeja says as she shows the scars that remain on her arms and thighs.

She doesn’t know what happened to her son or if he’s still alive. Abeja was sick for many weeks in the bushes of what is now South Sudan. Once she recovered she had a man waiting to be her ‘husband’. Like many abductees, Abeja had to kill or be killed. In her four years with the LRA she tells IPS she can’t recollect the number of people she was forced to kill, but she puts the number at more than 40.

Abeja was one of the lucky few that escaped. She returned home in 2006 with a boy who is now about five years old. Since the war ended in 2006, people went back to their original homes and depended on emergency aid.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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