Kathy Cook - Stolen Angels

PENGUIN CANADA

STOLEN ANGELS

KATHY COOK is an internationally acclaimed journalist whose work has been published around the world, in over forty countries and in eighteen languages. In Canada, her pieces have appeared in Readers Digest, the National Post, Walrus, and the Ottawa Citizen. She has won several awards including a Canadian National Magazine Award in the category of politics and public interest in 2005. This is her first book. She lives in Ottawa.

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published 2007

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

Copyright Kathy Cook, 2007

Epigraph on page vii reprinted by permission of the Gandhi Institute.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $20.3 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.

Nous remercions de son soutien le Conseil des Arts du Canada, qui a investi 20,3 millions de dollars l'an dernier dans les lettres et l'dition travers le Canada.

Manufactured in Canada.

ISBN-13: 978-0-14-305481-8

ISBN-10: 0-14-305481-3

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication data available upon request

Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 477 or 474

To my husband Mike, with love.
And to Catherine and Mariam, with hope.

MAHATMA GANDHI

CONTENTS

PREFACE

My first trip to Uganda took place in the summer of 2000, when Readers Digest magazine asked me to research the story of a little Canadian boy whod set out to raise money for well-drilling equipment in that impoverished country. African children, he had learned in school, were dying from drinking contaminated water. At the time my career was writing near-death adventure tales, otherwise known as Drama in Real Life articles, for the magazine. Medical dramas, drug-addiction dramas, animalattack dramas, lost-in-the-wilderness dramas, all with happy endings. This was my job. Inspirational tales that educated and entertained.

After two Canadian aid agencies, Water-Can and Canadian Physicians for Aid and Relief, got behind the boy, Ryan Hreljac went on to collect enough funds so that CPAR could drill the wells. The first, now widely known as Ryans Well, was located near a school in the Northern Ugandan town of Lira. And so, having arrived in the country along with Ryan, his parents, and a film crew funded by the Canadian government, I headed out to visit the well. It was soon apparent to me that I was writing a fairy tale, an exotic childs story filled with ceremony and gifts and selfless altruism.

Then the executive director of CPAR-Uganda told me that only one hour north from our camp was the real story.

Gulu town was ground zero of the bizarre warwaged by children against other childrenthat lay behind the nations overwhelming poverty. CPAR drove me the next day to the displaced persons camps encircling the town. There I interviewed former child soldiers who had escaped from Northern Ugandas rebel ranks. They told gruesome and what seemed to me at the timeincredulous stories. Their testimonies far outstripped the greatest drama in real life tales I had ever researched only they didnt have a happy ending.

I didnt immediately do anything with these interviews. They were profoundly moving, but they werent relevant to the fairy tale I was writing. They would, however, ultimately become the reason behind this book.

In the next years I returned to school to do my masters degree in journalism and moved on to other narratives. But the story came up again in 2004 when I learned that, two years after our visit, a Ugandan boy whod been Ryans pen pal and thirty of his fellow village children had been abducted into the rebel army ranks. The boy had managed to escape moments after his capture, fleeing first to the local CPAR office and then to Canada and Ryans family. In the process of writing the follow-up article for Readers Digest, the larger issue of this army of stolen children came flooding back to me. It struck me then that perhaps I could tell the story of these children, of this illogical war, in a more comprehensive way.

Around that time the United Nations issued a press release declaring the tragedy of Northern Ugandas child soldiers as the worlds most under-reported story. By then the Lords Resistance Army (LRA), of which an estimated 90 percent were abducted youth between ages eight and seventeen, had grown into the worlds largest army of children.

I began researching the wara war in which Ugandas popular president, Yoweri K. Museveni, had pitted his army against the LRA, although many other forces were at play. I scoured Ugandan newspaper archives, aid-agency reports, and other journalists works. I was looking for a focal point, a drama playing out within the war that would be my way into its heart.When I began to read about the Aboke Girls I knew Id found it.

In 1996 thirty schoolgirls had been abducted from the esteemed St. Marys College School for Girls in Northern Ugandas Aboke village. Their plight touched the hearts of many around the world. The story of the girls enslavement among the rebel soldiers of the Lords Resistance Army was told on CNN, on The Oprah Winfrey Show, in The New Yorker. There were documentaries, a book. Only a few of the girls had managed to escape. But as the years passed and no more came home and the war raged on, the impact of the girls captivity became muted by the stark reality that thousands of others suffered similar fates.

I felt the horror of these girls lives, but not until I actually met them did I understand that there was something deeply profound in their suffering. From that moment on, the Aboke Girls touched me directly too.

STOLEN ANGELS is an account of the human will pushed to its limits. It is also a story of world politics and of Canadas role in those politics. Parts of the book were first published in Walrus magazine in June 2005. That article, The Peace Wager, won a Canadian national magazine award as a work of journalism capable of affecting public policy.

The books narrative is based on dozens of interviews and hundreds of reports and articles, and where the research is not my own I have footnoted it. I have made great efforts to go to primary sources, but on some occasions did rely on second-hand information, and so its possible that there are some errors. Every quotation in this book is exact, although in some cases, when conversations in the Luo language were subsequently relayed to me by people without perfect command of English, I corrected the grammar. Some of what is said here will not correspond to how others recall events. In those instances where the facts are in significant dispute, I have footnoted explanations. In war there are many truths.