STEPHEN was just 16 when, on May 11, 2003, the rebels of the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army raided the minor seminary in Gulu archdiocese in northern Uganda and abducted him along with 40 other seminarians.
They dragged the youngsters off into the bush, to train them there as child soldiers. Twelve of the young men are still missing.
Stephen was one of the fortunate ones, for after a few weeks he was able to escape this hell. Today he is training for the priesthood at the seminary in Alokulum.
He told his story to representatives of the international Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN), who visited Uganda recently.
He is a young man who even as an adolescent had seen more than we can even imagine. Murder, rape, torture – for two months all this was part of everyday life around him.
The rebels paid particular attention to training the seminarians, precisely because they were seminarians.
Stephen witnessed some of his companions being beaten to death with clubs and rifle butts. Others were hacked to death with machetes, simply because their feet were so badly wounded after the endless marches that they could walk no further.
Fortunately for Stephen he was spared from ever having to kill another person.
He spoke to Aid to the Church in Need about how his faith and his religious vocation were strengthened during those weeks of captivity. In his eyes there is still deep suffering, a horror that cannot be expressed in words.
The rebels – about 20 of them – came at 20 minutes past midnight. Some of them surrounded the seminary, while others went direct to the dormitories where the 16-year-old minor seminarians were sleeping.
The two soldiers whom the government had posted as guards outside the seminary had fled immediately as soon as the rebels appeared.
“We were abandoned; there was no one there to protect us,” Stephen said.
Apart from the seminarians there were another 1000 to 2000 people from the local population – mainly women and children – who had sought sanctuary there overnight. One boy, aged seven, was shot dead by one of the rebels in front of his mother’s eyes.
The rebels tied up the young seminarians with ropes and then tied them together in groups of four. Then they broke open the cupboards and cases, looted everything and forced the boys to take as many blankets, shoes and other items of clothing with them as they could carry.
Then came hours of marching through the night. In the morning the youngsters were divided up into smaller groups and taken off to different places.
A man with a machine gun examined the face of each one and picked out some of them at will. The seminarians were not allowed to be together.
Again, endless marching on foot, again the random division among different rebel groups.
One of the leaders told the boys, “Now you must see yourselves as an army!” It was made absolutely clear to them that anyone who attempted to flee would be immediately killed.
They were ordered to obey without question. This was no empty threat, as Stephen was forced to see for himself.
And yet his faith in God was not dented; quite the contrary. Stephen smiles when he speaks about his vocation, which has even been strengthened by his painful experience.
Yes, his faith has grown, he admits, with a glance that combines joy and hope and the knowledge of the grace that was given to him.
“I saw things that I thought I could never have borne to see. It would have been impossible, by human power alone, to have escaped all that.
“But God can work miracles. I was left with literally nothing but prayer. This was my only hope. But we could not pray together, and so I prayed alone.
“On each of the long treks on foot I prayed the Rosary, counting on my fingers, since I did not have any Rosary beads. Prayer was all I had. There may be people who have not experienced God, but I experienced him”.
Almost two months after his abduction, Ugandan government troops attacked the rebels. In the hail of bombs and machine-gun fire, Stephen managed to escape. He could easily have lost his life then, but he managed to escape.
At first he hid in the undergrowth. One of the rebels noticed that he was missing and shouted, threatening and waving his gun around to intimidate him.
Stephen thought the man had discovered him, but when he saw him pointing his gun in the wrong direction, he knew that the LRA man was only pretending in order to scare him into giving himself up.
However, Stephen heard the rebel say to another, “In any case, he won’t be returning to his village, he’s already been with us for too long!”
That was the method of the rebels – to terrify the children into submission by utterly breaking their will. But with Stephen they did not succeed.
Once there was nobody left looking for him, the young man made his escape.
For days he saw not another soul, as he dragged himself through the bush, not knowing where he was. Again and again he climbed trees so he could look out for another human being or an inhabited place.
Finally he arrived, utterly exhausted and incapable of walking any further, at an abandoned school. He slept the night there in the classroom.
When he awoke the next morning, there was a man standing in front of him. It was a soldier of the Ugandan army.
When Stephen told him that he was one of the abducted seminarians, the soldier replied, “You are lucky, you are safe now”.
He carried him on his back to the military camp, and from there he was carried on a home-made stretcher into the town, where he was taken to hospital.
It was here that the rector of the seminary came to visit him and then took him home.
Stephen’s family had thought him dead.
“They were already planning to ask a priest to say Mass for my soul,”, Stephen said with a smile.
His family were overjoyed and were reluctant to see him return to the seminary. But when Stephen came to the seminary to say goodbye, he sensed that this was his true place, and so he secretly packed his belongings, without telling his parents, and returned to the seminary.
Twelve of his former fellow seminarians are still missing. On the anniversary of their abduction, the rector of the seminary, Monsignor Matthew Odong, and the other seminarians wrote them a letter, which they quite possibly will never read.
In it they say: “We entrust you to the protection and loving care of Jesus Christ, who had called you to become priests and to proclaim the love and mercy of God in the world.
“We love you, dear seminarians. May God protect you and bring you safely home. Our prayers are always with you”.
Like these 41 seminarians, of whom almost a third will quite possibly never return home, more than 30,000 children and young people have been abducted by the rebels of the LRA since 1988, during the course of more than 20 years of bloody conflict between the Ugandan army and the rebels of this murderous group, led by Joseph Kony, in northern Uganda.
The boys are usually forced to become child soldiers, while the girls are abused as sex slaves. They are brutally raped, made compliant with drugs, forced to kill others, subjected to draconian punishments for minor offences, tortured and sometimes even bestially murdered.
Many have disappeared without trace.
Those who have survived have in many cases been deeply traumatised for the rest of their lives. Many of them cannot even bring themselves to return to their families, because they are so deeply ashamed of the deeds they were forced to commit.
Often the rebels deliberately forced the abducted children and adolescents to murder people in their own villages, and even their own parents and siblings, in order to make it impossible for them to return home.
The Catholic Church is helping these children. Among other things, the Catholic radio station in the diocese of Lira has created a special program, so that family members can send messages to the children, telling them that they love them and are waiting for them to return.
Some of the former child soldiers are also involved, encouraging their former companions to return home as they have nothing to fear.
The rebels set fire to the radio transmitter but the transmitter mast survived, and now Radio Wa (the name means “Our Radio”) continues to broadcast, with financial support from ACN, offering a message of peace and reconciliation in Uganda.
A great deal of work for reconciliation, healing and rebuilding is needed in this country of East Africa.
This long conflict is among the worst civil wars in Africa.
More than half the population of northern Uganda lives in refugee camps, for fear of the abductions and massacres – estimates put the figure at about 2 million displaced persons.
Since 2008 the situation has been more stable, but attempts to achieve an official peace deal floundered after Joseph Kony, the leader of the LRA, failed to show to sign the peace treaty.
Each one of the children and adolescents abducted and abused by the LRA has a face and a name.
Stephen, who has shared in the suffering of these children, now wishes as a priest to help heal their wounds and to bring peace to a country where children are exploited as a weapon.
He wants to bring the message of God’s love to those who have forgotten, while still children, that they too had a face and a name.
And he can likewise show them that God can indeed work miracles, for he himself has experienced such miracles.
