When the Lord’s Resistance Army attacked the village of Lukodi, Florence, like many others in her community, ran away in attempts to save her life and escape the fighting.
“I am one of the survivors of Lukodi,” she announced resolutely to a crowd of onlookers. “I don’t want to say so much, but this is what happened to me.”
Florence is a survivor of the Lukodi massacre. She shared her story with Luis Moreno Ocampo, former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, during his visit to northern Uganda in March.
Florence told her story, reflecting back to 10 years earlier when Joseph Kony’s rebel army destroyed life as she knew it. Lukodi had been the location of several small scale attacks before, but on May 19, 2004, the rebels brutally massacred over sixty people, abducted many others and left behind a community still reeling from the trauma it has experienced.
“I ran away and came back and found two of my children were abducted. [Another] one was already thrown in the fire and burnt,” Florence said.
Florence said that her daughter returned from captivity, but later passed away at a young age due to a serious illness. Her other child has never returned.
In Lukodi, community members have been known to share their narratives as a way of coping with the aftershocks of life following the conflict. Following Florence’s testimony, another man stood up to share his story. We do not know his name — a striking reminder that as hard as we work to humanize the victims of the LRA, millions of affected people and tens of thousands of abductees who will never return home go nameless as well.
Invisible Children’s co-founder and ambassador for victims, Jolly Grace Okot Andruville (pictured right), translates for a survivor of the Lukodi massacre as he shares his story.
“I was trying to collect bricks to build a house. Then I saw a lot of people…running. I didn’t know, but the LRA had come. When I saw the LRA was approaching and they started exchanging fire with the government troops, I ran away,” the man recounted. “We saw the reinforcements of the [Uganda People’s Defence Force] coming from town. But, [the LRA] had already set most of the houses ablaze.’
When this man returned from hiding the next day, he learned that his son was killed and his wife and another child were missing. They were later reunited, but not without consequences.
“My wife was beaten with the butt of a gun and the baby was also tortured and was later taken to the hospital. 10 years later, my child is mentally affected. He cannot concentrate in school. My wife is feeling her pain up until now.”
The testimonies that come from the survivors of the Lukodi massacre are honest portraits of what it means to deal with loss. Their experiences are a vivid reminder that the scars left behind by the Lord’s Resistance Army are both physical and emotional and far from being fully healed.
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