News-Letter

Media Credit: Eileen Huang Grace Akallo, a former child soldier, spoke about her experiences in a guerilla army.

At the age of 15, Grace Akallo was abducted by and forced to serve in the Lord's Resistance Army, a sectarian guerrilla army based in Northern Uganda, which claims to seek justice for the people of Uganda against the government.

Akallo, a former child soldier, and Professor Pamela Reynolds of the Department of Anthropology, spoke Tuesday night regarding the involvement of children in armed conflicts.

The event was hosted by Amnesty International in cooperation with the Hopkins Political Science Department and the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies.

Reynolds gave a brief introduction to the issue of child soldiers, discussing her own research work in Zimbabwe as well as in South Africa and explaining the complexity of the subject.

"On the one hand, we want to assert [the children's] innocence and call [for] their protection, while on the other hand, we must acknowledge that the young person can become engaged for a number of reasons that cannot be disregarded," she said.

Reynolds also discussed contentions regarding children who may or may have not volunteered to join the conflict.

"War undeniably removes the possibility of choice, but some engage with a consciousness that reflects themselves," she said. "One asks 'What, for the young or for any of us, are the limits of consenting to horror as political responses?'"

Grace Akallo, now a graduate student at Clark University, then told her own personal story.

"In 1996 when I was thinking about joining high school, the Lord's Resistance Army attacked my school and abducted 139 students," she said. "They took us into the bush, what you call the jungle."

A nun from the Catholic school Akallo was attending followed the soldiers and after pleading with them, managed to rescue 109 students, Akallo and 30 others, however, were detained by the Lord's Resistance Army and after a month, marched into Sudan where they were trained as soldiers.

"It was the last destination, that's what I thought," she said. "I was trained and then sent to fight: They taught us how to clean, dismantle and shoot a gun."

"It was survival, kill or be killed. It was a means of survival."

Continued...

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