LRA victim: Long road from night commuter to videographer

Gulu. As Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army rebels launched a devastating war in northern Uganda, Tonny Kilara Bazilo’s home, just like others, was not safe.
There was an ever-present danger of the rebels striking under the cover of night to loot and wreck all forms of havoc. Often, the rebels would abduct children, with the boys used to fill up ranks and girls largely taken as sex slaves.

The people of Gulu reacted to this situation in an intelligent way. The children would spend the day in the villages tilling the land, tending livestock or attending school, but would then move to Gulu Town before nightfall. The town, with a heavier presence of government forces, was relatively better protected and the children stood a better chance of escaping abduction while there. Night commuting – moving to Gulu Town every evening – gained international renown at the height of the war. And for seven years, Kilara commuted to Gulu Town. According to estimates by Unicef, Kilara was one of the 44,000 rural boys and girls who commuted to Gulu Town over different periods during the LRA insurgency.

“At 11 years, I was able to lead my two brothers to sleep in the corridors of St Mary’s Hospital,” Kilara, now 27, says.
Their home in Obia West, Bardege Division in Gulu Municipality, is at least seven miles away from St Mary’s Hospital Lacor, meaning that they covered at least 14 miles on a daily basis, to shuffle to and from the hospital.
Kilara says their parents, weary of travelling the long distance in search of safety, gave up and opted to stay home.
“Our parents opted to stay at home, arguing that they were old enough to be killed and they could not bother to commute,” Kilara says.

Lacor hospital was not the safest place to hide from the rebels. In fact, before Kilara and his peers started taking refuge there, the hospital had been attacked a number of times as the rebels went to loot drugs. Whenever they couldn’t find the drugs, they would abduct some staff of the hospital, particularly nurses, looking to extract drugs as ransom.
But possibilities like this were not in Kilara’s little mind as his thoughts wandered during the long nights in the corridors of the hospital. He was 11 years old by then, in the first place. But Kirala had more serious issues to worry about.
“I would fear that in the morning we would get home to find that our parents had all been killed,” Kilara says.
Kirala’s worst fears, thankfully, did not come to pass. But the more he commuted to Gulu, the more he felt guilty about having to leave his parents at home, in harm’s way. The commuting continued, nevertheless.

They would leave home at about 4pm, looking to reach the hospital by 7pm when it was not yet dark. Since they also had to attend school, this routine was difficult to keep. But they tried their best because one mistake could cost lives.
“There is a time when we overheard gunshots in the morning on our way back home at around 7am,” Kilara says. “We went back to the hospital and that day we did not go to school.”
Despite such interruptions, Kilara would soldier on and with support from different people, later on earn a diploma in Videography at YMCA in Kampala.

Speaking to us in his studio in Gulu, he could not hide his sense of accomplishment under the circumstances.
“I make documentaries for people who pay me Shs500,000 and above,’ Kilara says. “The money has helped me to cater for the school fees of my brothers and other basics in life.”
Because many of his peers with whom Kilara used to commute have not been as lucky, he feels more should be done to improve their situation.
“Since the guns have gone silent and the locals can access their land freely, there is need to support farmers with better mechanisation to improve what is being grown,” Kirala says.

History of kony’s two decade LRA war

The LRA began as an evolution of ‘the Holy Spirit Movement’ - a rebellion against President Museveni‘s government led by Alice Lakwena. When Alice Lakwena was exiled, Joseph Kony took over, changing the name of the group to the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). As the group lost regional support, he quickly started a trend of self-preservation that would come to characterise the rebel group, stealing supplies and abducting children to fill his ranks.
Starting in 1996, the Ugandan government, unable to stop the LRA, required the people of northern Uganda to leave their villages and enter government-run camps for internally displaced persons (IDPs). These camps were supposedly created for the safety of the people, but the camps were rife with disease and violence. At the height of the conflict, 1.7 million people lived in these camps across the region. The conditions were squalid and there was no way to make a living.

Thus, a generation of Acholi people were born and raised in criminal conditions. The LRA terrorised northern Uganda for two decades when, in 2006, they indicated an interest in peace negotiations. These were hosted by Juba, Sudan (now South Sudan), and dubbed the Juba Peace Talks. Meanwhile the LRA set up camp in Garamba National Park in northeastern Congo, gathering its strength and stockpiling food. There is significant evidence that Kony ordered his fighters to attack villages and abduct children in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo) during the Peace Talks. [Invisible Children]

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