Mutilation Sparks Uganda Outrage Over War
Reuters
Sunday, May 2, 2004; 9:35 AM
By Daniel Wallis
LIRA, Uganda (Reuters) - Sophia Apio dared not utter a sound as Ugandan rebels sliced off her lips and ears with a razor blade. They had threatened to hack her to death with machetes if she cried.
Apio, her husband Ojede and six others were captured by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) while scavenging for food in northern Uganda, where a 17-year-old war has forced about 1.5 million people to flee their homes.
Shadowy LRA rebels led by Joseph Kony, a former altar boy turned self-proclaimed mystic, typically target civilians in their brutal war against the government.
Tens of thousands of children have been abducted and forced by the LRA to become fighters, porters and sex slaves.
Apio, 35, was living in Aloi camp for people displaced by the fighting in Lira district, but, ravaged by hunger, she and the others ventured out on foot into the bush in search of food.
"Between the camp and the village we saw the rebels. Rebels in the trees, rebels in the bushes," she says, dabbing at the saliva that now runs unchecked down her chin.
"We tried to run but very soon they had surrounded us."
On a signal from an LRA commander, Apio's husband and the six others were killed -- their heads smashed in by fighters wielding heavy wooden clubs.
SHOW THEM YOUR FACE
Apio, a mother of six, was then dragged before the commander, who demanded to know the locations of Ugandan army units and local defense militias. She said she did not know.
"Then he told his boys to take off my blouse and he ordered me to have intercourse with my dead husband," Apio whispers amid the clamour of a busy hospital ward where she is recovering.
She lay down on the floor next to her husband's corpse, she says, and in terror began to stroke his chest.
"They shouted at me 'Is that how you do it?' then they told me to get up and come to them," Apio said.
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