
Some of the war victims during a meeting at Mayor’s Garden in Lira Town in 2018. Many of the victims say the memories of their loved ones are still fresh. PHOTO/BILL OKETCH
In late 2003, Josephine Anena (not her real name) and her elder sister, both born in captivity, returned home together with their mother, who was abducted aged just 13 in 1997.
However, their mother’s family, located in Acholibur, Pader District, could not accommodate them or welcome their mother since their paternity was unknown.
“The family had conditioned me to first return the girls to their father or his family, in case he is still in captivity or dead. I tried to trace his family in vain until 2007 when I gave up and decided to seek settlement in Gulu Town and fend for my daughters,” Anena’s mother says.
When she returned from captivity, Anena’s mother had two daughters. Now she counts five children. During the past 18
years, she has unsuccessfully attempted to settle down with a man thrice.
“I had to give up on marriage or another relationship after giving birth to my next three children with separate men
because they would kick me out either when pregnant or just delivered,” she says.
Anena would also go on to suffer the same fate as her mother. The father of her only son ended their relationship after finding out that she was born in captivity during the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) insurgency in northern Uganda.
Many other children born in captivity and their mothers continue to grapple with similar stigma, never mind that it is
nearly two decades since the guns went silent.
We spoke to 24-year-old Moses Okot, a Public Administration graduate from Gulu University, who returned together with his mother in 2003, from Nesitu in South Sudan.
This was home to one of the LRA’s major camps that crumbled under Operation Lightning Thunder’s firepower. Mr Okot says rejection from society and a lack of sense of belonging have pushed many of his colleagues into mental illness and hopelessness.
“Child tracing was done by the Women Advocacy Network, but I believe child tracing is not yet fully done since it needs
follow-up even after 10 years. Right now you find that the youth whose families were traced and reintegrated are no
longer in those families, they were kicked out,” he says.
Denied identification
So, why are people not accepting Okot and company into the community? Anecdotal evidence put their number at more than 10,000.

Former Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) abducted women lay tiles with names of missing women, and children on a monument at Ker Kwaro Acholi in Gulu City in February 2018. PHOTO/JAMES OWICH
Many of them, who struggled to pursue secondary education, have failed to advance in further studies or secure jobs after the government declined to register them to get National ID cards.
“One of our brothers got a scholarship at Gulu University but the last condition was a National ID. He missed out because he couldn't acquire it. Every time he got there, he was sent away,” Mr Okot discloses, adding: “Because we are denied National IDs, we are excluded from government programmes, [like] the Youth Livelihood Fund and the Parish Development Model because for you to register as a beneficiary, you must mandatorily present that ID.”
Mr Okot cited a mid-2024 meeting that involved people facing a similar predicament as him,the National Identification
and Registration Authority (Nira), community-based organisations (CBOs) and other stakeholders.
Mr Okot says Nira told them that whoever does not have a Ugandan birth certificate was not a Ugandan.
“One of us got up and asked the question: who are we? Which nation are we from? Do we belong to South Sudan, DRC or Uganda? Because we are being denied IDs just because we cannot identify our fathers whom we do not know and never saw,” Mr Okot recalls.
“Nira agreed to give us a special consideration to allow us to fill those forms and bypass the paternity issues in the National ID registration form, but we hope it will kick off this year,” Mr Okot adds.
Monitor has established that some of the youth born in captivity were presenting to Nira false information, including fake parents and relatives.
Ms Pamela Angwech, the director of Gulu Women Economic Development and Globalisation, a local non-governmental organisation (NGO) supporting female victims of war, confirmed the meeting in which Nira pledged to make a special arrangement to register children born in captivity.
“We engaged with Nira, and now they seem to understand,” she reveals.
Tough times
Mr Moses Komakech, one of Joseph Kony’s alleged sons who runs the Youth Advocacy Network together with Mr Moses Ojok, reveals that many people born in captivity have never known a normal life.
“One of the biggest challenges youth born in captivity face within our communities is stigma. They are looked at as not fit to be within the community since they are children of rebels,” he notes.
Five years ago, the two started the Youth Advocacy Network to bring together and seek to reintegrate children and youth born from captivity during the LRA war with their families.
Mr Komakech says the rejection has now forced the youth to marry among themselves.
“Most of us are in our 20s or 30s, some women are forced into marriage because life is very hard, and they
cannot provide for themselves,the same way the males will want to start a new life with a new family, but this is always
met with rejection,” he says.
Ms Evelyn Among, the director of Women Advocacy Network (WAN), a community-based organisation that
roots for the restoration of lives of female former LRA abductees, says the problem also took a toll on the mothers
of the youth who have met rejection and humiliation by their own families.
“A female victim who stayed in captivity for about 10 years, when they return, it is difficult for them to provide for the children's basic needs like education and livelihood. Because of that, many children do not have access
to education. They’re just surviving, some within their paternal homes and others in their maternal homes
because they don't have anywhere else to go,” she discloses.
“There is a serious challenge of denied access to family assets. For the case of women who returned with girls, some of them were welcomed because the society believes girls are assets since they attract dowry and
move on to other clans after marriage, but those with boys faced it rough,” she adds.
Slow transition
Mr Henry Kilama Komakech, an advocate and the victims’ lawyer during the Thomas Kwoyelo trial, says the situation is likely to worsen if nothing is urgently done to address the plight of the affected people.
“When the children were young, their mothers struggled more with survival needs like food, shelter, clothing, etc., but when these people grew up, they started battling the crisis of identity. If the boy or girl wants to know his father, that becomes a problem,” he says.

Thomas Kwoyelo, a former commander of the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is seen during the ICD sitting at Gulu High Court Circuit on October 25, 2024. PHOTO/TOBBIAS JOLY OWINY
Mr Komakech agrees with Mr Okot’s assertion that there is currently a huge relationship crisis that young women born from captivity and their mothers are dealing with.
“Some of them want to marry but that identity issue comes up and the affair fails," he says.
Mr Komakech said the government needs to deliberately design specific interventions targeting returnee women and their children.
In Amuru District, for example, hundreds of youth born in captivity are currently said to be struggling with tribal identities as per a 2024 study by the Justice & Reconciliation Project (JRP), an NGO working with war survivors in northern Uganda.
The youngest among the 693 participants in the study titled, Invisible Victims: Mapping & Identifying Children Born in Captivity” were reported to be 12. The oldest was found to be 38 years old.
The study indicated that 62 percent of the children born in LRA captivity’s mothers are alive while their fathers are either deceased or their whereabouts are unknown.
The absence of the fathers has put a strain on their mothers to provide as a single parent.
“The absence of a father figure in these children’s lives is hurting their sense of belonging and preventing them from inheriting land. This is because, among the Acholi people of northern Uganda, the land is passed down through the paternal line,” the report noted.
The study estimated that between 4,000 and 6,000 children were born in LRA captivity.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PSTD)
The elusive LRA leader Joseph Kony masterminded the abductions of more than 75,000 young boys and girls between 1986 and 2006.
He later recruited the males into the LRA ranks as fighters while the girls were either used as porters or sex slaves.
The children were majorly abducted from Acholi, Lango, West Nile and Teso sub-regions, as well as South Sudan. Out of the more than 70,000 abductees, only 22,759 returned home, according to figures provided by the Berkley-Tulane Initiative.

This undated file photo shows LRA leader Joseph Kony looking on surronded by his soldiers
Ms Stella Lanam, the director of War Victims and Children Networking, a local organisation advocating for formerly abducted women and children in the north, says many former abducted men and women are suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PSTD) after witnessing killings and other heinous crimes being committed during the insurgency.
“The victims now take their own lives after battling depression for a long time. We have records of 41 war survivors, who have committed suicide in the Acholi sub-region alone in the past three years because of mental ill-health,” Ms Lanam discloses.
To be able to address the challenges war victims face, the local governments across the region, with the support of civil society groups and the central government, should generate complete data showing the total number of children born of war, Ms Angwech says.
She notes that the disparity in figures has made it difficult to ascertain the magnitude of the problem and the intervention required.
“There is a question of the floating population. Wherever you talk about these children, now grown into adults,
it is an inter-generational problem. Children born of war and rape, some are now mothers and fathers, some
are married, some not, and some are children with children, a completely new generation,” she says.
“The worst thing is that there seems to be too much conversation about paternity when it comes to our traditional practices and customs and religion. Unless we embrace them, we will have a generational issue since
the question is related to identity, citizenship, paternity, and belonging,” she adds.