These words were spoken by Grace Akallo, a former child-soldier from Uganda, who was in Rome last June to participate in the symposium Children and Young People Affected by War: Learn, Understand, Act.
According to the United Nations and Save the Children, it is estimated that around 250,000 children are currently being exploited globally by armed groups and paramilitary forces as soldiers. As such, they are fulfilling functions such as frontline fighters, porters or sex slaves. Over one billion children, that is, almost one sixth of the total world population, live in countries or territories affected by armed conflict. Of these, some 300 million are under the age of six.
Child soldiers are deprived of the love and protection of their families, and are embroiled in a conflict they neither created nor understand. In particular, girl-soldiers are compelled to become ‘women’ prematurely, and constitute the favourite victims of marauding bands of adult male soldiers who rape and abuse them.
“There are dozens of armies and rebel groups”, Grace informs us, “who continue to ruin the lives of children in the same way around the world”.
Grace then added the harrowing account of her kidnap, “In 1996, when I was thinking about joining high school, The Lord’s Resistance Army attacked my school in Aboke and abducted 139 students. They took us into the bush, what you call the jungle”. Sister Rachele Fassera, a nun from the Catholic school Grace was attending, ventured into the bush behind them in a desperate attempt to free her students, risking her life in the process. After pleading with the soldiers, she managed to rescue 109 girls. Grace and 30 others, however, were detained by the Lord’s Resistance Army and, after a month, marched into the Sudan where they were trained as soldiers. She was raped and morally abused and, naturally, she was trained to kill.
After a gruelling seven months, Grace finally managed to break free and return to her old school. “I was happy to be back”, she says, “but my heart was saddened by the ongoing torture my friends were still going through. I left too many of them behind. I was lucky enough to be able to escape and to be supported by people who cared for me, like Sister Rachele. But so many girls are still waiting for their chance to be rescued, and I think of them everyday”.
At the end of the symposium on children affected by war, Pope Benedict XVI, during his weekly General Audience on June 24, greeted the UN Secretary-General’s representative for children and armed conflict, who was accompanied by Grace Akollo.
Benedict told them that he was close to all of these little victims of violence, fear, abandonment, hunger, abuse, sickness and death, and that he always remembered them in his prayers.
Grace told the journalists that the voice of the Pope John Paul II was very important when she was kidnapped in Uganda in 1996. On that occasion John Paul appealed publicly for her release and that of the other girls taken with her from the school, and that “the whole word heard about it”, she added. “Even the rebels heard about it. They were so angry at us and they said, ‘Who are you that even the Pope is talking about you?’”
Grace is now a 29-year-old graduate student at Clark University, Massachusetts, and together with two other former child soldiers, has created the Young People Affected by War network, which aims to amplify the voice of children scarred by the physical, psychological and social costs of war. She also routinely travels to Washington and to the United Nations to speak on behalf of World Vision, a Christian relief and development organisation that has counselled, rehabilitated and reconciled more than 15,000 formerly abducted child soldiers with their families and communities.
Every child rescued from war, violence, weapons and drugs is a small victory, as well as a grace for the whole of humanity, and Grace Akollo is proof of this.
Updated on October 06 2016