KAMPALA
Although the conflict between the Ugandan government and the rebel Lords' Resistance Army (LRA) in the northern part of the country ended in 2006 after 20 years of fighting, many of the rebels' victims still bear the scars of war.
Without his upper lip, nose, ears or hands, Ochola John, 29, recalls how in 2004 the door of his home in Gilgil village in the Acholi region was flung wide open at around midnight and he was forced from his bed.
"They knocked my door down, grabbed me, and took me out," he told Anadolu Agency. "I kept hearing someone shout, 'He is a government soldier'."
His passionate pleas fell on deaf ears.
"They kept saying I was a soldier responsible for the death of one of their colleagues," he recounted.
"The rebels then tied my hands to my back. With a knife, they started chopping off first my lips, my nose and then ears," John recalled bitterly.
He screamed in pain, hoping it would all end soon with a quick shot in the head or back, as he had seen in many similar cases.
"The [rebel] soldier then untied my hands and raised his axe," John recounted. "He first chopped off my left hand, then the right."
Three of John's fellow villagers were then instructed to take him to a nearby army base.
"They told my village mates that they should tell the UPDF [Uganda People's Defense Force, the national army], that we [the rebels] do not want any soldier," he recalled.
Uganda witnessed massive human rights violations and abuses during the conflict, which began in 1986 and continued until the LRA leader fled the country to the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo.
According to research carried out by the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium (SLRC) in 2012/13, the Acholi and Lango sub-regions of Northern Uganda are home to approximately 3.6 million people. Ten percent of them still bear war scars and one out of every three households contains an injured person.
-Silent agony-
John spent months in agony and pain undergoing treatment at the Kitgum government hospital.
"For four months, I lay on that bed," he recalled. "The treatment and conditions in the hospital weren't the best, but it was all I could get."
Crippled and disfigured by the LRA, John could not return to school.
He eventually got married and now has four children – two girls and two boys.
His wife, who runs a small business baking cakes, is the household's sole breadwinner.
"It's very hard, because I don't work," John told AA. "So my wife struggles to sell some cakes and that is how we survive."
Unlike John, 42-year-old Rackara Richard, another of the LRA's many victims, hardly speaks. And when he does, it's barely a whisper.
Judging from the scars on his face, it is a wonder that he managed to survive.
His long, oval face, unlike others, reveals a deep hole between his right eye and nose.
"The rebels put a gun pointing to my throat. Upon firing it, [the bullet] came right through here and [they] left me to die," Richard told AA in a whisper, pointing to his nose.
As he needs considerable energy to sustain a conversation, efforts to get him to talk more about his near-death experience were in vain.
With no wife or children to support him, Richard fully depends on his maternal aunt for survival.
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