Cœur de pardon: Les femmes ougandaises autrefois enfants soldats mènent maintenant la paix
Cœur de pardon: Les femmes ougandaises autrefois enfants soldats mènent maintenant la paix
Global Sisters Report (GSR) || Par Melanie Lidman || 31 janvier 2018
Le jour ensoleillé de janvier dernier, École professionnelle St. Monica pour les filles à Gulu, en Ouganda, était plein à éclater. Plus de 5 000 personnes ont couvert chaque pouce du campus verdoyant, célébrant le Gulu Episcopal Provincial Annual Peace Prayer Week, qui a culminé le 13 janvier 2017 avec une messe de célébration.
"Que chaque cœur ne favorise pas la violence! Que chaque bouche ne favorise pas la violence!» Les paroles de Mgr John Baptist Odama, archevêque de Gulu, échouèrent à travers les terrains de l'école.
Il y a 20 ans, L'Armée de résistance du Seigneur Joseph Kony Ils ont pris l'assaut de St. Monica avec des armes à feu, cherchant des enfants qu'ils pourraient contraindre à devenir de nouveaux soldats. Mais en ce jour de janvier 2017, les trous de balles qui pimentaient encore le plafond des salles de classe ont été opposés à des milliers de personnes à l'extérieur, en fermant les mains dans une prière pour la paix.
Assis parmi la foule était Sr. Nyirumbe de romarin, l'ancien directeur de l'école St Monica.
« J'étais très observatrice, et une chose que j'ai remarquée, c'est qu'aucune femme ou religieuse n'a pu donner sa voix [pendant la semaine de la paix] », a déclaré Nyirumbe. "Ils n'en ont même pas invité un ! Quand nous parlons de consolidation de la paix, je m'attendais à ce qu'ils disent : « Laissez-nous prendre certaines de ces femmes qui ont été profondément touchées par ce conflit pour donner leur voix, pour savoir comment elles sont impliquées dans la consolidation de la paix, quels sont leurs rôles. »
À la suite de la semaine de la paix dominée par les hommes, Nyirumbe a décidé de réunir certaines femmes à Gulu pour créer leur propre forum de la paix. « Nous, les femmes, devrions nous faire entendre, pourquoi attendons-nous d'autres personnes ? » demanda-t-elle.
Le pape François marque Journée mondiale de la paix le 1er janvier, offrant une vision d'un monde plus pacifique dans l'année à venir, un message Nyirumbe espère que les femmes prendront à cœur.
Nyirumbe supervise également un effort pour rédiger un « programme de paix » spécifique aux femmes avec des survivants du nord de l'Ouganda. Le programme utilisera des exemples concrets et des méthodes qui ont aidé les femmes de Gulu à apprendre aux femmes dans d'autres zones d'après conflit comment trouver la paix tant au sein d'elles-mêmes qu'au sein de leur communauté.
Nyirumbe dit que la consolidation de la paix exige une approche à deux volets : les femmes doivent obtenir l'indépendance financière grâce à l'éducation formelle et à la formation pratique; cela les conduit à un sentiment d'autonomisation bien au-delà de la survie. Alors la vraie guérison peut commencer. Les femmes doivent se pardonner et trouver le calme à l'intérieur avant de pouvoir se tourner vers l'extérieur et commencer à guérir les fractures dans leur société, dit-elle.
Trous de balles dans le plafond
St. Monica, comme beaucoup du nord de l'Ouganda, porte toujours les cicatrices physiques des années de troubles. Depuis 1989, plus de 30 000 enfants, garçons et filles, ont été enlevés dans le nord de l'Ouganda et forcés de commettre des atrocités contre leurs propres villages pendant la guerre de 25 ans menée par Kony.
Kony, un prophète auto-décrivé qui s'est penché sur le renversement du président de longue date de l'Ouganda, Yoweri Museveni, a demandé à ses disciples d'enlever des enfants dès 8 ans, de les laver le cerveau et de les forcer à brûler des maisons et à violer et tuer leurs voisins. La violence personnes déplacées de plus de 2,5 millions dans le nord de l'Ouganda et a fait 100 000 morts.
Les enfants appelés "voyageurs de nuit" encombrés dans les couloirs de St. Monica de chaque soir, des kilomètres de marche chaque jour pour avoir un espace sûr pour dormir, se cachant des kidnappeurs.
L'Armée de résistance du Seigneur s'est finalement effondrée alors que les enfants kidnappés s'échappaient, et la guerre s'est arrêtée. La Cour pénale internationale a mandat for Kony in 2005, and the Ugandan government attempted to negotiate for peace starting in 2008. President Barack Obama sent special forces troops in 2012 to try to capture Kony in cooperation with the Ugandan army. The Department of Defense spent $780 million over six years in pursuit of Kony, though the operation ended last spring without Kony’s capture.
With his army weakened to only a few hundred fighters, Kony withdrew from northern Uganda years ago and is now believed to be in hiding in the Central African Republic, Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo.
As the conflict ended and the kidnapped children emerged from the bush, they had to return to the same villages they had pillaged. Many communities shunned the returnees, because the children’s presence was a reminder of the things they did and people they killed, a reminder of impossible loss. The process of reconciliation, some of which uses religious leaders to conduct traditional tribal forgiveness ceremonies, is ongoing.
Girls faced an even greater challenge than boys in the process of rebuilding a life after the conflict. Many girls were forcibly “married” to rebel army commanders, and they returned to their village with young children. The girls had barely completed elementary school and were now single mothers with no education or social support because their families shunned them.
When the first waves of female returnees came back home, the Sacred Heart of Jesus sisters, who have run St. Monica’s since 1982, adapted their vocational program for young mothers. They started a nursery school and kindergarten so mothers could study, and they offered literacy programs for girls who had left school so early they could not read. They incorporated therapy into their traditional vocational training in agriculture, weaving, catering and tailoring.
More than 1,500 girls and women have graduated from the various courses, which range from three months to two years.
Nyirumbe said it was a change for the sisters to begin to accept unmarried mothers to study at the school. “But we said, ‘Where is our compassion? Where is our care? Our care is to embrace both the mother and the child,’ ” she said.
As the years passed, many St. Monica graduates have found success: They started their own stores, began to reconcile with their family and neighbors, got married, had more children. “You can see a girl 10 years ago, she was so miserable, deeply traumatized, and I see her now very beautiful and well dressed,” said Nyirumbe. “I see these people have walked through their own pain, they took ownership and they are totally transformed.”
Once Nyirumbe, who gives speeches and interviews about St. Monica’s around the world, ran into one of her graduates in Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa airport. The graduate was returning from a women’s conference in Egypt, where she was an invited speaker. “She wasn’t [formally] educated, but she’s getting that freedom to go out and talk in the name of others,” Nyirumbe said.
A group of St. Monica’s alumni started the Women’s Network, an independent group of women who offer small-scale bank loans and emotional support.
Josephine Amena, a graduate of St. Monica’s who now works at the school, is one of the members of the group and said the financial independence she gained after learning to sew has allowed her to “stand firm.”
“Sometimes I’ll be defeated, but [after my training] I won’t need to go begging to people,” she said.
Amena accompanied Nyirumbe to Washington, D.C., in 2016 for the National Prayer Breakfast and spoke to a breakout session. Instead of focusing on the difficulties, her kidnapping and survival in Kony’s army, or her family’s rejection when she returned home, Amena prefers to talk about prayer.
“I told them that God has relieved me from the bush to continue with life,” she said.
Amena relied heavily on her prayer group, made up of both ex-soldiers and civilian victims of terror, to help her find inner peace. “I always tell my fellow ladies, ‘Stand firm, there are problems all over the world; there is nowhere where people aren’t suffering. Even if I’m sleeping hungry, wherever I go, when you have that peace of heart you’re not alone,’ ” said Amena. “Peace starts from the inside, and then you have more outside.”
How do you teach peace?
“You cannot teach peace,” said Nyirumbe. “You have to lead and see it done practically. The people who suffered so much are the very ones who can become teachers of peace.”
Nyirumbe is overseeing the creation of the Transformative Peace Education curriculum, part of a partnership with the University of Oklahoma’s Center for Peace and Development. There are already many blueprints for peace education curriculums across the world. But Nyirumbe is giving the survivors, not academics, the responsibility for designing the program.
“We’re involving people who went through that past and they can tell the story using their own example,” said Nyirumbe.
One lesson they plan to include in the curriculum is a photo project where the women create three photos that represent their past, present and future. “Pictures and storytelling are very good for these women,” said Nyirumbe. “It encourages them not exactly to forget the painful past but to remember it and be able to talk about it now, and keep it as a point of reference to teach their children. To say to them, ‘This is what we went through so I will take care of you and I won’t let you go through this,’ ” she said.
Nyirumbe said she remembers hearing traditional stories from her mother, including the stories about two brothers from the Luo tribe who kept fighting. To this day, she still hears her mother’s voice echoing in her ear with the moral of that story, warning her never to take revenge. “It is women who can tell these stories effectively to the children, who can say, ‘You must break the cycle of violence.’ Children spend so much time with their mothers,” she said.
Nirumbe says many women are cowed by their culture or lack of education.
“Education will liberate these women from their servitude, from their psychological slavery, from their psychological torture and mental torture because they cannot speak about the past. I know there are many things that hold them as captives, and one of them is lack of education. Once they are able to write and speak and communicate, they are no longer living in that prison.”
Pennies and peace
The curriculum will give women around the world practical tools for emerging from trauma and conflict toward personal healing and then doing peacemaking on a larger scale.
First, there’s the practical part of making peace, which is making money. More than anything, these women know you can’t pray on an empty stomach. In conflict areas beset by widespread poverty, the first thing is to ensure the women have a way to survive.
Amena and her friends, assisted by St. Monica’s, created small groups of “table banking,” or informal micro loan groups in their communities, to set up small businesses or shops using the skills they learned at St. Monica’s.
“You should always try to save a little money, because the world is like a ball,” said Amena, and you never know which way fate will roll. “If you think, ‘people will help me out,’ that is out. You have to stand firm and say, ‘What I’m doing is not only for my benefit but also for my children.'”
Then comes the emotional work.
Amena said in the early years, after her family rejected her and she was struggling to survive as a single mom, people often told her to forget the past and move forward. “But I’ve seen these things with my own eyes,” she said.
Instead, it took years of counseling and community prayer groups to address the trauma she went through and begin to heal. There is a pattern towards healing, one Amena and her friends will try to crystalize into part of the peace curriculum.
“Forgiving people is part of it, you must have a heart of forgiveness,” she said. One aspect of that forgiveness also focuses internally.
“You must have peace of mind, peace of heart, peace of body,” said Amena. “In families where there is no peace, life will be hard. People will be quarreling all the time. When you have peace of mind, it also helps the family to live in peace.”
It, too, is important to create a community of people dedicated towards the same goal of healing.
“When life becomes hard, you can say, ‘I have no one,’ it can be hard to share or ask for help,” said Amena. “I live and work with these people, and when I’m stuck with life they understand.”
Nyirumbe and the University of Oklahoma believe that people around the world will also learn and understand, gaining insight from the lessons these women have gleaned.
“We are working with them, but we are making them become the advocates,” said Nyirumbe. “They should find other women and say, ‘If we can do this, then you can reach it, too.’ “
Uganda now hosts more than a million South Sudanese refugees, who have been through their own traumas and need the same support and assistance.
“Someone can’t come and tell you to have peace in your heart and mind,” said Amena. “It depends on the way you live with people, what you do to people, and the life you’re going through.”
As Pope Francis reminds the world to pray for peace on Jan. 1, Nyirumbe hopes the message of the women of northern Uganda will also reach forgotten corners of the world where conflicts are just beginning to fade and wounds are still fresh.
“Peace is not just the absence of war, it’s also the peace of the heart,” said Nyirumbe. “And if we can get people to start living and feeling from their heart that they’re in peace, then development can start taking place. Without this, we will work in vain.”
[Melanie Lidman est correspondante au Moyen-Orient et en Afrique pour Global Sisters Report basé en Israël.]
Source: Global Sisters Report...
