Agnes

Free at last

At the end of the session, twelve thousand young people stood up to applaud not a new rock star, but a girl like themselves, one who in her own country, Uganda, was abducted by rebels and managed to escape. Her testimony opens up the heart: “God’s plan for me passes through the cross of this experience”

BY ANDREA COSTANZI

War has been raging in her country since 1986. In recent months, it has received international attention because of massacres in the refugee camps and the kidnapping of missionaries. Her house was searched inch by inch while her mother hid with a grandchild. After her talk at the UN, Agnes Gilian Ocitti, a 19-year-old Ugandan, is a thorn in the flesh of the rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army, whose atrocities she reveals to the whole world. These include her kidnapping in 1996 in the company 138 schoolmates from St Mary’s High School in Aboke. Sr Rachele Fassera, vice-principal and the friend of many of the girls, followed the group. By imploring the rebel commander, she obtained the liberation of 109 girls. Agnes was among the 30 left whom the rebels took to Sudan. She was forced to take part in the punitive beating death of one of her fellow prisoners who had tried to escape. “I expected to die myself, too. I thought life was by this point useless and meaningless, that it could end at any moment. Then I thought of the faces of my parents, the grief they would have felt. My heart said no. This hope gave me the strength to flee, to run for my life: six miles between death and freedom.” The 12,000 GS students who filled the Auditorium of the Meeting rose to their feet to applaud Agnes, one of them. With a testimony like this, the concreteness of Antonio Socci’s book, I nuovi perseguitati [The Newly Persecuted], is revealed. Those figures that were apparently so absurd to everybody, 160,000 Christian martyrs in 2001, become understandable in the face of Agnes, one of the 15,000 children kidnapped in northern Uganda. “In my book,” Socci explained to the audience at the Meeting, “there are normal people who are not martyrs by profession. What is astounding in them is their touched recognition of a God who came down to earth.” Agnes told the audience, “God’s plan for me passes through the cross of this experience. Catholicism arrived in my land in 1914, and already by 1918 Jildo and Daudi, young catechists who had converted only two years earlier, were martyred because they spoke to the people about Christ. They will be beatified next October 20 by the Pope.”

Today, Agnes is studying law at Makerere University in Kampala. “I want to serve my people and to see justice come about in the world. But how can I speak of justice when 19 of my schoolmates are still imprisoned, when every day my people are killed, kidnapped, mutilated by land mines, forced to live in refugee camps?” The answer seems hidden, then Agnes adds a new element to her story. “In Makerere, I live my belonging to CLU, which teaches me what justice is, God’s plan for each of us–a good plan, my vocation. The vocation of the Acholi people is the proclamation of the glory of Christ on the cross.”

“The world would accept our idea of God,” Fr Giorgio Pontiggia, Rector of the Istituto Sacro Cuore high school in Milan, said in closing, “it would accept a Church of good men and of values. But it persecutes Christians because they acknowledge Christ as present in reality. It is impressive that so many people are willing to die for Jesus. One can die only for something one loves and one can love only something that makes him live more intensely.”