‘35 people were killed, I met those people’: Boy soldier reveals devastation in Ukraine
A child soldier forced to brandish an AK-47 at age 12, and a refugee displaced by war, Brisbane’s Ayik Chut knows the reality of conflict and has revealed the awful scenes he encountered when he travelled to Ukraine to help its embattled people.
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Brisbane father Ayik Chut has seen war in all its horror and fear. It was a feature of his childhood, as a boy soldier for his birth country of South Sudan, where, from age 12, he was armed with an AK-47 assault rifle and witnessed many years of terrible atrocities. He was also himself brutally tortured.
For several years, Chut, who now lives in Brisbane, was also a refugee, displaced by war and surviving years in Ethiopian and Kenyan refugee camps before settling in Toowoomba with his family in 1996, aged 19.
And so when Chut, now 45, who has worked as an actor and has written a book about his life story (The Lost Boy: Tales of a Child Soldier), saw the atrocities of the Russian attack on Ukraine in February, he felt compelled to use his particular skill-set to help those in need.
Less than a fortnight after the deadly war began, Chut travelled to Ukraine, where he joined the International Legion of Defense of Ukraine, a military force of volunteers from foreign countries.
Within days of arriving, he survived a deadly Russian air strike on the Yavoriv military training base in Ukraine, in the Lviv region, close to the western border with Poland.
The attack – that killed 35 people and injured more than 130 – saw more than 30 missiles fired at the facility that was used by the US and NATO for training exercises.
“I knew what I was getting myself into. I did it because I knew I wouldn’t be scared like most of the other volunteers would be,’’ Chut says.’
“When we were at the training base, many of the people didn’t know how to use a gun. I’ve been a boy soldier. I also know what it’s like to be a refugee. I went through what Ukrainian civilians are going through but our war (in South Sudan) didn’t have the modern weapons like the missiles.
“Watching the news in Australia, I thought I could help the refugees. I came to help and what I heard about this war is that it isn’t just about Ukraine and Russia, it is a war that could lead to World War III.
“If Australia wasn’t supporting Ukraine I wouldn’t go there. And if Australia was attacked I would be the first person to put my hand up to fight because this is my home. My children and my family call Australia home.
“I joined the Legion just to have a gun so I could protect myself while helping the civilians. We were bombed at the Legion training base, not at frontline fighting.’’
Chut says the Russian air strike on the training facility was “like a firework store’’.
“When it was attacked, it just went off, missiles were going everywhere. The missiles just kept dropping and we ran to the bunkers,’’ he says.
“There were a lot of explosions and the window of the room where I was sleeping was blown out.
“The base was wiped out – an area of about two football fields – and 35 people were killed. I met these people, I was training, eating and talking with them the day before.’’
Chut, of Indooroopilly, in Brisbane’s west, a father of two children, including the sole carer of his daughter, Sunday, 3, spent two weeks
in Ukraine.
He has since made a second trip to the war-torn country, working with organisations such as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and Red Cross, helping refugees make safe passage out of Ukraine.
The past few months have been a sad and tumultuous period in Chut’s life. For the first time in 26 years, Chut recently returned to the Republic of South Sudan for the funerals of both his sister Aguil De’Chut Deng and his mother Achol Aguin Majok, who tragically died just one month apart.
Aguil, 54, who lived in Australia since 1996 but travelled regularly back to South Sudan, was known as a freedom fighter, peace activist and champion of women and children’s rights.
She advocated for South Sudanese children and their families in refugee camps where they lived in poverty and helped thousands of refugees come to Western countries such as Australia, America, the United Kingdom and Canada.
In 1996, Aguil and her family were among the first South Sudanese refugees to settle in Toowoomba.
She studied at the University of Southern Queensland and began speaking publicly, educating an Australian population largely ignorant about the war in South Sudan. She travelled to the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany to speak about her country.
In Australia, she founded the Sudanese Australian International Activist Group, connecting refugees to communities and services, and meeting former prime ministers John Howard and Kevin Rudd.
Among her achievements, she addressed the UNHCR Executive Committee in 2007; participated in the Australia 2020 Summit (in 2008); was nominated to the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) National Liberation Council representing the diaspora in Australia and Oceania; campaigned for diaspora participation in the 2011 South Sudanese Independence Referendum; and founded the South Sudanese Women Advocacy for Peace.
Aquil was honoured with a state funeral in South Sudan, praised by South Sudanese president Salva Kiir Mayardit, who described her as a patriot and “woman of immense courage in her generation’’ and a “pivotal personality in the history of our liberation’’.
At the behest of the president, she was the first woman to be honoured with a burial in South Sudan’s Heroes Graveyard.
Chut was in Ukraine when he heard of his sister’s disappearance. She was missing for several days before the tragic discovery of her body in a wooded area in Brisbane on April 30. It is believed she took her own life.
She leaves behind two sons Dheiu, 37, and Dut, 34, and daughters Yar, 30, and Alair, 22.
Dut Aguil, who was born in Ethiopia and came to Australia along with Chut in 1996, says his mother had been staying with him and his sister Alair at their house at Bracken Ridge, in Brisbane’s north.
“In our country, mum was the most respected woman to walk off South Sudan,’’ he says.
“She was so respected and I’ve learnt that she was not just my mother, but the mother to South Sudan.
“The whole country is mourning her. She would give the world to help other people – that was just the type of heart that she had.’’
Dut says his mother was “not herself’’ in the last weeks of her life and that it seemed she had the weight of the world on her shoulders.
“You never know what is going on in other people’s minds,’’ he says.
As Chut prepared to travel to South Sudan to bury his sister, the unthinkable happened when his mother Achol died suddenly.
Achol lived in Toowoomba but was in South Sudan visiting her other daughter, Yar, 47, in Juba, the country’s capital.
While Achol was there, she learned the terrible news of Aguil’s death and extended her stay in South Sudan while her daughter’s body was transferred from Australia for her funeral in Juba.
But before the funeral, Achol died in confusing circumstances during an attempted armed robbery of her daughter’s general store that was attached to the house (where she was staying).
It is unclear how Achol died but Chut says his mother, who was in her 70s, was an asthmatic and was already devastated by her daughter’s death.
In disbelief that his sister and mother had passed away, Chut travelled to Juba in what he says was the “worst trip I’ve ever had in my life’’.
“I had butterflies in my belly the whole time, just going up and down, while I was on the plane,” he says.
“I was already going to South Sudan for my sister’s funeral and then my mother died. I was frozen when I found out.’’
During his time in Juba, Chut revisited some of his childhood haunts including a rubbish dump where he used to scavenge for food. Here, he found three mothers with about eight young children going through rubbish piles looking for something to eat.
Chut gave them a modest amount of money by Australian standards but enough for the women to buy food for perhaps a couple of days.
“I looked for food there when I was a kid. I used to do the same thing,’’ Chut says.
“When I went back there, I felt lucky out of millions. I sat with the mothers, got on my knees, shaking hands, talking to them. “They are sitting there with their children in the dump, there are flies everywhere, they live in a shelter there. I just felt sad it is still happening.’’
Chut has faced many difficult years to overcome his traumatic childhood.
In Australia, he suffered horrifying, recurring nightmares and was misdiagnosed and medicated for schizophrenia for eight years before he was correctly diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
During those years, he lost sight of his acting ambitions (he had previously done some local television ads and worked as an extra in television series Cybergirl and movies Scooby Doo and Curse of the Talisman) and says he became a “drugged out, volatile, risk-taking, emotional basketcase’’.
He got into trouble with the law, developed a drug and alcohol problem and landed criminal charges of assault, obstructing police and disorderly conduct, finally ending up in Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre.
But by 2013 he was leading a clean and sober lifestyle and in 2017 he featured on SBS television program Look Me in the Eye, where two estranged people sit in a room and look at each other, with no words, for five minutes.
Chut was featured with Anyang Reng, the teenager who mercilessly tortured him as a boy soldier in South Sudan, who Chut had, incredibly, crossed paths with in Brisbane.
Chut, who has since acted in television series Safe Harbour and Harrow and as an extra in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, volunteers at Police Citizens Youth Clubs at Lang Park and Inala, in Brisbane’s southwest, where he mentors teenagers and adolescents.
He would like to open a youth centre in Brisbane for teenagers and adolescents, “for every child that needs help – African, Asian, caucasian, any kid’’.
A charity, in his late sister’s name – the Aguil Chut Foundation – is also being established in South Sudan to help young women and he and Dut hope to expand this to Australia.
“I’m a single father, full-time caring for Sunday and I want to do something I love,’’ Chut says.
“My sister helped people everywhere. Going to Ukraine, this is something my sister would have done. And I want to help young kids who need help. Being a citizen in Australia is the best thing anyone could wish for.
“Life doesn’t get any better than to live in Australia.’’
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