As Peace Process Shows Gains, Northern Uganda Must Not Be Forgotten
Michael Wilkerson, 10 Sept. 2007
World Politics Review Exclusive
KAMPALA, Uganda — Northern Uganda has been mired in violent conflict for over 20 years.
And though it rarely receives as many headlines as nearby fighting in Darfur, Somalia, or even Eastern Congo, the war in Northern Uganda, one of Africa’s longest running conflicts and humanitarian disasters, is inching toward a possible resolution.
For over 10 years for many Northern Ugandans, home meant forced living in a crowded, unsanitary camp. The Ugandan government called these camps "protected villages."
In Juba, Southern Sudan, negotiators from the government of Uganda and the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) recently signed the third phase of a five-part peace agreement. The progress is important, but the government of Uganda and its Western sponsors still have much to answer for. Even if peace is officially declared, resolving the humanitarian crisis in the North will be no easy task.
Two Decades of War
In 1986, inspired by a cult-like belief in the religious powers of a woman named Alice Lakwena, a small group in Northern Uganda began fighting against current President Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army. Museveni had just fought his way to power, deposing the former military regime. Lakwena’s promise of immunity to bullets proved false, and the group was decimated by Museveni, only to reemerge as the Lord’s Resistance Army under the leadership of Joseph Kony, who also claimed mystical powers. The LRA has a stated goal of overthrowing the Ugandan government and instituting rule based on the 10 Commandments.
Though many in Northern Uganda were less than thrilled with Museveni’s armed takeover of power — particularly because of a North-South divide that is a lingering result of colonial policies — most were not too keen to join Kony’s guerillas either. In order to sustain his army, Kony took to raiding, raping and kidnapping his Acholi kinsmen in the North. Over the past 20 years, the LRA has forced thousands of children to join as fighters or sex slaves, and killed countless others during forays into villages in the border areas of Uganda, Congo, and SouthernSudan.
Meanwhile, even as he was being hailed by the United States as a “new breed of African leader,” President Museveni was either unable or unwilling to defeat the LRA militarily, and failed to protect civilians in Northern Uganda from being kidnapped and brutalized. Eventually, he set up internally displaced persons (IDP) camps ostensibly to protect those in the North from the LRA. In reality, the death rates from the horrible conditions in the camps have been higher than in the worst periods of violence in the long war — with constant reports of abuses by the soldiers who are supposed to be guarding against the LRA. A 2005 World Health Organization report said the camps experience 1,000 deaths per week, most of them children. “Not a single explanation on earth,” wrote journalist Elias Biryabarema of Uganda’s Daily Monitor after visiting the IDP camps in 2005, “can justify the sickening human catastrophe [of] the degradation, desolation, and the horrors killing off generation after generation.”
A ‘Secret Genocide’?
Worse still, the conditions have long had an element of ethnic cleansing. The vast majority of those in the camps are from the Acholi ethnic group, which has often opposed Museveni politically, and which he once threatened to contain “like grasshoppers in a bottle.” Most of Museveni’s top staff and military officers are Banyankole, a tribe hailing from Southwestern Uganda, and a significant number of the most powerful figures in the government come from a Banyankole sub-group, the Bahima — a sort of Skull and Bones for Uganda. After the murderous regime of Tito Okello, a northerner, Museveni rose to power, casting himself as a savior of the South.
Olara Otunnu, a former U.N. under secretary general from Northern Uganda, has condemned Museveni for a “secret genocide” against the Acholi. In an article with that title in Foreign Policy magazine in July 2006, Otunnu outlined some of his claims. “Government soldiers are screened, and those who test HIV-positive are deployed to the north, with the mission of wreaking maximum havoc on the local girls and women,” he wrote. The Ugandan government consequently denied that it had any such policy, but other government actions, like refusing for many years to guarantee safety for humanitarian food shipments to the camps, raise doubts. In Uganda, it is widely believed that Otunnu’s U.N. career was cut short by opposition from Museveni’s government to his nomination for higher posts.
Though the U.N. has periodically highlighted the conflict, and the International Criminal Court indicted Kony and his top lieutenants for war crimes, there has been little international attention to Northern Uganda, something that may be attributed to Museveni’s position as a darling of the West. Despite his former policy of one-party “democracy” (a referendum in 2005 paved the way for a multiparty political system), and well-documented election rigging, Museveni scored with donors for agreeing to economic restructuring, and successfully reducing the AIDS rate (at least in the South) during the early 1990s. For years, Muesveni’s government has received large amounts of foreign aid, much of which is American, and the Ugandan government usually relies on aid for at least half of its budget. As journalist Howard French points out in his 2004 book “A Continent for the Taking,” in 1995 Museveni had not yet even held elections after almost 10 years in power but was receiving almost double the amount of U.S. foreign assistance as Mali, which was struggling to sustain a much more legitimateturntowarddemocracy.
Museveni positions himself as anti-terror ally
Then, in a brilliant move after Sept. 11, 2001, Museveni positioned himself as a key ally in the War on Terrorism in East Africa, promising to vigorously fight al-Qaida. Sightings of the terrorist group in Uganda are still zero, but Museveni allegedly earned plaudits for helping sponsor rebel groups in Southern Sudan against the oppressive Islamic and northern dominated government. Being able to point to an LRA threat from the North was politically convenient, said Andrew Mwenda, previously a prominent journalist and radio host in Uganda, now an activist against foreign aid. “It allowed Museveni to create a strategic alliance with the U.S. and distract from his ruling regime,” he said.Shortly thereafter, the U.S. listed the LRA as an official terrorist organization and, starting in 2003, even provided non-lethal military support like uniforms, communications equipment and vehicles, ignoring Museveni’s tarnished human rights record.
Peace Process Provides Opportunity
Despite his past actions and the free hand he was given by donors, in 2006 Museveni made the important decision to endorse a plan for peace based on negotiation with the LRA, not total war — something much of the Acholi community had demanded. Though skepticism remains about whether the peace process will succeed, fighting has stopped almost completely and Uganda’s New Vision newspaper reported on Sept. 5 that people are beginning to leave the camps to return to their villages. But even if the war ends, there are still nearly two million displaced people in the North, and life outside the camps will not be easy. Speaking to World Politics Review late last month, Biryabarema of the Daily Monitor pointed out that peace is a good start if it happens, but that peace alone isn’t going to do much for people released from the camps. “Imagine, these are guys who have not been in their villages for 15 plus years,” he said. “They will remain trapped in squalor, stalked by nearly all the horrors that they thought they had left in the camps.” “It annoys me so much to think that Northern Uganda will remain in that sort of primordial existence for the next several decades,” he said.
With all the difficulties elsewhere in East Africa, peace in Northern Uganda would be a laudable accomplishment. The war and Museveni’s presidency both started more than 20 years ago. But if the United States and other donors really support peace, justice and reconciliation in Uganda, they should pressure Museveni to use some donor money to rehabilitate the North rather than to pamper himself. The government allocation for the president’s personal residence was twice the 2006-2007 budget of the entire Ugandan Department of Agriculture, Mwenda said, even though 78 percent of Ugandans work in agriculture and live in poverty.
The people of Northern Uganda, and the Western taxpayers supplying much of the foreign aid, deserve better. Should the war actually end, it will be a shame if Museveni is allowed to let Northern Uganda languish in its misery for a third straight decade.
Michael Wilkerson attends Stanford University, where he is a member of the editorial board of the Stanford Daily newspaper. He spent the summer of 2006 as a journalist at the Daily Monitor, a local paper in Uganda to which he still contributes. This summer he traveled again to Uganda as a freelance writer. He can be reached at wilkerson.wpr@gmail.com .
