Hell On Earth: The Crisis
In Northern UgandaBy Joseph Grosso
20 April, 2006
Countercurrents.org
A familiar refrain on many of Africa’s post colonial catastrophes goes something like this: countries possessing substantial natural resources, fertile soil, and mineral deposits have been stuck in abject poverty and disease due to porous government, colonial legacies, stifling bureaucracy, and warfare leaving many of the continent’s people with little hope for a brighter day. International realpolitik and Wall Street inspired structural adjustment programs have also been coldly imposed.While it is wise to avoid cliques and recognize subtle and grand differences, the above has been a broadly accurate picture of many African states such as Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, Mobutu’s Zaire, and Doe’s Liberia.
Unfortunately this can also be said for Uganda, once called the “Pearl of Africa” by Winston Churchill. With the world’s limited attention towards Africa now focused inconsistently on the genocide in Darfur, another longstanding humanitarian crisis continues to fester in northern Uganda. It is there where a corrupt, poorly disciplined army has battled for twenty years against a vicious insurgency by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a group made up largely of terrorized, abducted child soldiers (some of whom are made to kill their parents under the threat of death to ensure their loyalty), led by a man who claims to be fighting for the Ten Commandments.
Since its independence from Britain in 1962, Uganda, originally pieced together out of different tribal lands, has experienced more than its share of tragedy starting with its first elected Prime Minister Apollo Obete who rewrote the constitution in 1967 giving himself full state powers. This was followed by the horrifying reign of Idi Amin who seized power in a military coup in 1971.
After some initial hope Amin turned into one of Africa’s worst dictators. A former non-commissioned officer in the British colonial army who served during the gruesome counterinsurgency against the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, Amin soon organized death squads and mass killings of the Langi and Acholi peoples (two of the countries suspected of supporting Obete), while expelling Uganda’s economically significant Asian minority practically destroying the country’s economy. Even suspected of practicing cannibalism, Amin gave himself bizarre titles including ‘the true heir to the throne of Scotland’. By the time he was overthrown by a Tanzanian military intervention in 1979 (after Amin invaded Tanzania) Amin was responsible for an estimated 250,000 deaths.
Amin’s reign was followed by the return of Obete in disputed elections that plunged Uganda into civil war and repression that killed 100,000 more people. In 1986 Yoweri Museveni seized power and has since been labeled a poster child of reform by the IMF and the World Bank. Museveni’s regime can reasonably take credit for a steady economic growth rate and success in taming the spread of AIDS that continues to ravage so many other parts of Africa; however Museveni’s democratic credentials have proven to be quite questionable and his government has taken part in the pillaging of eastern Congo.
At about the same time as Museveni’s seizure of power, Joseph Kony established his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in the north of the country. Ostensibly having roots in a movement representing the Acholi people against government exclusion, the LRA quickly showed its true colors (while being supported by the same Sudanese government now committing genocide in Darfur). Child abductions began in the late 1980s in the district of Gulu where young female students attending The Sacred Heart Girls Boarding School were abducted; as many as 25,000 children have been abducted by the LRA, 7500 of which have been girls. According to UNICEF 1000 have conceived children in captivity where many kidnapped girls live as sex slaves to male commanders. Kony, with a bizarre mix of mysticism, ritual, superstition, and viciousness, seems to keep those around him in enough awe and fear to generate at least surface loyalty (A Human Rights Watch report quotes an escaped LRA member saying “When you go to fight you make the sign of the cross first. If you fail to do this, you will be killed…You must also take oil and draw a cross on your chest, your forehead, and each shoulder, and you must make a cross in oil on your gun. They say that the oil is the power of the Holy Spirit”) Massacres also became a staple in the LRA repertoire. In his book titled Innocence Lost: When Child Soldiers Go to War, Jimmie Briggs recounts a particularly terrifying one in 1995:
A group of three hundred LRA soldiers entered the trading center of the town of Atiakin, in the Gulu district.Easily overpowering the local home guard, the insurgents marched most of the civilians out of the area. The following day under direct orders from Kony, LRA separated from the rest those men and woman deemed elderly or sick…Moments later they murdered 155 people with machetes, pangas, and rifles.
Maiming and disfigurement are also common LRA tactics, including the hacking off of hands, lips, ears and noses. Up to 12,000 people have been killed during the conflict (with more dying from related hunger and disease) and hundreds of thousands have been displaced.LRA terror has also spawned the phenomenon known as the “Night Commuters”. Since 2003 every night an estimated 30,000 plus children hike miles from their rural villages for urban areas, including camps for internally displaced persons in order to avoid abduction by the LRA- some walking up to five, even ten, miles.
According to a 2005 UNICEF report, since most children commute without adult protection they “face the threat of physical abuse, sexual exploitation and gender-based violence, including rape”. Given the sheer number of commuting children camps cannot house all of them, leaving late-comers to seek shelter in public places such as churches or doorways.
Needless to say the LRA insurgency has had grave economic implications for northern Uganda which has not benefited from recent economic reforms. A Human Rights Watch report last year put it succinctly:
While certain aspects of the war such as the LRA’s mutilations and abductions of children have received occasional media coverage, comparatively little has been done by the Ugandan government and the international community to alleviate the suffering of the more than 1.9 million people forced from their homes…Following the forced displacement of 95 percent of the population in the three districts inhabited primarily by the Acholi ethnic group, and the looting and destruction of property by the LRA, northern Uganda is poorer than ever.
In December 2003, the Ugandan government referred the situation to the International Criminal Court (ICC), which announced a short time later that its first investigation ever
would be into the war in northern Uganda. In October 2005 the Court unsealed arrest warrants for several LRA leaders including Joseph Kony- all of whom remain at large.The crisis has been made worse by government forces, known as the Ugandan Peoples’ Defense Forces (UPDF), whom have also committed abuses against civilians including beatings, rapes, and murder. These abuses have been committed with near impunity. Despite several heavy-handed governmental offenses against the LRA (which created many of the displaced people camps), the UPDF has not been able to the insurgency.
The intervention of the ICC has also raised questions about the ability of the Court to assist in ending the conflict given that the bulk of the Court’s investigation figures to be against the LRA, raising issues of one-sidedness by a lack of investigation against the UPDF- as the investigation was requested by the government itself.
Also involved is the issue of justice verses peace as LRA commanders, who have proven to be difficult to capture) may be less willing to end the fighting with arrest warrants hanging over them. Peace negotiations between the government and the LRA broke down early last year and excruciating decisions regarding amnesty or third country asylum may have to be faced to end the fighting (similar to the process that ended the civil war in Liberia with indicted warlord’s Charles Taylor’s temporary asylum in Nigeria).
A brief report released in January by the International Crisis Group offers a comprehensive approach for bring stability to the region. This includes a military component involving three or four sharp attacks on LRA positions with the hope that many fighters would be tempted to turn themselves in. Ideally this would be done with Security Council support by a combination of Ugandan and international forces.Along side this would be increased international aid for internally displaced people as well as funding for a serious demobilization and reintegration program for fighters. Donors would also work with the Ugandan government to establish some sort of Truth and Reconciliation Commission to assist in healing local wounds inflicted by decades of horror. International pressure can also be used on the Ugandan government to make necessary reforms to the UPDF and punish human rights violators with its ranks.
Any approach will have to be reasonably flexible, but the time is long past due for the crisis in northern Uganda to come urgently to the forefront of international attention. The LRA insurgency has condemned a region to unimaginable terror and poverty. As the international community hopefully rallies itself further in Darfur, we must make it clear that the children of Uganda matter just as much. Joseph Kony cannot be allowed to continue to create a living hell for the holy commandments in his mind.
The author can be reached at [email protected]
