If one puts all these figures together, remembering that they are drawn from a fairly representative sample of ordinary civilians in Gulu district, it becomes clear that the average civilian had, over the course of nearly two decades, experienced a relentless series of violations.
Discussion
When the outline of the major phases of the ‘war’ is juxtaposed with people's memories, it suggests that, from a longitudinal perspective, the LRA, rather than being the lead perpetrator, was one amongst many, including the UPDA, Karimojong, Lakwena, and NRA/UPDF. The levels of brutality, displacement and impoverishment, are extreme – and under-acknowledged. When Gersony argued that it was not possible to compare the violence in northern Uganda with the ‘large-scale mass murder and brutality that characterized UNLA operations in the Luwero Triangle in 1983/4’ (1997: 23), he seriously underplayed the devastation wrought on people in Gulu and Kitgum districts over nearly two decades (as compared with two years). Throughout my fieldwork I failed to encounter anybody who had not either experienced extreme abuse and atrocities first hand or witnessed them being exercised on immediate family members – often by government and rebels in quick succession.
Although the death rate and other impacts should have placed northern Uganda squarely on the lists of ‘deadly conflicts’ suggested by organisations such as the Carnegie Corporation in New York, it is not clear that the term ‘war’, as conventionally understood, adequately describes (let alone explains) what was happening. The fact that the elder quoted at the beginning of this chapter described people of Acholi as ‘in a dilemma’, a people who ‘don't know how to go forward’, is not surprising. The defining features were not the pitched battles between LRA and UPDF that conventional notions of war might suggest, but rather the phenomena of inexorably escalating displacement, dependency, debilitation, militarization, geographic reach and international involvement over time. Even humanitarians did not seem to grasp the extent of what was going on. It was only in November 2003, when the UN's Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs saw fit to describe the situation as worse than that in Iraq,58 that the gravity of the situation began to be acknowledged.
What the above account does demonstrate is that even by the late 1990s, President Museveni and his government, although in some respects exemplifying an ‘African renaissance’, in others remained in a weak position and faced a problem of control. Internal divisions juxtaposed with the fact that over 50 per cent of its budget came from external donors, made their hold on power considerably more provisional than was generally perceived. Nor could these internal and external pressures be dealt with discreetly, as they were closely related both historically and in the present.
Back in 1986, with the memory of how post-independence political parties had been overlaid with and become synonymous with ethnic, religious and political agendas, Museveni and the NRM made the achievement of national unity and the elimination of all forms of sectarianism point three of their ten-point programme. This goal underpinned the ‘no-party’ system and continued to inform the Government's doubts about the move to multi-party democracy being urged from both inside and outside the country,59 a move which was eventually made in time for the 2005 elections.
Underlying the positive political project of national unity were very real military and political imperatives. If the rebel NRM was to achieve any kind of national and international credibility as the Government of a country – rather than merely being seen as the occupiers of a nominal capital city – then it had to establish control of the north. As described above, for some months following the taking of Kampala the NRA had no presence in – and therefore did not exercise control over – those parts of the country north of the Karuma Bridge (River Nile). Even once they did establish a military presence, they were regarded by many as an occupying force rather than as fellow Ugandans – not helped by the fact that many members of the NRA were Tutsis from Rwanda who would eventually return to Rwanda as part of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in 1990.60
The real-politik objective of gaining control is suggested by Museveni's appointment of a Minister for Pacification of Northern Uganda (a term used by George Orwell to exemplify political euphemisms, words which serve ‘to mask, sanitize and confer respectability’ and to ‘insulate their users and listeners from experiencing fully the meaning of what they are doing’ (Cohen, 2001: 107)). Even with the amendment of this title to Minister for Reconstruction of Northern Uganda, the implementation of the Local Council system of non-party democracy, and the massive militarization of the north by the UPDF, the Government's authority was not fully established in 1999 and the relative importance of central and local government, members of parliament, religious and traditional leaders, remained in flux. While the interventions of national level church leaders, such as the call from the Archbishop of Kampala, Emmanuel Cardinal Wamala, to Kony, ‘to stop fighting and accept dialogue with the Government’,61 posed no direct challenge to the Government, those of Acholi religious leaders did, for they ‘appealed to the Government to declare Acholiland a disaster area and immediately enter into direct negotiations with Kony rebels. They have also demanded that Parliament revokes its recommendation for a military solution to the 12 year war which has devastated northern Uganda’.62
Amongst Government representatives in particular, decentralisation raised numerous questions about who had most power, despite the claimed complementarities of the centre and the districts.63 These ambiguities further aggravated doubts about whether the Acholi had ever been truly ‘pacified’ and brought under political control, doubts which themselves were fed by the possibility that the LRA's apparent resilience was at least in part due to covert support from civilian Acholi. Furthermore, despite a project of national unity, colonial discourses based on notions of ‘tribe’ had been deeply internalised and remained an organising principle in many people's thinking. For example, one peace activist stated to me that his loyalties were, in order of priority, to himself, his family, his clan, his tribe, his country, and to the human race. Ethnicised thinking continued to pervade political organising and entered into the literature of international agencies,64 creating an evident challenge for a Government aiming at national unity. At the peace meeting convened by religious leaders in 1998, for example, one Catholic priest held that:
If the Acholis are united, who can come and separate us? If the Acholis are united, our voice shall be heard. Before the Movement system, how did the Acholi live? If they unite they will be like the Karimojong who responded to the raiders from Kenya by using students in Makerere to threaten secession and as a result were given weapons. Let the Acholi do the same.
He continued: ‘People in Acholi come together to dig a garden and successfully finish it. If they are united they will be respected by other tribes. The tribe is something that comes from God. To be peaceful we should accept God into our lives’.65 In one short speech he thus clarified that his vision of ‘unity’ was of the tribe not the nation, he also distanced the Acholi from the Movement, aligned them with the Karimojong and their approach to making demands on the state (including the threat of secession), conjured up the promise of tribal identity as the basis for respect, and brought God on side too. In doing so he exemplified a broader tendency to mythologize Acholi identity. This was further demonstrated in the religious leaders’ appeal for Third Party Mediation published in the daily newspapers on 8 March 2004. This blended religious imagery with pan-African and ethnic rhetoric: ‘We were moved by our moral and religious obligations as shepherds of God's people, especially of the weak and vulnerable. But we also found warrant for such solidarity in our noble African tradition best captured by the Lwo saying oyoo opilo too ikom litinone (The mother rat will die with her children)’.66 The appeal describes how ‘the Acholi traditional, social and moral fabric that once formed one of the most beautiful cultural tapestries in Africa is now in tatters’. It calls for mediation from internationally renowned Africans, with only the San Egidio community mentioned as possible non-African mediators.67 Somewhat perversely, therefore, local ‘peace activists’ who claimed to be seeking a way out of the situation