Ethnicised thinking was further evident in the call of the former Minister of State for Reconstruction of Northern Uganda for a conference which would ‘include all the stakeholders in Acholiland and enable them to resolve the contradictions between them, before bringing in the international community’.69 It was also reflected in formations such as the Acholi Parliamentary Group, and shaped donor and interventions such as the EU's ‘Acholiland Programme’.
Alongside the conceptual climate created by discourses of ‘tribe’ was the concrete reality of a lack of military control. A WFP report of 1999 described how the organisation was adopting a partial approach and only assisting the population ‘already under firm government control’ (WFP 1999: 33), and one elder I interviewed argued that ‘In the camps people are protecting government soldiers. People are failing to pay taxes as they have no source of income, therefore we can say they are under rebel control’.70
The sentiments of most Acholi towards the Government were clear, as they pointedly refused to vote for Museveni in presidential elections in 1996, 2001 and 2006, and, in opposition to the Government, called for a negotiated rather than a military solution to the conflict.71 Equally in the Teso sub-region, the spontaneous formation of ethnic militias from late 2003 to early 2004, and the speed with which the UPDF moved to bring these under its own control (Dolan, 2004), was an indicator of how fragile the government felt the earlier pacification of the sub-region to have been.
The most pressing reality, though, was the glaring inequality between the north and south of the country, and the grievances this both reflected and gave rise to. As one New Vision commentator observed:
Let us face it: life up there is what some defunct philosopher would call nasty, short and brutish. And it is being lived in the same country and under the same government with the rest whose most urgent problem is to cut down on the fats in their bodies…Those fellows who did not know what their president looks like live in the same country with several thousand who surf the internet and communicate with friends all over the globe via email…72
The degree of inequality was beyond ready redress. The task of holding together a country which did not fully feel it was a country was not made easier by being beholden to international donors for support. Paradoxically, Uganda's status as a success story and show-case for international policies was also an indicator of the extent to which its room for an independent development trajectory towards national unity had been compromised. When as a student at Dar-es-Salaam University in the late 1960s, Museveni wrote that he and his fellow students were ‘probably reactionary puppets of neo-colonialism in the making’ (Museveni 1970: 7), he was unnervingly close to predicting his own future.
Under structural adjustment policies, state services and large-scale infrastructural developments were cut back and the possibility of buying favour with the population at large was reduced. Restrictions on military expenditure and demands for demobilisation weakened the use of the military to keep a grip on power. Under an internationally driven agenda of multi-party democratisation, Museveni's ‘no-party’ system was coming under increasing challenge. And under de-centralisation policies, power at a local level was re-ethnicised and the whole concept of national cadres of civil servants was diluted. Indeed, even donor support for the re-anointment of traditional leaders could be seen as undermining a national project of anti-sectarianism. The development of a national IDP policy mentioned above involved developing institutional mechanisms to ‘include direct participation of donors, UN agencies and NGOs in all IDP planning’, and the early warning system was to involve an ‘interagency Vulnerability and Assessment Mapping Group consisting of WFP, OPM [Office of the Prime Minister], SCF-U.K., FEWS [Famine Early Warning System] and IOM’. In short, the Government was becoming a minor player in its own major issues. The referral to the ICC which was made in 2004, and which was to become such a stumbling block to the peace talks in 2006, was in some respects an admission of loss of control, insofar as under the Rome Statute such referrals are only to be made where the state concerned is unwilling or unable to bring perpetrators to account.
That these frameworks imposed by the international donors were something of a straitjacket for the Government is evident from many defiant statements made by the President. An article in The Monitor, for example, went under the headline ‘I will not kneel before donors, swears Museveni’.73 At times donor-government tensions over issues such as levels of demobilisation, amnesty, and defence expenditure resulted in open wars of words between them. On 25 February 2004 MPs passed a resolution calling for the north to be declared a disaster zone. In March, following attacks on IDP camps in Lira district, tensions were such that the Donor Group on Northern Uganda, Amnesty and Recovery from Conflict74 issued a statement in which they endorsed Parliament's February resolution and rejected ‘the assertion that Donor's restrictions on Defence expenditure have impeded the UPDF's capacity to defend citizens from such attacks’. In May 2004 the donors rejected the proposed 2004/5 budget ‘citing excessive public administration costs and unjustified increases in defence spending’.75
There were attempts to escape the straitjacket. The rapid subdivision of existing districts into smaller ones (e.g. Kitgum district became Kitgum and Pader districts) can be seen as a necessary ‘divide and rule’ tactic to counter the re-ethnicising influence of decentralisation – if ethnic identities could not be overcome through a super-ordinate national system then breaking them down into sub-ethnic groupings was an alternative.76 Exercises such as mchaka-mchaka (political education – see Chapter 5) could be seen as an attempt at generating a national perspective; placing the President's brother Salim Saleh in charge of reserve forces could be interpreted as an evasion of the constraints of demobilisation. All these, however, might be termed political bricolage, making do with the little that is to hand.
The reality was that, with the de-fragmentation of the national pearl still unfinished business, with externally driven agendas threatening a degree of re-fragmentation, and lacking the resources to glue the ethnicised fragments together with large-scale economic development, the Government was left with relatively few options. While hard-won political independence demanded that the state control its own population, it offered little in the way of economic power with which to exercise this control.
Some Concluding Questions
The above narrative provokes numerous questions which are addressed in the following chapters. First, what can be said about the nature and motivations of the ostensible protagonists, the LRA and Government of Uganda, and indeed, are they the only actors who should be considered? Was the LRA much more successful than is generally allowed, or was it a less important player than it was usually made out to be? Given that it survived nearly two decades while numerous other rebel groups came and went, was this due to a particular resilience on its part – or was it allowed to survive? Equally, and related to this, was the Government serious in its stated intentions to find a solution to the war? Given that non-military solutions (Pece peace accord 1988, Bigombe peace talks 1994, Uganda-Sudan peace accord 1999, Amnesty Bill 2000) and military ones alike (Operation Iron Fist 2002, ethnic militias 2004) resoundingly failed to bring about any resolution to the situation and succeeded only in aggravating it, the integrity of purpose of those who designed and implemented such ‘solutions’ has to be open to scrutiny.
Particular questions also arise over the Government's integrity of purpose with regard to internal displacement. The increasingly destructive impact of living for extended periods in ‘protected villages’ led to growing calls for decongestion and resettlement but, until late 2006, virtually no steps were taken to do so. What then was the real function of a phenomenon which most people at least purported to regard as having negative consequences?
The escalation of non-military phenomena also prompts questions about the nature of the relationship between long-term and severe impact on civilians and the perpetuation of conflict. Did the inexorable escalation reflect self-perpetuating, indeed self-aggravating dimensions to the dynamics of the war? At times the conflict between the Government's stubborn adherence to seeking a military solution, and the equally strong resistance to this from an increasing range of civil society