'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Notes from Uganda, Part 1

It is now Saturday.  I arrived here in Kampala Monday morning, having flown overnight Sunday from Amsterdam to Nairobi and then connected with the short flight from there to Entebbe airport.  Entebbe was the site of a daring and heroic Israeli hostage-rescue operation back in the 1970s.  I don't recall most of the situational details of that story...  I think the Israeli commandos had come in from some kind of side airstrip. 

As the hotel shuttle made the one-hour drive from Entebbe in to Kampala Monday, I saw a side airstrip between the main runway and the shore of Lake Victoria.  Now it seemed to have become a fairly substantial UN staging area.  There were four small planes and a couple of helicopters, all with highly visible UN markings, and then huge rows of shipping containers all around, all also clearly marked as "UN".  My understanding is that the UN uses this area as a support base for many of the humanitarian and peacekeeping operations it maintains in the region, including UNOMOC in the nearby areas of eastern DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) and UNMIS in Southern Sudan.  Perhaps also for some of the humanitarian aid that UN agencies deliver to the war-torn areas of northern Uganda itself (more on this, later.)

So this gave me a rather vivid picture of the precarious, conflict-enveloped situation of Uganda, a mid-size country located right here in the "heart" of Africa, squeezed between these two massive and extremely troubled neighboring states, Sudan and the DRC.  Sudan and DRC are, I thnk, the two largest countries in Africa.  So large that you can actually travel right across the continent from its western coast to its eastern coast by passing only through the two of them.  Or you could, if they had road systems anything up to the task, which of course they don't.  Their mutual border is not long; but then tucked in between them to the south of that mutual border is Uganda, and tucked in to the north of it is the Central African Republic.  (Rwanda, a country much smaller than Uganda, lies to the south of it, and also bordering DRC.)

These "national boundaries" in the heart of Africa were all drawn onto a map of the continent by representatives of European governments who met in Berlin in 1884-85.  How on earth did that happen, you may ask?  Well, that was the heyday of all the European empires.  Many of them already had colonies and zones of influence along the coasts of Africa,  but the riches (and strategic value) of the interior of the continent were becoming both apparent and somewhat accessible to them.  So to cut down on further fighting over these ricvhes between themselves, they sat down in Berlin to draw up firm "borders" between the different areas of Africa that they either already controlled or hoped to control.  King Leopold of Belgium, a newcomer to the empire-building scene, was "awarded" Congo at the conference.  The Brits (who some years earlier had beaten the French during a historic inter-imperial encounter in El-Fasher, in Darfur, and had thereby established their control of the entire Nile River system)  were "awarded" Sudan and Uganda.  The Germans got Rwanda, the French got Central African Republic and Chad, etc etc...

Nice work if you can get it, eh? (Irony alert.) Dividing up the booty of somebody else's entire continent without even consulting them...

All that "history" is still burningly relevant here today, for many, many reasons....

One is that the borders marked in on that map in Berlin made absolutely no sense in terms of the pre-existing political geographies of these areas. Another is that the whole period of imperial resource looting, gross imperial oppression of indigenous communities and their lifeways, and post-colonial exploitation by the western powers has left terrible legacies of harm and suffering on these peoples and their countries.

I am here in Uganda doing two, or maybe more, things.  One is to take part in a conference of the International Development Ethics Association (IDEA), which lasted from Wedmnesday morning until, actually,  today.  (I'm playing hooky from this morning's session to sit here and be writing this.)  Another is to learn a lot more about the situation in northern Uganda, regarding which the International Criminal Court in The Hague now has five international arrest warrants outstanding, but where there is also-- right now!-- an intriguing peace process going on, which includes or may very soon in the future include either the people named on those warrants or, certainly, their very close associates.  What, I have been wondering, is the nature of the interaction between these indictments and the peace talks?

I am making this trip not alone, but with my friend Coralie (Corky) Bryant, a terrific woman whom I've known for many years.  She's also a Quaker.  She has had a long and rich carreer of working on development issues.  She was a senior staff member at the World Bank for a while, working on evaluating the effectivness of Bank programs in various parts of the world.  After retiring from there, she went to Columbia University in New York, to head up their Development Studies program.  As part of that, she did a lot of work studying various international non-governmental organizations.  Her most recent books were one on international NGOs and one (co-authored with Christina Kappaz) titled Reducing Poverty, Building Peace.

Anyway, Corky did a Ph.D. at the London School of Economics in politics and public administration back in the early 1960s, and for her fieldwork she spent four months in Uganda at the time of national independence in 1962.  So for her, this is a significant coming-back.  She hasn't been back here in all the intervening years.  When she was here before, she was affililated with the Makerere Institute of Social Research; and this week, our conference has been hosted by Makerere University Faculty of Arts; so it has been even more truly a "coming back".  By and large, her main impression here has been one of sadness at the shattering of the hopes she had seen (and shared) for the country back in 1962...  But I guess I should let her speak for herself on all this.

In the intervening decades, Uganda has witnessed considerable amounts of internal political discord, one foreign invasion (but in the circumstances, that of ending Idi Amin's ghastly period of misrule here in 1978-9, not a completely bad one), and the destabilizing spillover from other conflicts in the immediate region-- southern Sudan, eatsern DRC, and Rwanda.

One thing I have certainly heard many Ugandans remark on since we've  been here is the inappropriate (and therefore dysfunctional) location of the "national" borders that were drawn up by those European diplomats at the Congress of Berlin. The country's population of around 24 million contains members of nine or more fairly distinct "indigenous" language groups, and much smaller numbers of other people, primarily descendants of the South Asian people were brought here as administrators and traders in the days of British rule.  (The story of these Ugandan Asians is itself quite interesting:  They were all expelled from the country  by Idid Amin, who also expropriated nearly all their properties here.  More rcently, though, the current presdent, Yoweri Museveni, invited them back and offered full restitution of the epropriated properties.  One of our fellow conferees here is Prof. Shiraz Dossa from Nova Scotia, who had been one of those expelled by Amin.  He retained a great affection for the country.  He said that many of those expelled had indeed come back here to live and work, though only around 60% of the expellees had bothered to take up the offer of property restitution.  My general impression is that many of the expellees have becomes very successful in business and the profressions in other countries, primarily Britain and Canada; though I am sure there were also some for whom the expulsion proved devastating and economically crippling.)

Anyway, of the indigenous peoples-- a category that I know Mahmoud Mamdani doesn't like, but which I still find to be a morally and analytically compelling one-- the five main language groups in the south are by and large speakers of Bantu languages.  The biggest of these are the Baganda, the group after whom the the country was (mis-)named by the British.  (At an introductory session of the conference held Tuesday,  a talented Makerere University historian called Mwanbustya Ndebeesa gave us an "introductory overview" of the country's history.  He said that the British had asked Swahili speakers in the east what this country was called, and they had told them "Uganda", though the Baganda people themselves call it Buganda; and the Brits just went with what they had heard.)

In the north, there are four main language/ethnic groups, speakers of non-Bantu languages who are often described as "Nilotic" peoples. There is considerable cultural and extended-family overlap between people who live inside Uganda's borders and those in neighboring countries.  In the southwest, Uganda contains indigenous people (who are full citizens) who are Banyarwanda, and therefore closely connected with the Banyrwanda people of Rwanda.  Similarly, in the north, it continas many citizens who are closely connected with peoples in South Sudan; and I imagine the same is true along the country's other borders, too.

One of the big themes in Uganda's internal politics has been the shifting balance of power between the country's northern and southern communities.  Museveni-- who won a slightly less-than-fair election to a third presidential term back in February of this year-- is  by and large seen as a proponent of southern-- or sometimes, southern and western-- interests.  Many analysts consider he has a long-lasting desire to punish the northern peoples (for reasons that are not entirely clear to me.)  Anyway, at the time in 1986 that Museveni's very disciplined guerrilla formation, the National Resistance Army (NRA), was making its grab for national power by trying to seize control of the capital, Kampala, it seems that  fighters from the Acholi people, based in the north, were also trying to do the same; and they lost out.

At that time, a few years post-Idi Amin, much of the country was rife with contesting guerrilla groups. After 1986 Museveni managed to bring most of them under central government control-- primarily through the widespread use of amnesties and by incorporating men who had previously been guerrilla fighters into his new national army.  But the Acholi (and also, apparently, some other northern groups) he was never able to subordinate in this way; and a cycle of armed conflict, containing elements of oppression and resistance to opprerssion, with many egregious atrocities committed by both sides, became entrenched there.

As part of the oppression/subordination of the northern peoples, the Museveni government has for many years sustained the political marginalization and institutional discrimination against the peoples of the region; and more rcently  (from 1996 on) started forcibly relocating northerners, primarily Acholi, from their farms and villages into structly government-controlled areas named (or perhaps, misnamed) "Internally Displaced Peoples" camps-- IDP camps.  I say that perhaps this is a misnomer, because the term IDP camp, in international discourse, usually refers to encampments established for people who have voluntarily left their homes and moved to an area within the same country, fleeing either conflict or stravtion.  However, the camps established in the north by the Museveni government have, I think, much more of the aspect of  the "strategic hamlets" established by, for example, the US forces in Vietnam.  Strategic "villageization" programs are a frequent component of colonial and post-colonial counter-insurgency campaigns.  They can be traced back to the British imperial forces' introduction of "concentration camps" for whole communities of Boer/Afrikaner farming people in South Africa during the Anglo-Boer wars.  (They have something in common with the US government's "concentration" of native Americans into tribal reserves in the 1800s.)  Extremely coercive strategic villageization was also an integral part of  Britain's counter-insurgency campaign in Malaya in the 1950s and-- certainly-- in Kenya in the same decade (as I have written about earlier, on JWN.)  It also has a lot in common with the way the US forces in Iraq have tried to exert their control over the Sunni areas of the west of the country.

The strategic goal here is to "break the back" of an insurgency by denying it access to any sympathetic and potentially supportive population.  The way this is-- in the colonial view-- to be achieved is by cutting off the entire population of people suspected of harboring sympathies for the rebels from their own productive economic base and rendering them completely dependent on the government for survival.  (And if many of them don't survive the villageization process, then so be it; though actual destruction of the population is not, in the first instance, the goal.)

So are these camps in northern Uganda-- which currently, I believe, host some 1.0 to 1.5 million people-- really IDP camps, or are they "strategic hamlets"?  The key issue here is whether the decision the camp residents made to leave their home farms and go to the camps was made voluntarily, or through government coercion.

Thursday I bought Tim Allen's excellent and very up-to-date book, Trial Justice: The international Criminal Court and the Lord's Resistance Army.  He writes (p.53) :

The public health and public security situations in these camps is often appalling, and directly and unacceptably lethal to their inhabitants.  Allen writes (pp.55-56):

I have focused first and foremost on these figures (and descriptions) of the very harmful effects of the government's long-sustained villageization/"IDP camp" program for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, as Allen alludes to, these figures are shocking on a world scale, and certainly should "shock the conscinece of the world"-- but this situation is still stunningly little known about elsewhere in the world.  The Crude Mortality Rate figures in northern Uganda are, for example, significantly higher than those among IDPs in Darfur, and far higher than those among Palestinians in Gaza-- but where has been the international outrage?

Anopther reason to focus first on these figures is that governments and even moderately well organized government security forces are nearly always much more powerful, and in particular, much more capable of inflicting real harm on people, than any non-governmental organizations are ever able to be.  And we should surely hold government just as accountable as we hold non-governmental organizations accountable for the harm they inflict on human persons.  We could describe this as a quintessentially victim-centered approach.

Yet in many or most of such cases, the western media (in particular) tends to focus on the often more "spectacular" acts of violence committed  by the rebels/insurgents, and on the effects of those acts, rather than on the much more damaging acts committed-- and often on a longterm, continuing basis-- by the much more powerrful security forces of established governments.  In the case of Uganda, this means that most attention in the western MSM has been on the, yes, often extremely grisly and 'spectacular' acts of violence committed by the insurgent forces in northern Uganda, which nowadays means the "Lords Resistance Army' (LRA).  It is against five top leaders of the LRA that the ICC has issued indictments and, more recently, international arrest warrants.  The acts of which they are (fairly credibly) accused include the enslavement and sexual enslavement of numerous young people, acts of mutilation, rape, and very wanton killing, etc etc.

The ICC has not, however, issued any indictments against members of the Ugandan government or its armed forces (the UPDF) either for any of the significant war crimes which some UPDF are credibly accused of hacving committed within northern Uganda or-- more broadly-- for the implemtnation of the entire broader policy of coerced "villageization" of the Acholi and other northern peoples, which itself has infliucted broad and great harm on them.

Does the villageization policy not "shock the conscience of the world" in quite the same way?  I am trying to understand this.

When I interviewed the ICC Chief Prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, in The Hague nine days ago, he said his investigators had pursued some investigations into allegations of UPDF wrongdoing.  But, he said, using solely the criterion of the "gravity" of the crimes committed, then these five LRA commanders would have to come at the top of the list of any of those actors in the north Uganda situation who had committed the "most grave" crimes.

I think we could all benefit from further exploration of this concept of "gravity."

...

This issue is also very thought-provoking, beacuse in a real sense, the hopes of many of my good friends in the western rights movment back in the 1990s, when the ICC was being created, was that it could somehow act as a counter to the disproportionate power that national governments enjoy in their enconters with vulnerable populations.  But here we are, in Uganda, with the ICC weighing in-- with all its (not terribly certain) political weight-- effectively on the side of the government, and against the anti-government rebel force.

Not terribly surprising, perhaps, given that it was the government oif Uganda that invited the ICC prosecutor to take up the case of northern Uganda, in the first place..  Or, that the government of Uganda has almost undiluted control over all the ICC's access to the terrain of, and witnesses within, the "scenes" of the crimes committed.  (And we have certainly already seen the extent to which, in Rwanda, the government's control of the ICTR's access to terrain, and the material evidence and potential witnesses contained therein, hasd skewed the ability of that international court to deliver impartial justice to all Rwandans.)

...

Tim Allen's book, which I have just about finished reading, is really valuable.  It contains a wealth of background material, and firsthand interview material gathered in northern Uganda, on the issue of the interaction between the ICC and the situation here.  He reaches a conclusion that I am generally inclined to disagree with-- namely, that the ICC actions regarding northern Uganda have, on balance, been a good thing, even if the ICC has made many mis-steps alkong the way.  And he backs it up with some serious and interesting evidence,  and some interesting though (in my view) not yet totally convincing argumentation.  He is also fair enough to present a lot of evidence that undermines his own eventual conclusion.  Basically, the big thrust of his argumentation is that, yes, it is true that many, many leaders and spokespeople for the Acholi people in northern Uganda have spoken out strongly against Ocampo's issuance of the five indictments-- but, here are his main counter-arguments:


My sense, from reading Allen's book, is that he has agonized just as much as I hav-- maybe more-- over this whole issue of the eventual utility of the ICC's work (in general); and he has come down, for now, just over on the other side of the fence to where I have been.  But I am certainly still prepared to be persuaded that the ICC's intervention here in Uganda can ultimately prove to have been helpful to the people of Uganda-- and here, I underline, that it is they, and not anyone else (and certainly not a bunch of very highly paid international lawyers sitting in comfort and security in The Hague), who should be seen as overwhelmingly the primary stakeholders in the success of this whole case.

Handy slogan to remember in this context: the old Hippocratic formula of "First, do no harm!"  No, it should certainly not be acceptable to us if the ICC were to end up making things worse for the people of northern Uganda  but then have its spokespeople turn round and claim that, "Well, it might not have been so good for the people of northern Uganda, but it is good for the development of the whole field of international criminal justice in general." 

And who will tell whether it has been good for the people of Uganda?  Why, the people of northern Uganda themselves.

The main way in which thie ICC just might, possibly, prove to have been helpful is if  it turns out that its issuance of the indictments was one of the factors-- in addition to the broad, though by no means total, success of the UPDF's lengthy latest military assault, named 'Operation Iron Fist'-- that helped push The LRA leader, Joseph Kony, and his lieutenants , into the peace talks that are currently underway in Juba, South Sudan... and if these peace talks should indeed succeed in bringing about a fair and sustainable resolution of the conflict in northern Uganda that restores to the peoples of the area all their basic civil, political, economic, and social rights-- and inparticular, their right to return to their familial farsteads and rebuild a sustainable version of their life in the way that they choose to (consonant with their continuing duties and rights as full Ugandan citizens.)

And if all of that happens, then what happens to Joseph Kony and his lieutenants becomes just about irrelevant... provided that their ability to regroup, rebuild a political base, and re-enact the kinds of atrocities they have been committing over the past 15 years has been totally incapacitated.

But how to incapacitate their ability to regroup?  One way is through amnesty and subsequent incorporation into the political system, as happened with the Renamo atrocity-perpetrators in Mozambique, and the apartheid-era atrocity-perpetrators in South Africa.  Another would be by sending them into exile somewhere (for now), and perhaps dealing with outstanding claims against them, later.  Another would be by  trying them in The Hague.  (But if the process there looked horribly one-sided, that would not really help the building of social peace and political trust within Uganda.)

And if the peace talks fail?

I guess the Museveni government must have a plan for that eventuality.  Most likely, a military plan.  Not one that I want to even think about (given that all the violence, including anti-personnel violence like the villageization program, that he was able to deploy in "Iron Fist" proved insufficient to break the back of the LRA.)

Then of course, there's another intriguing wrinkle in what has been going on here... and that is that sometime earlier this year Museveni started to fall out seriously with the UN and with the ICC (which many people here seem almost to equate with the UN, though the two bodies are certainly distinct in many significant ways.)

I will write more about this (I hope), later.  For now, suffice it to note here that sometime around 12 days ago  he sent his Defense Minister to The Hague to plead with Ocampo to suspend or withdraw the indictments against the LRA Five, but Ocampo refused.

Now, the negotiations in Juba, which are hosted by the Government of Southern Sudan, have been going ahead for five days or so.  On the government's side, internal affairs minister Dr. Ruhakana Rugunda is leading the five-person negotiating team.  I find it hard, here, to find out who is heading the LRA's negotiating team.  But their spokesperson in Juba is Obonyo Olweny; and another team member is identified in Thursday's edition of the New Vision daily paper here as "Sunday Ochaya, alias Otto", who is accused of having committed various atrocities, including cannibalism.

The talks had an opening ceremony on Friday, July 14, and opened in earnest on Monday, July 17.  On Tuesday, the Daily Monitor paper printed the opening statements made by the two sides.  The government side's statement was fairly short.  In part, it read::

The government statement also expressed the hope that the peace talks would be finalized "in the shortest possible time; in any case not later than 12th Sept 2006."

The LRA's opening statement was much longer, much less focused and well organized, and contained many strong accusations against the government.  Some of threse concerned the creation and maintenance of the IDP camps.  Others concerned allegations of specific acts of war crimes and crimes against humanity undertaken by members and commanders of the government forces.

At the end, however, the LRA also articulated its demands of the government side, under the rollowing headings:

• Immediate ceasefire (to be monitored by the EU, AU, IGAD, and the East African community)
• Disbandment of the IDP camps and protection of human dignity.
• Protection of our land..
• Compensation and reparation.
• Reorganization of the army and other forces.  (Under this rubric, the LRA said that the UPDF "does not reflect" Uganda's national character.  They said, "We demand its total disbandment so that an internationally supervised recruitment is done taking into account regional balance and integration of those in the LRA and other armed oppositions who have the qualification or are trainable and wish to join the army.")
• Protection from political persecution and marginalization.
• Correction of imbalance and disparity in the development of our country.
• Provision of equal opportunity for our people.
• Restraint from abusive language.
  

Altogether, I would say there seems to be a clear basis there for reaching a political agreement -- provided both leaderships really want to do that.  (Given the amnesty provisions-- which are in line with a long-existing Ugandan government Amnesty Law-- and the other LRA-integration steps proposed by the government, then any agreement reached along these lines will not be one that the ICC prosecutor would be happy with.  On the other hand, the ICC Statute does say that the interests of victims and of broad justice might indeed be suifficiently compelling that  the prosecutor could ask for the withdrawal of an outstanding indictment.)

But do the two leaderships want the  peace talks to succeed?  That remains to be seen.

For my part, I would love to go to Juba and cover the peace talks!  But I really am not able to do that on this trick.  I do, however, have plans to go to the capital of the Acholi region, Gulu,  for a couple of days toward the end of next week.  I know that won't be nearly long enough to learn everything there that I want to know.  But it's better than nothing, and it will give me a couple of work-days here in Kampala, also, to do some interviews and talk to various people here before I go.  (Also, Corky turned her ankle pretty badly Wednesday night, so I want to stick around a bit and help her out here in town.)

---

What is it like finally being here in Uganda?

Pretty exciting, since I've thought about the place for so long and never actually been here before. Exciting, too, because I love the raw energy of African cities, even if it's often expressed in ways that seem chaotic and possibly even frightening to some western minds-- and because nearly all the African people I've ever met have the most amazing human qualities of grace, good humor, and spirituality, resourcefulness, intelligence, and resilience, and tremendous loving-kindness and warmth.  Who couldn't like that and be energized by it?

We have heard some most amazing stories from Ugandans whom we have met and talked with here; and I'm only sorry I don't have time to write them all down here, right now.  (Later, I hope.)

The city is spread over seven or more expansively rolling hills.  It is dusty and has a lot of poverty and some very tragic beggars.  We're almost right on the Equator, and every other day or so there has been a sharp, though generally short, period of rain.  Nearly all the men here, and most women, wear some version of western dress, though there are plenty of women in beautiful, smartly tailored African-style outfits or (at the lower-income end of the scale) tucked-around skirt wrappers, as in Rwanda or Mozambique.  Far fewer of the women here than in rwanda have babies tied onto their backs (or otherwise attached to them); and on the weekdays it was very rare to see elementary-school-age children out on the streets during the daytime... But in the afternoon, out they all pour onto the streets from their schools, wearing some version of British-style school uniforms.  There are many, many churches and church schools here, and also a noticeable number of mosques, a couple of which are quite grandiose.  I also saw at least one large,  nicely maintained Hindu temple...  So evidently, a number of the Asians have settled back in here quite nicely.

We haven't been out of Kampala yet.  I kind of wish I could drive to Gulu, and see some of the countryside that way.  But flying seems more "efficient", in general.

Corky and I have both been looking at the degree to which people here even seem concerned with the conflict that's been raging for so long, and so horribly, in the north.  There definitely is some awareness of it, andf some awareness of the underlying social and political issues involved.  The Daily Monitor newspaper seems to do a better job of covering the peace talks in an evenhanded way than the (government-owned?) New Vision.  We have also been interested to see the degree to which Ugandans have felt free to express public criticism of the government.  (Museveni's party won re-election here in February; but EUI and other election monitors have recently issued a report that was criticial of many aspects of the conduct of the election.)  Anyway, at the IDEA conference at Makerere University, which was a large public setting, we heard several Ugandan speakers make remarks that were directly or indirectly very criticial of the government-- or, on occasion, of the whole political class here-- which they seemed to do without any visible fear of retribution.  Which was heartening.

Anyway, I need to go out to the hard-to-access web connection facilities here and get this all posted onto the blog.  More later.