'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

Notes from Uganda, part 2

Yesterday (Monday) we had a good, productive day.  Did I mention earlier that my traveling/work companion here, Corky Bryant, sprained her ankle last Wednesday?  It has slowed her down a lot, but it has still been great being with her here.

In the morning, I was able to do a good, fairly long interview with Morris W. Ogenga-Latigo,  the leader of the parliamentary opposition.  In the afternoon, Corky and I were able to interview people at the national Amnesty Commission (founded in 2001, and still very active) and the World Food Program.  Both of these meetings were also very interesting.

Ogenga-Latigo is a leading member of the Forum for Demoicratic Change (FDC), whose leader, Dr. Kizza Besigye was defeated by Pres. Museveni in last February's elections and has been the subject of some fairly evidently politically motivated criminal charges (including treason charges) by the state.

This year's election was the first in which parties other than Museveni's National Resistance Movement (NRM) were allowed to run, and the FDC put ina fairly good showing. Under some pressure from western donor governments, Museveni allowed Besigye to run despite the charges that were still outstanding against him.  (The two men have a long history of political entanglement, much of it very cordial.) 

I am still trying to figure out the particular quality of Ugandan politics.  The country is very evidently not the same kind of brutal dictatorship that it was in Idi Amin's time. The moves Museveni has made toward political pluralism seem good, in general, though there have been clear limits on such moves.  In addition, there are a number of continuing concerns about his human-rights record-- the greatest of which would have to be in his use and running of the whole system of IDP camps. (See the previous Uganda Notes post on JWN.) Some 90% of the people in the Acholi regions are in IDP camps, as too are substantial  numbers of people in the Lango and Teso regions.  Here are figures from a recent UNDP update:

Numbers of people in IDP camps ("2006, Preliminary Update", rounded to nearest thousand):
Acholi Districts	1,098,000 people, in 104 camps
LangoRegion	442,000 people, in 58 camps
Teso Region	160,000 people, in 142 camps

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Ogenga-Latigo told me that he had been an NRM member for 20 years.  He's the MP for Agago, and by profession a professor of entomology and ecology at Makerere University.  He's also an ethnic Acholi who feels the pain of his people very intensely.  I want to write up a lot more of  the interview later.  But the most important thing I got from him was his assessment that both the LRA and the NRM are engaging seriously and in good faith in the current round of peace talks, which are being hosted in Juba, South Sudan by South Sudan President Dr. Riek Machar...

That actually had been my first question to him: "Are the parties to the Juba talks serious?"  I had previously seen some evidence-- including the press reports of the lengthy and accusatory opening statement made by the LRA-- that suggested that perhaps its leaders were more interested in posturing for their own claimed political base among the northerners/Acholi than they were in trying to build a workable, problem-solving relationship with the NRM/government team.

Latigo replied,

I asked how what had looked to me like LRA posturing in the opening days could be reconciled with a view that their engagement in the talks was serious.

"The posturing is okay," he said, smiling.  "In our community, if you go to negotiate a dowry, you always start off with a lot of posturing, even if your intention in the negotiation is entirely serious.  This is like that.  I'm not sure if the government side completely understood that at first.  But people did try to explain to them.  And in my view, Rugunda [the head of the NRM negotiation team] did show a lot of tolerance for it."

(I was struck-- then and since-- by the nuanced, relaxed, and understanding viewhe expressed of the role of cultural differences in negotiations.  Evidently, he himself must have a long experience as a "cultural negotiator" between Acholi people and other Ugandans.  When he talked about this issue of the "culturally expected" nature of some early "posturing" in the negotiation, I thought of the many parallels with cultural differences inside Arab-Israeli negotiations... Too many examples to list them all; but the one that stands out for me is the differing reactions in October 1991 to the opening presentation that Syrian Foreign Minister Farouq Sharaa made at the big peace conference in Madrid.  That presentation was certainly a hard-hitting bid to get all of Syria's many grievances against Israel out on the table at one time, and was seen as many in the west as "proving" that Syria did not want to engage seriously in peace talks...  Later, as the US tightened its grip on the so-called "peace" process even more tightly, US/western "cultural" norms that expected Arab negotiators to remain silent in public about their grievances and their people's anger became ever more firmly imposed on all the "peace" talks... Perhaps, though, the use and enforcement of those "cultural norms"  was more an issue of of the US seeking to control and dominate all aspects of the "peace" process in the interests of its ally, Israel, than of consciously seeking to impose western cultural norms on it?  Actually, most policymakers in the US are so amazingly provincial and lacking in self-awareness that they probably don't even recognize that the way they do things is an expression of only one out of a large number of "culturally different" ways of doing things... Dealing with people from very different cultures is not something that most Americans are very good at... )

All the better, then, that at least some significant people in Museveni's NRM seem able to understand, and not over-react to, things that the LRA team said and did that were culturally "different" from the way many non-Acholi Ugandans might have done them.

But actually, not that different.  When Latigo discussed the "news leaks" that had come out recently that the security forces of the DRC might be just about to "move in" on the Garamba National Park in eastern DRC, which is where LRA head Joseph Kony has been holed up for a while, he laughed and said, "Well, that seemed to me like the NRM side doing some posturing of its own regarding the negotiations!  Actually, do you think the government of the DRC is in any position to send forces to Garamba to do that?  President Kabila has elections coming up Saturday, and some major security and political threats of his own these days."

(More on Latigo's views of the peace talks here later, I hope.)

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Many or most of the LRA's atrocities have actually targeted their fellow-Acholis.  I found Latigo's description of the effects of these atrocities on the attitudes of Acholi people toward the LRA to be very interesting.

At one point, I asked Latiga how he explained the factors that had persuaded the government/NRM side to enter into the negotiations with the LRA.  He said that, especially in 2001-2, "There were so many atrocities by the LRA, especially in Pader District-- that was when they even took some people, including children, and cut them up and cooked them-- and the publicity about this put so much pressure on the government, that they decided from then on that they would probably need a political strategy to complement the military campaign they were waging, which was called Operation Iron Fist-- "

How was that, again?  The LRA committed atrocities, but that put political pressure on the government side?

"Yes. Because the government had told us that they had solved the problem of the LRAl.  But evidently they had not.  And they seemed incapable of assuring the security of the people."

I asked what the main emotional response of Acholi  had been on hearing the news of those atrocities.  Had they felt anger or fear or what? "When we hear of such atrocities, our main feeling is one of resignation.  We ask, 'Why is God sending us this fate?'  It is no longer useful for us to get angry with either the government or the LRA."

At many points, Latigo had stressed to me that the Acholi culture is one very focused on forgiveness and reconciliation (though there were some timing/sequencing issues regarding this that he mentioned at another point in the discussion.)

Right after his description of the people's widespread sense of resignation in the face of the atrocities, he said, "We are prepared to forgive and to reconcile.  But we will still also always ask the hard questions of 'Why? Why us?  and Why was all this allowed to go on for so long?'"

I suggested that addressing those questions could well, at a later date, be the subject of a truth commission.  He agreed.

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Of course, I also asked Ogenga-Latigo about the ICC.  What was his view and experience of them? "We've had several contacts with them," he said.  He noted that when a delegation of "Acholi community leaders" had gone to The Hague to talk with Chief Prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the delegation "was composed by the government, and they did not ionclude me!"  However, when various delegation's from Ocampo's office had visited Uganda, Latigo had been able to meet with them.  That included one meeting Moreno-Ocampo.

He said,


(Which is, actually, more or less the way that matters have turned out thus far.)

Later, he stated firmly,

I asked if he thought there had been a chance that the ICC's issuing of the indictments and arrest warrants against Kony and his four top colleagues in the LRA leadership might have helped "push" Kony to the negotiating table>?

At another point Latigo said, "Our community is not punitive in the way the ICC is, but our focus is on forgiveness and reconciliation."  He described his view of the kinds of forgiveness that are required, as follows:


How about the thought of forgiving Kony and his comrades in the LRA leadership?

Latigo looked very serious.  "If someone did something very bad, then they need even more magnanimity from us in terms of forgivness," he said.

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Ogenga-Latigo told me he had never met Joseph Kony in person.  Nonetheless, from his long experience in community politics he had formed a fairly rich picture of him as a person.  I asked if he thought, as many people say, that Kony is "crazy"?

He thought for a moment.  "Maybe 'crazy' in the sense that Hitler was.  That is, actually, an exceptional person with deviant attributes.  Kony undoubtedly has cunning and resourcefulness, in order to be able to have survived so long...  However, in a normal society, he would probably be a misfit."

If he were to "return to Acholi" and seek to live in peace, would the Acholi people seek to kill him in revenge for all the suffering the LRA had inflicted on them?  "No, we really do have a strong tradition of forgivness, and a strong desire to close the books completely after any conflict."

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The prospect that Kony might indeed seek to, and be allowed to, "return to Acholi and live in peace"?  Yes, this prospect seems very much to be on the table right now.  The peace talks that opened in Juba ten days ago have been suspended for one week, to allow each side's negotiating team to conduct "consultations."  The government's chief negotiator has come back to Kampala to consult with, presumably, the President.  And the LRA team has, I think, gone to Garamba to consult with Kony.  But the other interesting thing that's been happening is that a 27-person delegation composed of Acholi religious and community leaders, and family members of Kony and some of the other indicted men has also gone to Garamba to consult with Kony and his cohorts there-- and they have been doing this entirely with the Ugandan government's permission, and indeed encouragement.

Among the Kony family members, his mother was supposed to be in the group, but the Daily Monitor today reports that health reasons prevented her joining the mission.  However, his sister Gabriela Lakot was in it, along with two women described as Kony's "wives", Cecilia Atuku/Akullu and Margaret Abalo, along with their children (by Kony.)  Kony has been notoritous in the recent past for having taken 27 or so "wives" from among the abducted girls and women.  One of those in the present delegation, Cecilia Atuku, was described in the DM as "anxious to meet the father of her two year old daughter. 'I really want to see him and if he comes out [of the bush] I am willing to marry him," Cecilia told Daily Monitor in an interview at Juba International Airport." 

Go figure.

So anyway, there's the Government of Uganda, which in general has been a darling of the "international community" in recent years, helping to organize that delegation of folks to go and talk to Kony in Garamba-- at the same time that (1) the ICC/Interpol international arrest warrants against him are still outstanding, and (2) the LRA is still on the US government's "Foreign Terrorist Organizations" list.

Go figure.

For myself, I am delighted that President Museveni seems to be pursuing this peace process with such seriousness and vigor, and I only hope the "international community" willo give his effort all the chances that it needs to succeed.

Dr. Rugunda, the leader of the government negotiating team, has underlined on a number of occasions that the goal of the government's current policy toward the LRA is to give Kony and his comrades-in-arms a "soft landing."

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One last little note here about the political dimensions of the ICC's intervention here-- and also the international discourse about that intervention.  I want to note that  in the book by Tim Allen that I wrote about on JWN yesterday, Allen's argument that the ICC might indeed receive some significant support from within the Acholi community, and in particular his argument that the "Acholi community leaders" who had expressed opposition to the ICC were not thereby representing the actual views of the Acholi people, relied very heavily on the pro-ICC views he heard expressed (in, I think 2004 or 2005) by just one Acholi community of some standing, Walter Ochora.  He describes Ochora (pp. 139-40) simply as, "the chair of the Gulu District Council."  He notes that after Museveni's guerrilla army seized Kampala in 1986, Ochora fought for a while in one of the remaining anti-Museveni groups, "but was one of those who accepted peace terms."

What Tim Allen didn't make exactly clear in that description  to people who are not close watchers of Ugandan politics is that, rather than being purely an authentically ":Acholi" community leader-- in the sense, that, for example, he might have been elected by Acholi to his position on the District Council-- that position is instead one that is appointed by the central government.  So he is an employee of the central government; and it was probably in that role that he was saying whatever he said to Allen and other enquirers back in 2004-2005.

Now, however, Walter Ochora is described in today's Daily Monitor as the leader of the 27-person delegation that has gone to Garamba to meet with Kony.  (Also in the delegation were two other notorious former oppositionists who in recent years have accepted the government's shilling: former high-ranking LRA commanders Sam Kolo and Kenneth Banya.)

...  I am actually a little concerned by Allen's failure to have spelled out the true nature of Ochora's role in Gulu (which I'm assuming he must have known)-- and also, his decision to give such great weight to Ochora's views in his argument.  Why did he do that?  I don't know.  And why did the consortium of publishers who published his book hurry to get it out so fast?  I don't know.  What I do see, though, is that the publishers give credit at the back of the book to a number of  organizations for having "supported" the book's publication-- and that some of these are organizations with a fairly strong, and quite possibly pro-ICC, political agenda.

So let's look-- from Tim Allen or from somebody else-- for a lot of folloow-up interviews with Walter Ochora.  He sounds like a fscinating man.  But I imagine his views must have evolved somewhat from the time when he was assuring Allen that Kony was simply a criminal, and he "should be prosecuted and sent to prison."(p.140.)