Finally, Uganda Feels Shock and Shame
The February 21 killings by the Lord�s Resistance Army rebels of over 200 in an internally displaced peoples� camp outside the northern Uganda town of Lira, for once seemed to shock the country.
The international community was obviously quite horrified, and the story received a level of coverage that no atrocity by the LRA has got in the world media for a long time now.
News agencies referred to it as the "worst massacre" in the uniquely brutal 17-year insurgency by the LRA.
A "peace march" in Lira last week degenerated into primitive tribal anger, when local people from the Langi community, descended upon "suspected rebels" in the crowd, most of them Acholi, and lynched them. This time, the shock of many Ugandans turned into shame as these images, again, were played out in the international press.
However, this was not the worst massacre by LRA. Twice in the past, they have slaughtered more than 300 villagers.
The attention that the Barlonyo camp massacre has received is more indicative of the fact that the full extent of the nightmare that the people in the north have been living through over the past 17 years is finally beginning to register.
Until now, the war has been nothing more than "northern madness up there" to most Ugandans outside the region. The grim body count had been overshadowed by the arguments of whether the government was or wasn�t doing enough to end the war; the fascination with the bizarre mix of superstition and fundamentalist Christianity that seems to drive the LRA�s butchery; the morbid tales of girls abducted by the rebels and forced into sex slavery; not to mention the profiteering by the army from the war.
In that sense, the pain felt for the Barlonyo 200, even if they were fewer than the victims in previous rounds of butchering by the LRA, is a great improvement. Even the lynching of five people by an enraged Lira mob showed some progress. The last such lynching occurred in the northern town of Gulu some years ago.
On that occasion, the rebel "suspects" were already in the hands of the army, and a local commander allegedly released them to the mob so the people could kill them as a way of democratising the participation of the masses in the counter-insurgency campaign. In Lira, no security officer offered up the suspects. In fact, the police and army shot and injured some of the killers.
The one serious damage the massacres and the mob killings did is to the standing of Uganda, which has from 1986 fought a gallant campaign to put behind it the international image it gained over the 1970s and �80s as a murderous and lawless country.
With that history, there were always those looking to see whether the country would revert to its old chaotic habits.
Kenyans, however, admired Museveni and the turnaround his government had brought to Uganda. Four years ago, you had to work very hard to find a Kenyan who didn�t think that the grass was greener on the Ugandan side.
Last week, they too had their own lynch party. Jaded by the crime that has blighted life in many parts of Nairobi, a mob put six suspected robbers to the torch in the Kibera slums.
A colleague, unsure whether his main story for the day would come through, said casually that the Kibera killings might well come in handy. To which I quipped that unless the dead robbers had a little name recognition, they didn�t deserve the spot.
He replied; "The problem is you Ugandans are used to big kills of 200-plus, this must be nothing." I agreed, and wondered what would happen in Kenya, the day someone butchered 200 people � maybe a special edition?
It struck me later that even five years ago, the massacre of 200 people in Uganda would still have shocked Kenyans. But it would have been considered unusual. Today, many more Kenyans seem to think it is typical.
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Charles Onyango-Obbo is managing editor in charge of media convergence at the Nation Media Group.
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