Kony's Unholy War Spreads Terror in Uganda's North
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The Nation (Nairobi)
June 16, 2005
Posted to the web June 16, 2005
Peter Kimani
Nairobi
The deafening blast from a tyre burst at a fuel station on Gulu's main street tears through the midday calm, but it proves inadequate in stirring the people's curiosity.
"Hapa tumezoea milipuko," (We are used to explosions here," a boda boda (taxi) operator grins, clearly unmoved.
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Nineteen years of conflict in northern Uganda have dulled people's senses to canon blasts, gunfire and other loud explosions, one would think they are hard on hearing.
From a casual glance, Gulu, a town the size of Ruiru that's located 400 kilometres north of Kampala, does not show the scars of the long, protracted civil war, though its stunted state is obvious.
The eateries are functional, beer is served chilled and four-wheel drive vehicles cruise down the well-paved streets, thanks to a thriving NGO "industry" that the conflict has spawned.
This facade of prosperity amid grinding poverty, are some of the long-term effects of the trouble in northern Uganda.
This feeling is vindicated a few kilometres from Gulu where people are herded in camps awaiting food rations from relief agencies Ð though they once provided for themselves.
Original crisis
Even more disturbing, an assessment of the situation gives the feeling that skewed policies seem to exacerbate the original crisis, while long-suffering civilians have come to accept war as part of their existence.
Gulu and the larger northern Uganda, represents the ugly side of Uganda: bare, barren and beaten.
If Kampala, the city on seven hills, is the quintessence of the economic miracle that Uganda has marshalled, winning respect far and wide, Gulu represents the country's, and the continent's ultimate shame of a people in the throes of self-destruction.
The issues are manifold and complex; so are the many players and the hidden forces that continue to wage a hideous war where children and women have borne the brunt of the suffering.
Since August 20, 1986, when the first bullet was fired, northern Uganda has known no peace.
Months later, a young woman called Alice Lakwena would traverse the bush smearing shea oil on young men's chests. The men bore stones that Lakwena said would turn into grenades and explode at the advance of the enemy.
This did not happen, and Lakwena's Holy Spirit Mobile Force was soon crushed by Yoweri Museveni's freshly-constituted National Resistance Army. Then came Joseph Kony, a former altar boy who emerged to declare war on Kampala, and state his ambitious intention to install a theocracy based on the Biblical Ten Commandments.
Kony, who continues to lead the Lords' Resistance Army, has not renounced his intentions, and maintains his military engagements from his bases in southern Sudan and northern Uganda. Recently, he pitched tent in eastern Uganda.
Since Kony's destructive campaign started, 1.6 million people have been displaced, pushing many into deeper pits of poverty as farming, the region's mainstay, has been disrupted.
The Uganda Bureau of Statistics estimates that 67 per cent of the population in northern Uganda lives below the poverty line, while data gleaned from veterinary sources indicates that extensive theft of domestic animals in Gulu and Kitgum by rebels and government forces, reduced the herd from 285,000 in 1985 to 5,000 in 1997.
"In an instant," researcher Robert Gersony writes in his report, The Anguish of Northern Uganda, "Acholi farmers were deprived of the milk their cows provided; the additional acreage and higher yields which their oxen permitted; their fallback for marriage dowries and education-"
"It's rural terrorism," Uganda's Defence and Uganda People's Defence Force spokesman, Maj Shaban Bantariza, says of Kony's war activities.
Bantariza's words echo American sentiments that declares the LRA as "one of the most dangerous international terrorist organisations," in this year's congressional report, Country Reports on Terrorism.
Whether that's a problematic definition is hard to tell, for the anarchy wrought upon by the LRA is there for all to see.
But given LRA's connection to the political crisis in the Sudan, a more accommodating attitude should have been more appropriate.
"Washington is preoccupied with events in Sudan, even though the viability of the recently signed peace between the Sudanese government and the SPLM is partly intertwined with the fate of the southern Sudan-based LRA," explains the International Crisis Group, in a recent briefing paper. , Shock Therapy for Northern Uganda's Peace Process.
Principally, Kampala's stance towards LRA is that it is a terrorist organisation without any specific agenda, and President Museveni's position on Kony is that he should surrender, or they shall get him.
Although the core centre of Kony's war is northern Uganda, its ultimate resolution might lie far from there.
American dollars, for instance, have been used to crush the rebellion unsuccessfully in the past, with the neighbouring Khartoum responding in kind to support the LRA.
Washington's motivation has been to flush out Islamic fundamentalists in Sudan, as it widened its "war on terrorism," while Kampala supported the Sudanese People's Liberation Movement to retaliate Khartoum's support for LRA.
But before the issues get clouded with the "internationalisation" of the conflict, it is critical to understand the core issues that sparked the initial conflict, and why past efforts to end it have come a cropper.
To start with, there has been an attempt to erroneously depict LRA as a creation of the Sudan, from where the rebels have been operating.
Another equally misleading view is to present LRA as "remnants" of disgruntled elements from the Milton Obote and Idi Amin's armies through the 1970s and 1980s.
Equally persuasive is the colonial discourse where the British are accused of fanning ethnic fissures by declaring the northern frontier a "labour reserve," which was resented Ð and resisted by northerners. "The Lamogi Rebellion of 1912 was the earliest resistance to British rule in Acholiland," explains Prof Jakoyo Peter Occiti, who teaches history at Gulu University.
The fact that the Nubia and the Baganda were used to crash the rebellion may have caused ethnic schism that was exploited in later years.
There is also the issue of under-development in the north, which is partly due to the raging conflict and clear neglect of the region by policy-makers in Kampala.
Yet, northern Uganda was once vibrant, thriving on agro-pastoral economy through the 1940s. The British, however, recognised the region was "a disturbed, hostile territory, in which there were some tribes powerful enough to offer stiff and prolonged resistance," as J. Barber notes in Imperial Frontier.
Using divide and rule tactics, the British propagated the notion of the Acholi as a "martial" community. In The Colonial Roots of Internal Conflict, Lwanga-Lunyigo further explains that this "martial" image of the Acholi was used by the British to conscript 20,000 Baganda who were used to subjugate and "pacify" the Bunyoro, and reinforced existing ethnic animosities.
This "martial" tag was conveniently dropped during the First World War, when the Acholi were drafted to fight for the British.
"Even then," writes Prof Dani Wadada Nabudere in War in Acholi and its Ramifications for Peace and Security in Uganda, "only by inducement of the chiefs who were paid three rupees for each Acholi recruit for the war. When they were recruited in the army in large numbers, it was more due to economic conditions in Acholi rather than for cultural reasons."
Prof Nabudere further asserts that the number of Acholis in the army dropped significantly in the 1950s as more soldiers were recruited from the Lang'o and the Teso communities, and further reduced in 1964 when Milton Obote took over the reigns of independent Uganda.
In other words, the perception that post-colonial disenchantment in the north is rooted in the Acholis losing military ground is not entirely accurate, as historical evidence show they never enjoyed that domination.
In the same breath, it would be a misnomer to side-step the discriminatory policies pursued by the Obote, and subsequently Amin regimes, which sowed the seeds of discord that grew over time and engulfed the north.
Although Obote was from the "north," hailing from the Langi community, the two communities have distinct cultures and languages, and he marginalised the Acholi generals in the army to promote Langi juniors, and trigger resentment that would later foment the "war of generals".
Obote's successor, Amin, was a Kakwa from West Nile who was equally wary of the Acholis in the army, and instituted a murderous campaign that pushed many into neighbouring Tanzania.
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That these Acholi soldiers formed a crucial base that deposed Amin in 1979 from Tanzania was "a historical accident". Nonetheless, the re-installation of Obote, and his victory in the subsequent 1980 poll triggered further unrest, this time from Museveni, who disputed the poll result.
Tomorrow: The emergence of Museveni's National Resistance Army and Kony's changed fortunes
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