Who should speak for victims of the LRA-UPDF war?
Since the Juba peace talks between the Lords Resistance Army (LRA) and the Government of Uganda (GOU) began on July 14, 2006, the LRA has surprisingly outperformed the GOU in
several areas. Apparently, the LRA has undergone a qualitative transformation in the sense that it has abandoned its purely military struggle and has assembled a formidable team of advisors and negotiators who have simply made the GOU look amateurish.
For example, when the LRA made its opening statement, the GOU negotiation team was caught off guard and walked out only to return later. The GOU also tried to undermine the Juba talks by seeking to negotiate directly with Kony, only to watch the effort turn into an LRA publicity bonanza. Furthermore, initially the GOU refused to reciprocate a cessation of hostilities unilaterally declared by the LRA only to accept it later.
On its part, the LRA has made some mistakes. By asking South Africa to co-mediate the Juba peace talks, the LRA put South Africa in an awkward position of undermining the Government of South Sudan (GOSS). South Africa did declare its support for the peace process and the willingness to help whenever needed. So far, the two real winners are the LRA for having been accorded a chance to tell its story to the world directly and the GOSS for keeping the talks on track.
The performance of the LRA at the peace talks has apparently put some people in a dilemma. On the one hand, to them the LRA was for almost 20 years synonymous with a mindless killing machine, totally incapable of reasoning or listening to reason. Since
the LRA is made up mostly of abducted Acholi children, by extension, Acholis became associated with people who love to kill their own children according to one Ugandan ambassador. Those people now cannot understand how the same mindless killers can even show up at the talks and sound reasonable.
There is no question that the LRA committed unspeakable atrocities. Some of the commanders themselves have accepted responsibilities for some of the atrocities committed against the people as far back as 1994 when they made a serious attempt to negotiate a peaceful end of the war. Such admissions were captured on tape. Although the current LRA behavior may seem surprisingly good, it is not really new because in 1994, the LRA ceased hostilities and some of their commanders were even staying in UPDF
barracks while the rest of them were roaming freely in the urban centers in the North until President Museveni decided to scuttle the peace process. Therefore, while we should celebrate the current agreement to cease hostilities and for the LRA agreement to assemble at designated areas, we have merely taken a long and costly detour to arrive at the same point where we were 12 years ago.
It is in the backdrop of such modest success at the Juba peace talks that several journalists have come out swinging at the LRA for appearing to claim to be the voice of the victims of this war. For example, in his Monitor opinion piece of Aug. 29th, Vukoni Lupa Lasaga pleaded, Somebody tell LRA they are not the peoples voice. On Aug. 30, Angelo Izama asked in his Monitor article,
Will geographical north rally around political LRA? and in his opinion piece of the week of Sept. 3-9, K. David Mafabi boldly proclaimed, The LRA do not speak for northern and eastern Uganda. While these authors have the right to express their opinions on the question of who can speak for the people of northern and eastern Uganda or the victims of the war, it is hypocritical of them to assume the role of spokespersons for the people of the North and East in asserting that the LRA should not speak for the victims of the war. After all, they were not elected by the people or the victims to
speak on their behalf. All they have is access to the news media where they can publish their own opinions. The only people who can legitimately claim to speak on behalf of the victims are the elected officials.
There is also a need to separate the message from the messenger. In this case, the messenger is the LRA and the message is the demands articulated by the LRA negotiation team. In spite of what the above authors claimed, the call for the GOU to democratize, eliminate rampant corruption in public institutions, respect the human rights of all citizens, equitably share the national cake etc are in fact national demands. Even President Museveni himself acknowledged the scourge of corruption, Uganda being ranked the 7th most corrupt country in Africa by one survey.
While the LRA has an ugly history in terms of how they employed a strategy of terror to fight the war, their demands resonate very well throughout the country. In that sense, their message reflects the same demands which have already been articulated by other rebels and the opposition parties. For comparison, one should look at the Manifestos of the Democratic Party, Forum for Democratic Change, Uganda Peoples Congress and even the National Resistance Movements 10 point programs it came with from the bush in 1986.
The question of whether a political force will coalesce around the LRA or the north is important, but cannot be answered subjectively. It
is not the physical geography that gives rise to a political force. Instead, it is the problems people in the same or different geographic areas experience and their efforts to solve such problems that unite them. In turn, it is the particular geographical areas where particular problems occur that give the specific political force its local, regional, national or international character.
In Uganda, there have been numerous rebel groups and the LRA is just one of them. They include UPDA, UPA, Nile Bank Rescue Front, PRA, ADF, Force Obote Back and others. The LRA is, however, unique among the many recent rebel groups in three aspects. First, it waged one of the most brutal wars in Uganda for almost 20 years and has so far survived it. Second, it found itself in the unenviable position of being used by the GOU as a tool to execute
genocide in northern and eastern Uganda, a political tool to win support from Southern Uganda and as a convenient factor for financial gains for the GOU. Third, the LRA has managed to deny the Uganda Peoples Defence Forces (UPDF) a military victory, thus forcing the GOU to agree to negotiate a settlement of the war rather than continue to pursue a military victory.
Some journalists are puzzled by the behaviour of some of the civilians whom they saw as behaving as if they were on a picnic when they went to meet the LRA in the bush. However, that is not surprising. First of all, the behaviour was consistent with the spirit of reconciliation. Second, it was also consistent with the recognition of the fact that in spite of its ugly human rights records, the LRA had the guts to stand up to a repressive government. Furthermore, in
spite of its history of unspeakable violence, the LRA was unwittingly vindicated to some extent by Musevenis callous treatment of the 1.6 million IDPs, the removal of Presidential term limits and the injustices in the recent parliamentary/Presidential elections.
Finally, to assert that this was a senseless war is to profess a sense of laziness to inquire into the matter. It is unlikely that people on either side would have taken up arms and risked their lives for no reasons at all. We may disagree with their rationale or how they fought the war, which is not the same as saying that the protagonists were just mindlessly fighting each other. The need to inquire into the rationale for the war is important from a practical point of view. In order to prevent a similar war in the future, we need to know the motivating factors.
Just saying that it is a senseless war will not be enough to prevent it from happening again.
In conclusion, while we should reject the LRAs method of fighting an oppressive NRM regime, we have to acknowledge that the message which they have been articulating at the Juba peace talks does reflect the demands of many people not only in the north and east, but also in Buganda, as well as the west. Therefore, it will be this commonality of the underlying national problem that will spur the development of a new political realignment of forces in the post-conflict resolution era. [ENDS]
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