Friends
As the series on Acholi violence continues, I am going to use this series to do
some touch ups that I did not have the time to do a fair sheiks, and what I am
going to specifically deal with this time around is the term “Acholi violence”
Why am I using it and why is it used out there? Why is it legally acceptable to
be used? Well It is a tough question but tough questions must always be dealt
with or we will become useless lumens that support the wave than the facts. To
those that care to know my back ground, I never bunch people in one class, in
fact while discussing The Luwero war I was very careful to always protect UNLA
members for not all were killers. I have members of UNLA in this city and I
have treated them with the respect they so deserve even though I know that a
whack of them especially Acholi were brutal killers. How then did I change from
that principle to reaching a point of accepting a term “Acholi violence” but
use it?
When the Kony war started men like Dr Kiiza Besigye never wanted it to be made
public, they operated that war from a very quiet moment where they never
allowed members of press to go there , they never allowed soldiers back to talk
about what is happening there. When the helicopter went in to destroy homes and
granaries thus forcing the people to camps, North was a secret killing zone.
The attitude The Besigye’s did in Northern Uganda is exactly what Allan Barigye
is doing in UAH to educate Ugandans that we have absolutely no problem in The
North, if a mother cooked her baby it happened ten years ago. So to Barigye and
Besigye they have a statute of limitation when a Northerner dies, a statue that
does not hold if the name of Iddi Amin comes up. But through the noise many of
us did to the international community, NGOs started to go up there at a slower
pace, they started to see the atrocities Acholi were committing to each other,
atrocities Barigye has now told us that based on his past experiences, Acholi
were not brutal enough to be bothered with, NGOs continued coming back filling
reports that Acholi are actually violent people. Foreign embassies in Kampala
started to file same reports. Those reports raised an outrage from many
Northerners for you are camping a whole lot of people in same camp, I raised up
and opposed them as well. But what caught our attention was the simple fact
that many of the people that were using the term, were unrelated, so you find
The Swede saying we have Acholi violence, The Brit same thing, Chinese used the
same term, now when it comes from different sources you need to be an idiot to
ignore it. In as much as many international organizations went North to feed
and provide shelters, a good number of them raised up to study if a tribe can
be classified violent. Among those that flew to Gulu is the Liu Institute for
Global Issues of University of British Columbia. And they researched as to
whether Acholi are violent and filled many reports on the region some of which
I have posted and some I have not.
There are two universities that flew into Uganda to study Acholi violence, The
Human rights Center, University of California, Berkley and International Center
for transitional Justice Payson Center for International Development Tulane
University, through Phuong Pham, Patrick Vinck, Eric Stover, Andrew Moss,
Mariake Wierda and Richard Bailey, they used the number of Langi and Acholi we
have in and out of the country, and the base number they used was very basic,
if you count all Acholi and Langi we have in and out of Uganda, they are
1,817,916 Acholi and 1,211,944 Langi. And the question they went after was does
Acholi violence exist? How did the war affect them and how did they react to
it? When you look at all Acholi in Amuru, Gulu, Kitgum and Pader, but also look
at all Langi in Lira and Oyam as a sample of all the total population in the
country, you get these numbers that are simply startling:-
People that were displaced 93.9% Acholi and 94.3% Langi
People that lost income 88.6% Acholi and 91.9% Langi
People that had houses destroyed 92.8% and 93.6% Langi
People that had productive assets taken away 91.2% Acholi and 90.9% Langi
People that had other assets taken away 94.7% Acholi and 92.8 Langi
People that had at least one family member killed 88.0% Acholi and 77.0 Langi
People that had a father killed 6.5% Acholi and 6,7 Langi
People that had mother killed 14.3 Acholi and 6.1 Langi
People that had a brother killed 39.6 Acholi and 30.7 Langi
People that had a sister killed 12.3 Acholi and 9.0 Langi
The numbers above are simply too high to be ignored, Acholi and Langi lived
under this oppressive system past 20 years, if anyone is forced to live that
way that long, I would not blame them for becoming violent. If we are talking
about a 2% that is a very different story, but when we start to talk about high
90% of a population affected for that long, you must agree that the population
must react that way. There are many dangers in our denial that these friends
are violent {a} we will stall on writing good laws to safe guard the rest of
society of their violence, {b} Those of us in diaspora have started to see a
huge number of especially Acholi that are failing to get employed, some do not
have homes but run from city to city, and we have seen a raise in crime
convictions. If we agree that they have such a bad back ground, may be such
information can be useful to social workers and lawyers with judges to make
preferable pre-sentence reports. But maybe it can help agencies that try to
find them jobs and accommodations. The numbers above are way too high for any
intelligent man/woman to ignore. With such numbers the term Acholi violence
became accepted and widely used.
Fellow Ugandans Acholi violence is real and we need to address it but candidly.
Stay in the forum for Series two hundred and thirty nine on the way ------>
EM
On the 49th Parallel
Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja and Dr. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda is in anarchy"
Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi
"Pamoja na Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja na Dk. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda ni katika
machafuko"
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