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3

AN OVERVIEW OF THE SITUATION IN NORTHERN UGANDA

Right now the people of Acholi are in a dilemma. They are neither pro-government nor pro-rebel, but they don't know how to go forward. Once we have clarity about which side will win, we can organise…it is not possible for this war to end. It will cause a lot of division among the tribes of Uganda. When it started people saw it as just Acholi. Now they see Kony in Kasese, West Nile, Kampala…(Elder, Gulu district, 1998)

Introduction

It is never easy to know when a war truly began (Azar, 1986; 36). Was it when deaths per year reached a certain level? Or the day the first shot was fired? Or before that, when conditions of structural violence (Galtung 1969) were created which would eventually lead to physical violence? Furthermore, what defines a particular period of violence as a war in its own right rather than simply one more in a succession of phases of violence? The so-called LRA war, after all, follows on from the violence of the Obote and Amin periods, violence during the establishment of colonial rule, and the depredations of the ivory and slave trade in the nineteenth century, to mention only the most obvious. When the explorer Samuel Baker described the Acholi area as he found it in January 1864, he drew a picture which was to be repeated over and over, not least in the years since 1986: ‘For many miles circuit from Shooa, the blackened ruins of villages and deserted fields bore witness to the devastation committed; cattle that were formerly in thousands had been driven off, and the beautiful district that had once been most fertile was reduced to a wilderness’ (16) (quoted in Gray, 1951: 125). When Girling conducted fieldwork in the area in 1951, he described it as a ‘colonial society’ and argued that ‘it is long since the political organisation of the Acholi…was changed by the direct intervention of the British Administration’ (1960: 84).

When a war truly begins is thus not an academic question. It lies at the heart of ambiguities about what it is that interventions such as conflict resolution, peace-building, truth and reconciliation and related transitional justice processes should actually be addressing. How far back do they need to go? Is it sufficient to address the most recent period only, particularly if that recent violence is a symptom of a failure to resolve grievances arising from earlier violence and violations?¹ Certainly many of the older people in northern Uganda made connections between the LRA war and injustices of both the colonial and post-colonial era; when I visited the remains of Baker's Patiko Fort in 1999, my guides could still show me the exact spot where the slavers kept their captives more than one hundred years earlier.²

Not with standing these substantive reservations about the way in which choosing a start-date risks pre-empting analysis of the current situation, 1986 offers a useful starting point, as the takeover by the NRM marked a dramatic shift in power – and the emergence of new non-state actors. Having recovered a degree of political strength under Obote II (1980 to 1986), the Acholi reverted to a position of relative weakness more akin to their experience during the Amin years (1971 to 1979). The national army, in which 30–40 per cent of troops had been northerners, was routed and replaced by what had been a rebel force dominated by people many regarded as foreigners at worst and southerners at best. Tutsis, who formerly had been their herds-boys, were suddenly the allies of the new regime, and the Karimojong, who traditionally had sheltered Acholi children in times of adversity, were now said to be rustling away Acholi cattle. People's sense of social and cultural cohesion and material security was severely threatened.³ The decimation of cattle stocks in the early years of the war echoed the thefts by the slave- and ivory-raiders of the late 19^th century, which had also resulted in ‘The destruction of the once-large herds of Acholi cattle’ (Girling 1960: 14). Willet Weeks gives a figure of 123,375 for 1983 dropping to 3000 in 2001 (Weeks 2002: 4). Gersony claims a drop from 285,000 for 1985 to 5,000 in 1997 (Gersony 1997: 27).⁴ People's principal asset base was stripped away and, particularly post-1996, life in the protected villages further undermined peoples’ subsistence strategies. The period 1986 to 2006 thus marked a dramatic reversal in fortunes for the majority of people in Gulu and Kitgum, a reversal within the lived experience of a significant proportion of the population.

This chapter begins with a brief note on the place of northern Uganda in national politics during the colonial and post-independence period, and then focuses on the period 1986–2006. After setting out the situation in seven distinct chronological phases, it presents the history of the period as remembered by the women of a self-help group, before closing by identifying some key issues and questions which lie at the heart of subsequent chapters. It is possible, as does Gersony (1997), to structure a post-1986 account in terms of the different movements (UPDA, HSM, Severino Lukoya, Early Kony, Current Kony), but this is problematic given that the movements did not constitute wholly distinct chronological phases. It also narrows the conceptual framework to one in which conflict between government and one insurgent grouping or another is the defining feature of the situation. To avoid these shortcomings, I have adopted a structure based on chronological phases of physical violence and relative calm.

Phase I:	August 1986 to May 88
Phase II:	June 1988 to March 1994
Phase III:	April 1994 to early December 1999
Phase IV:	Late December 1999 to March 2002
Phase V:	April 2002 to November 2003
Phase VI:	2004 to 2006
Phase VII	June 2006 onwards

Each phase was characterised by a period of acute violence followed by lulls which ended when a failed ‘solution’ unleashed a new wave of ever more intensive violence. Phase I ended after a Peace Accord was signed with one of the main insurgent groups in northern Uganda, the UPDA. Phase II ended with the collapse of direct negotiations between Government and LRA in early 1994. Phase III came to an abrupt close following the signing of a peace accord between the Governments of Uganda and Sudan at the end of 1999, and Phase IV ended following the failure of a massive military operation code-named ‘Iron Fist’. True to form the violence which this failed solution catalysed escalated the situation to previously unimagined levels of humanitarian need in Phase V. The overall trend, despite lulls, was one of escalation. It was only in Phase VI, following a damning and unprecedented critique of the situation by the UN, that there was a massive up-turn in external intervention and interest and a corresponding change in the pressures on the Government of Uganda. Phase VII was marked by the Government's decision to engage in peace talks with the LRA from June 2006 onwards, a move which generated some hopes of an eventual return home for the hundreds of thousands of IDPs in northern Uganda.

The Build-Up to War

Missionaries first arrived in the Buganda kingdom in the 1870s, and the area known as Uganda became a British protectorate in 1894. Under British rule development was driven by a divide-and-rule strategy whereby different ethnic groups and the regions they hailed from were favoured for different areas of activity – southerners (notably Baganda) for agriculture and the civil service, northerners (including the Acholi) for the security establishment.⁵ As recalled by one Acholi elder (himself a former member of the King's African Rifles during World War II, and an elected chairman of a division in 1952 under British rule); ‘The Acholi were promoted by the British Government to handle key administrative positions because of their tolerance and honesty. For example, the leaders of the police force and of the prison service were both Acholis. They would not steal anything and showed a great interest in their work’. When asked if this was a divide-and-rule strategy on the part of the British, his answer was that;

A father of many children will always develop a particular liking for one of them. The Acholi were the favoured child of the British. For example, British bosses would test their staff's honesty by leaving money and thing lying around to see if it would still be there. But to some extent divide and rule was manifested during the distribution of seeds to the different tribes. The Acholi were given cotton seeds, compared to the Baganda who were given coffee and tea which yielded a lot of money at that time. Even the bananas were different, the Acholi received Jamaica bananas, the Baganda received [a type called] Bayoya. This was a source of tension; when you went to Baganda you would find different seeds…The Acholi were told through agricultural policy that certain types of seed were unsuitable. ⁶

As such no one group or sub-region enjoyed both military and economic power simultaneously, and discourses of ethnic difference were established which live on to this day. The promotion of Acholi to major positions in the security establishment for example, was, after independence, reframed as proving that they were militaristic, a notion which many Acholi themselves bought into.

Colonisation by the Catholic and Anglican churches added further complexities, with combinations of religious and ethnic divisions inexorably coming to underpin the political parties formed in the run-up to independence. The Uganda National Congress (UNC) formed in 1952 was predominantly Protestant, while the Democratic Party (DP) formed in 1956 was predominantly Catholic. The Uganda People's Congress (UPC) formed in 1960 opposed both the Catholic political movement and claims for an independent Buganda state, while the Kabaka Yekka (KY) party created in 1961 represented the predominantly Protestant Buganda kingdom's drive for autonomy. As such, by the time of independence in 1962, the organising principles of ethnicity, sub-region, religion and politics could only be extricated from one another with considerable difficulty,⁷ but rather than creating a unified whole they had generated what – in a reference to Winston Churchill's description of Uganda as the ‘Pearl of Africa’ – has been described as a ‘fragmented pearl’ (O'Brien, 1997). Indeed, the independence constitution reflected a hierarchy of different ethnic groups, granting federal status to the kingdom of Buganda, semi-federal status to the kingdoms of Ankole, Bunyoro and Toro, and district status to Acholi, Bugisu, Bukedi, Karamoja, Kigezi, Lango, Madi, Sebei, Teso and West Nile (Mutibwa, 1992: 24). Following the coup by Obote, a northerner from Lango, in 1966, this independence constitution was suspended. The reformed constitution of 1967, which officially de-ethnicised the polity, angered those who had been at the top of it (in particular the Baganda), aggravating ethnic tensions and strengthening their importance as an axis of anti-government mobilisation. The whole question of the status of ethnic kingdoms and leadership remained live, resulting in concessions from the NRM Government such as the reinstatement of the Kabaka of Buganda in 1990, followed by the Omukama of the Banyoro, and the anointment of the Rwot Moo of the Acholi in 2000. However, these ethnic structures were weaker than in the past – not least because they could no longer collect taxes, this function having been taken over by county chiefs.

Ethnic/religious/sub-regional tensions increased incrementally over the following decades, and not just along north-south lines.⁸ Examples often given in conversation include Idi Amin's use of soldiers from West Nile to persecute Acholi and Langi in the 1970s, the Karamajong's extension of cattle-raiding westwards to the Acholi sub-region in the early 1980s, and the involvement of Acholi soldiers in atrocities in the central Luwero triangle in the early 1980s.⁹

Phase I (1986 to 1988)

For people in northern Uganda, the period immediately after the capture of Kampala by Museveni's National Resistance Army in January 1986 was a strange time of holding one's breath while preparing for the worst. Someone who was fifteen at the time recalled how:

When the news broke that the government…was overthrown by Yoweri Kaguta Museveni…there were repeated calls in the form of public addresses and rallies for [the] public to join the army of Tito Okello Lutwa to defend our land and properties from the invading Banyarwanda led by Museveni and others. The population were convinced beyond doubt by the army that no one would escape death if the NRA rebels captured Gulu district…

Day by day the numbers of UNLA soldiers who were coming from Kampala increased. Their arrival in town also meant increases in the numbers of vehicles as most of them were able to come back with vehicles and other looted items. One of my uncles came back with a lorry full of assorted looted items from Kampala.…There was no news of the NRA advance. In reality they were closing in from various fronts, but had not yet reached Karuma [where there is a key crossing over the river Nile].

He went on to describe how the UNLA soldiers forcibly rounded-up civilians, took them to the barracks and armed them with guns, pangas, spears, bows and arrows ‘for confrontation with the NRA around Karuma bridge’.

By March 1986 the NRA had reached and taken Gulu town. A brief and deceptive lull soon gave way to extreme turmoil marked by the formation of a number of different insurgent groups. The Uganda People's Democratic Army (UPDA), known as ‘Cilil’, was made up of UNLA members who had fled northwards following the overthrow of Obote in July 1985 and Tito Okello in January 1986. Having passed through Gulu on their way north, they initially based themselves in southern Sudan, and made links with the Equatoria Defence Force (Allen, 2005b: 4) but, following problems with the Sudanese Peoples’ Liberation Army (SPLA), came back to Gulu district and began attacks on the NRA.

In 1987 they managed to surround Gulu town, and people were not able to go more than 1/2 kilometre from the centre of the town…Life was so difficult in terms of food, feeding, recreation, education-wise and in all other aspects…The government soldiers were so weak that the rebels could come to town and do what they wished to do without any resistance…The rebels could go up to the barracks and exchange bullets with the government soldiers.

As well as the UPDA, a less conventional force, the prophetic Holy Spirit Movement (HSM), was built up under the leadership of a woman known as Alice Lakwena, who claimed to be possessed by a Christian spirit known as Lakwena (‘Messenger’). The HSM's military wing, the Holy Spirit Mobile Forces, began operating in August 1986, only months after the NRA had established control over northern Uganda. This has been described in some depth by Heike Behrend (1999).

The NRA, after consolidating their position and reinforcing their numbers, responded to these various insurgencies with considerable force and brutality. As they moved outwards from Gulu town, their behaviour confirmed people's worst fears, as they ‘started killing people, burning houses, looting food items and doing all other bad things to the local population’ (see Tables 1-5 below for examples). By December 86 the NRA was seeking to capture ‘Cilil’ and ‘Lakwena’ and their collaborators. One respondent, after hearing gun-shots, fled his home, but:

All our family members who did not hear the gun shot were captured and died very terribly. The army moved into the whole area and captured every civilian within the surrounding area and assembled them within the Divisional Headquarters. At about 10.00 A.M. out of 33 people who were assembled 28 were killed and left at the Division along the road side…From that day the Government army killed many people in various places within the Division. I slept in the bush for one and a half weeks and later on decided to move away to Kampala where I remained for three years up to 1989 November when I came back to Gulu.

Another respondent described how the army pursued them as they fled:

Now when we saw the smoke of our burning houses, we decided to run and hide in a nearby stream called Lacwii. But as we were crossing…it seemed the NRA realised [where] we were hiding…because they started firing and bombing the Lacwii. This was a day I knew God protects and preserves. Bullets were pouring in our direction like drizzling rain, and their sounds were like popping simsim [sesame]…

Although NRA features heavily in accounts of violence from that period, UPDA and HSM were also guilty of much looting, killing and burning (see Tables 1-5). There was also considerable destruction of infrastructure such as dispensaries and schools, and the beginnings of large-scale internal displacement.

Having reached Jinja in a circuitous march on Kampala, Lakwena's HSM was militarily defeated in October 1987. Lakwena fled to Kenya where she retained refugee status at the time of writing (2005). When a peace accord with the UPDA followed in May 1988, it seemed the worst might be over. However, it was an incomplete peace. Some remnants of both HSM and UPDA fed into the developing strength of the Lord's Army under Alice's father Severino Lukwoya, and the Lord's Resistance Army under Joseph Kony. Somewhat confusingly Kony's group began as the Holy Spirit Movement, changed its name briefly to United Democratic Christian Army, before eventually settling on the name Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). To add to the confusion, Kony also claimed to be possessed by the spirit of Lakwena.

Phase II (1988 to 1994)

By late 1988 it was clear that the war was far from over. In what Amnesty International describe as ‘one of the most intense phases of the war, between October and December 1988…the NRA forcibly cleared approximately 100,000 people from their homes in and around Gulu town. Soldiers committed hundreds of extra-judicial executions as they forced people out of their homes, burning down homesteads and granaries’ (Amnesty International, 1999: 11). Behrend describes how ‘in November 1989, Gulu, the capital of Acholi District, was a city “occupied” by the NRA. Trucks carrying soldiers and weapons careered down the main street’ (Behrend, 1999).

Many respondents recalled 1989 as the year in which

The army's second division used to do this male rape, known as Tek Gungu, on any men who were arrested in the rural villages, over a period of six or seven months. Many of them subsequently committed suicide. To be victim of Tek Gungu was regarded as worse than being killed. There was a period when these events even entered into the songs people sang. Eventually local leaders protested and the whole unit was transferred.¹⁰

The toll on the economic and social fabric was beginning to be felt. Dowries were given in cash as cattle had been rustled, sexually transmitted diseases were perceived to be rising, the only large-scale industry in the area (the foam mattress factory in Gulu) relocated to Jinja, and there were repeated army ‘operations’ to identify rebel collaborators. Abuse of civilians remained the order of the day. One respondent who lost twenty-nine head of cattle in 1990 to soldiers, recalled being told that ‘it was government policy to remove all the Acholi animals to be eaten by the army’.

1991 saw the beginning of LRA mutilations and maimings reminiscent of those of RENAMO in Mozambique, including the cutting of lips and noses and the use of padlocks on the mouths of people they thought might report them to the authorities. In April a major four-month Government anti-insurgency operation known as Operation North was launched under which travel was severely restricted and people were rounded up for screening. During this period 890 elders met in Viva Rest-house in Gulu (where they were fed courtesy of the 4^th Division Commander) and passed a resolution that the population should be organised into ‘bow-and-arrow defence units’ to fight the rebels – a collaboration with the Government which did not escape the watchful eyes of the LRA (see Chapter 4).¹¹

1992 saw the launch of the first Northern Uganda Reconstruction Program (NURP I), ostensibly ‘an emergency operation aimed at restoring basic economic and social infrastructure as well as reviving economic activities in the northern region.’ This targeted fourteen districts in total. While budgeted at U.S. $600 million in 1991, only $93.6 million would ultimately be disbursed (COWI 1999: 20–28).

The tit-for-tat relationship between Uganda and Sudan, which was to become more prominent in later years, was already visible at this point, with the bombing of Moyo by the Sudanese in 1990, and sightings in Gulu of the SPLA leader, John Garang, in 1991. International interest was demonstrated when Pope John Paul II visited Gulu in 1993 to pray for peace from a specially constructed podium which was still standing in the centre of Kaunda Ground six years later.¹²

In 1992 and 1993 violence abated, prompting several secondary schools displaced from 1988 onwards to return to their original sites.¹³ Mrs Betty Bigombe, then Minister for Pacification of the North, led a series of face-to-face meetings between representatives of both Government and LRA in late 1993 and early 1994, raising hopes that peace was just around the corner (see Chapter 4).¹⁴ In-stead, an ultimatum from Museveni to the LRA in early February to come out of the bush within seven days or be killed, led to the collapse of talks and a dramatic resurgence of violence.

Phase III (1994 to 1999)

This third phase of the conflict took place against a changing national backdrop. Following the adoption of the 1995 Constitution, which limited the office of President to two five-year terms, Museveni was elected for a first term under the new constitution in May 1996 – effectively ignoring his previous ten years in power – and declared his intention to defeat the LRA militarily. The Local Government Act of 1997 devolved many functions and powers previously exercised by the Central Government, further deepening capacity problems in northern Uganda. Two years later a report for the second Northern Uganda Reconstruction Programme noted that ‘under current decentralisation, districts have a tendency to compromise quality because of biases to recruit local ethnic personnel’ (COWI 1999a: 21). A further development after the 1996 elections was the formation of the Acholi Parliamentary Group comprising all eleven elected Acholi MPs. This grouping would play some role in raising national awareness of the war, particularly in pushing a motion through Parliament calling for a national investigation into the situation.

Phase III was marked by ongoing LRA insurgency from rear bases in the Sudan, allegations of increased Sudanese support to the LRA, and a number of major atrocities which are generally attributed to the LRA. These included the Attiak massacre of 22 April 1995, the ambush of the Karuma/Pakwach convoy of 8 March 1996, the Acholpi refugee camp massacre of July 1996, St Mary's College abductions in October 1996 (the ‘Aboke Girls’), and the Lokung/Palabek massacre of some 412 people in January 1997 (Gersony 1997: 38–44).

People began commuting into safer areas by night and returning to their homes during the day-time. Places such as Gulu town and Lacor hospital were overflowing with people sleeping in any available spot. One elder recalled;

Before the protected villages in 1997 everybody was forced to come and stay in town. Some people sneaked back to the village because they had no money for food or rent. The churches were full, so was Kaunda Ground, Pece Stadium was full of tents, also Gulu medical [hospital]. Food was supplied by Red Cross, World Vision, Church of Uganda and Catholic Church. They [the displaced] were known as ‘Oring Ayela’, ‘Those who have run from the problem.¹⁵

By late 1996 the Government began a strategy of ‘protected villages’. Located in pre-existing hubs of local economic and administrative activity otherwise known as trading centres, these brought people from widely scattered small villages together into much larger aggregates ranging from a few thousands up to tens of thousands. They generally had a military presence (a ‘detach’) for the ostensible purposes of protection from the LRA. Although some people chose to move into such camps voluntarily, others were forced by the UPDF (see Chapter 5).

Together with LRA atrocities, the formation of the protected villages was the defining feature of phase III of the conflict, and in many respects remained so from that point forwards. From late 1996 there was a flurry of screening exercises known as panda gari (Swahili for ‘climb into the truck’). Whereas the one in 1991 included women and children, most of the later ones focused on rounding up hundreds of men who were then obliged to identify themselves to the army – failure to do so could result in arrest on suspicion of being a rebel or a rebel collaborator.¹⁶

External factors were increasingly acknowledged. In 1997, for example, The Monitor reported that ‘President Yoweri Museveni, after years of denials, has finally acknowledged United States assistance in its protracted northern war with Sudan-backed rebels’.¹⁷ In June 1998, when the Uganda Young Democrats (with partial sponsorship from the British Labour party) organised a seminar on the theme ‘Human Rights and Democracy’, their Vice-President argued that ‘This war is not ours. It is a war of imperialistic interests; a war of mineral wealth and oil in southern Sudan; it is a war of influence. That woman (Albright), who promised us nothing but guns to kill our own people and to protect American interests in this region, is bad’.¹⁸ At the conference on ‘Peace Research and the Reconciliation Agenda’ held in Gulu in September 1999 the fact that the SPLA were hosted in northern Uganda was publicly acknowledged, and both the Local Council Chairman and the Resident District Commissioner argued that ‘the major stumbling block is the problematic relationship with the Sudan’. An Acholi elder concurred: ‘The war is not between Kony and the government – it is between the governments of Sudan and Uganda. The peace talks and conferences will not stop the war unless the Sudan and Uganda governments understand each other and Sudan stop support [to the] LRA and Uganda stop support [to the] SPLA’.¹⁹ The MP for Gulu Municipality, while chairing a debate on the Sudan, asked the panellists to address a number of questions:

‘What is Sudan's government stands towards neighbours and their intentions for the Region? What are the regime's chances of survival? I mean the Sudan regime, not any other regime.²⁰ What are the strength and the weakness of SPLA and the Northern opposition alliance? How are they affected by changes in tactics of those who back them in the region, and globally? What is the form and extent of greater power involvement? When we talk of the greater power, we mean those who have ever launched nuclear bombs.²¹ And is the solution to the Sudan conflict a prerequisite for peace in Acholi Land and Northern Uganda?

At the end of the same conference the Minister of State for Northern Uganda noted participants’ concerns that the Sudan could continue as ‘the host and master of LRA and as the source of arms trafficking’ unless diplomatic relations were regularised and ‘we address issues about the role of SPLA and other rebel groups in the peace process in Northern Uganda’.²² UNICEF gave a taste of interventions to come, when in June 1998 it called for LRA abductors to be tried at the International Criminal Court,²³ and a UPDF helicopter crash in July 1998 offered a further glimpse of international involvement, as the Russian-made Mi. 17, commonly known as Sura Mbaya (Swahili for ‘Ugly Face’), had been piloted by an Ethiopian.²⁴ This prompted a statement from the LRM (Lord's Resistance Movement) that ‘We are deeply sorry for the deaths of foreign nationals being killed in an internal war between Ugandans. We appeal to the Ethiopians to stop their nationals fighting us’.²⁵

Three important civil society groupings emerged in this period, all calling for a negotiated solution; the diaspora grouping Kacokke Madit, the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative (ARLPI), and the revived Acholi ‘traditional leaders’. With financial support from the British Government, the diaspora grouping, which described itself as ‘a non-profit making forum dedicated to identifying and implementing practical initiatives to end the armed conflict in Northern Uganda by peaceful means’, organised several big meetings (Kacokke Madit), the first two of which were held in London in 1997 and 1998 respectively. These were also attended by the Ugandan Government, Acholi Members of Parliament, religious leaders and district leaders. The third was convened in Nairobi in late 2000, but was terminated due to fears that delegates might be harbouring the Ebola virus wreaking havoc in Gulu at the time.

While the 1997 meeting was attended by LRA external coordinator, Dr James Obita, rumours put out by the New Vision that Kony would ‘lead a delegation of his supporters’²⁶ to the 1998 one proved unfounded. One fieldworker reported that ‘Last month [June 1998] they [the LRA] were telling people that they are not going to attend “Kacokke Madit” in London since it is a waste of money. They want the “Kacokke Madit” to take place either in northern Uganda or Kampala’.²⁷ The New Vision reported that in one preparatory meeting for Kacokke Madit 1998 Acholi exiles had ‘criticised President Yoweri Museveni for ‘not doing enough to protect and feed the people of Acholi particularly those in protected villages’”.²⁸ A few weeks later they reported the LRA's refusal to participate, apparently because they saw it as ‘the brain child of President Museveni’.²⁹

The formation of the Acholi Religious Leaders Peace Initiative (ARLPI) in May 1998 brought Catholics, Anglicans and Muslims from Gulu and Kitgum districts together under one umbrella. The inaugural meeting named Bedo Piny pi Kuc (‘Let us sit down for peace’), signalled a commitment to a negotiated solution and was attended by, amongst others, the Resident Representatives of the World Bank and UNDP, the Minister of State for Northern Uganda, and the UPDF's 4^th Division Commander. ARLPI's membership was subsequently expanded to include religious leaders from throughout northern Uganda, and over the following years they became increasingly critical players in the anti-war camp. These processes were given extra impetus by the installation of a new Anglican bishop of Gulu, Bishop Onono Onweng in May 1998, and a new Catholic Archbishop, John Baptist Odama, in early 1999. ARLPI was to become involved in trying to make links with the LRA, raising international awareness of the situation, and confronting Government misdemeanours.

The third civil society voice to emerge in this period was the revived ‘traditional leadership’. Although widely welcomed at a local level, their restoration, far from being a purely local initiative, was in fact largely externally driven and enabled. The then Minister of State for Northern Uganda, himself an Acholi, promoted it inside Uganda with ideological support from a report written for a British NGO by a British Government Social Development Adviser. Funding came from the Belgian Government, and implementation capacity from the international NGO ACORD. The rationale was that if traditional leaders were reinstated they could do two things. Firstly, by virtue of their position they would be able to command the respect of the ‘boys in the bush’, who, it was asserted, would heed a call from the elders to lay down their weapons. Secondly, and also by virtue of their traditional roles, they would be able to effect cleansing ceremonies between returned rebels and their home communities, processes without which, it was said, reconciliation and therefore successful reintegration could not take place. Although there was no noticeable impact on levels of return from the LRA, the restoration did add another institutional voice in favour of negotiation to counter the Government's militaristic position.

There was thus increasing polarisation between the Government's preference for military solutions and civil society's favouring a negotiated one. In 1998 the Dutch chargé d'affaires reportedly said that the war in the north was affecting Uganda's image abroad and undermining its attractiveness to foreign investment. He also argued that ‘the army is draining Uganda's sons in their prime who could otherwise use their talents to build up the country’.³⁰ Museveni remained adamant until mid-1999 that the situation demanded a ‘military solution’, ruling that negotiations with ‘bandits’ were out of the question. This was echoed by his brother, Salim Saleh, who said that ‘the conflict will be solved by military means, not dialogue’.³¹ When in 1997 the Report of the Committee on Defence and Internal Affairs on the War in Northern Uganda was published, it recommended pursuing the military option, obliging two Acholi members of the committee³² to append a minority report urging a negotiated solution, as they felt this more accurately reflected the wishes of those consulted.³³ As such, dichotomised positions regarding a solution became an extension of the conflict itself.

Foreign governments offered some financial assistance, but generally made little (visible) strategic contribution to the debate at this stage. By 1997 the local organisation working with returned abducted children from the LRA, Gulu Support the Children Organisation (GUSCO), had established a reception centre with DANIDA funding.³⁴ Following a visit by the all-party International Development Committee of the British House of Commons, the British Government donated items valued at 44 million Shillings to GUSCO (approx. £14,000), and these ‘included 80 mattresses, 40 double-bed-deckers, 15 sewing machines, a generator and computers’.³⁵ Only a few weeks later

Mrs Clinton also said her country through USAID will provide U.S. $500,000 directly to local groups including Concerned Parents Association and Gulu Save the Children Organisation to help them find abducted children and give them the medical care they need to heal. She also said they will provide another U.S. $2 million over the next three years for a new Northern Uganda Initiative that will help people plagued by rebel activities get jobs, rebuild schools, health clinics and their own communities.³⁶

There was a gradual increase in interest from international organisations, with, for example, the establishment of a UN Disaster Management Team (UNDMT) charged with developing a Relief and Rehabilitation Programme for Displaced People in northern Uganda (WFP 1999: 20). In 1997, as well as Gersony's report on the war, UNICEF set up ACRIS – the Abducted Child Registration and Information System – to record both ongoing patterns of abduction and return, and to build a retrospective picture. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both produced reports detailing LRA atrocities (HRW, 1997, Mawson, 1997), followed by a further one from Amnesty International on Government abuses (Mawson, 1999). In 1998 the U.K.’s television Channel 4 screened a film (‘The Mission’) about the 1994 peace talks and the abduction of the Aboke girls in 1996. The Belgian organisation, Pax Christi, made a political decision when it decided to fund the travel expenses of the district chairmen of Gulu and Kitgum districts to go to Nairobi in 1998 ‘to meet a delegation of Lord's Resistance Movement/Army (LRM/A) in a bid to initiate peace talks’.³⁷

From early 1999 there was a noticeable lull in LRA activity. Together with some changes in the political climate, notably President Museveni's agreement to allow people to talk with the LRA (though he himself refused to do so), this created hopes that peace was just around the corner. Several national and international NGOs moved into Gulu district, eager to revive ‘traditional’ leadership and reconciliation mechanisms, and to address the trauma of returned abducted children. The Belgian Government, in addition to the small yet politically significant amounts it invested in ‘traditional leadership’, put significant finance into upgrading the telephone system as part of NURP I, and, from 1999, USAID channelled large volumes of aid through an array of local and international NGOs, notably Red Barnet (Danish Save the Children).

The lull in LRA activity coincided with extensive UPDF activity in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo. UPDF forces had been involved in various ways in the fighting in the DRC from 1997 (UN, 2001), and 1999 saw overt fighting there between UPDF and Rwandan Government forces. Despite the Lusaka peace accord of July 1999, fighting continued, some of it involving UPDF forces recruited from northern Uganda.³⁸

District level consultations on NURP II ended with a national consensus workshop in Kampala in October 1999. The District Profile for Gulu and Kitgum, drawn up as part of this process, argued that

The government must acknowledge the scale of trauma-related problems as underlying causes for conflict and underdevelopment. It is critical for all concerned parties involved in the war in the Northern region to develop the will to take the difficult political steps required to prevent further human rights abuses. The continued plight of the lives of thousands of children and individuals who are helplessly affected by the effects of the war, calls for a strategy to resolve the war through peaceful means.

It also argued that, if peace were to be attained, the underlying causes of the conflict had to be addressed. It therefore stressed a need for ‘trauma support systems’ and a need to identify ‘the interest groups causing insecurity’, and thus added weight to calls for a non-military solution (COWI, 1999b; 21).

Perhaps as a political concession to these pressures, the Government signed a Carter Center-brokered ‘peace agreement’ with the Sudanese Government in Nairobi on 8 December 1999. The LRA had not been involved in direct negotiation, and within just two weeks of the peace agreement, the LRA re-entered Uganda from Sudan. Civilians who over the previous six months had begun tentatively leaving the ‘protected villages’ in order to return home, now found themselves being herded back by the army. Vehicles were ambushed and burnt on all roads out of Gulu except the Kampala highway, and rebels mounted attacks on Government targets in the heart of Gulu town. Phase IV had clearly begun.

Phase IV – Amnesty for ‘Terrorists’ (2000 to 2002)

In early January, people were again forced back into the protected villages in scenes reminiscent of the late 1980s and mid-1990s (see Chapter 5). On 17 January, having been pushed for primarily by those interested in seeing a non-violent solution to the LRA conflict, the long-awaited Amnesty Act was put in place. Many question-marks had hung over its development: Could it work without direct negotiations – peace talks – with the rebels? Would it be right to give unconditional amnesty, without ensuring that the culprits admitted and atoned for their crimes and some guarantee that they would not re-offend? What would be the implications for civil liability vis-à-vis Acholi who refused to recognise traditional inter-clan reconciliation mechanisms such as mato oput and compensation payments for damage done or lives taken (culo kwor)? How would it accommodate non-Acholi who might insist on enforcing their rights through civil courts? The timing and actual implementation of the Amnesty law were also concerns: should it begin before preparations to receive, demobilise and resettle returnees were completed?

As finally formulated, the Act offered amnesty for ‘any Ugandan who has at any time since the 26^th day of January, 1986 engaged in or is engaging in war or armed rebellion against the government of the Republic of Uganda’. Persons who voluntarily renounced such acts were to be pardoned and excused from criminal prosecution. To avoid the Commission having to deal with the large numbers abducted and returned within a matter of days or weeks it was only available for former LRA members who were above twelve years of age and who had stayed with the LRA for more than four months. In all other respects it was a ‘blanket’ amnesty, open to all members of rebel groups, including the leadership. It was initially to run for six months, with the possibility of extension by the Minister for Internal Affairs. Due both to lack of funding (the Government provided the Commission with just under U.S. $1 million annually for administrative costs) and, some would argue, lack of political will, the amnesty process took some time to be put in place, with the Commission officially appointed in July 2000, and the Gulu and Kitgum offices opened in February and July 2001 respectively.

In parallel with these processes, a reasonable degree of security had been re-established relatively quickly in early 2000 following the LRA's angry outburst in late December 2001. By some accounts the LRA was under considerable pressure within Sudan in the wake of the Nairobi peace accord, and was seeking to make links with the Equatoria Defence Forces, a Sudanese rebel force operating in South Sudan. They finally met with the Carter Center in February 2000, and in July a ministerial meeting was hosted in Atlanta at which the Atlanta Joint Action Plan for the Implementation of the Nairobi Agreement was drawn up. A further meeting was convened in Khartoum in October 2000, and another in November, this time in Nairobi.

The UN Office for Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) reported that ‘improved security and access in northern Uganda encouraged many relief agencies to establish semi-permanent offices in Acholiland. The number of agencies involved with relief assistance increased from five in mid-1996 to over 60 by end-2000’ (UNOCHA 2001: 14). A severe outbreak of Ebola haemorrhagic fever in Gulu district in late 2000 (thought by some to have been brought back from the DRC by a returning soldier) fuelled local and international calls for the dismantling of the protected villages.

On 3 June 2001 the Carter Center hosted a further implementation meeting in Nairobi. Gulu District's LCV Chairman met with the LRA on 4 June 2001, and the Government declared a demilitarized zone. In a further implementation meeting in Nairobi in November 2001, a letter was written to Kony asking him to participate in the dialogue, but to no avail. By late 2001, UNOCHA was reporting increased movement between camps and home areas in both Gulu and Kitgum, and that ‘Although District authorities have not directed ‘decongestion’ per se, there are numerous reports of people responding to new deployments by UPDF and creating settlements close to these. New smaller camps have been set up (from large camps) throughout the sub-county, especially around larger camps like Pabbo’ (OCHA, December 2001, reported in Global IDP database).³⁹

At a political level, 2000 saw a contentious referendum on the continued viability of the ‘Movement’ political system, and 2001 saw President Museveni's re-election for a second term, though with virtually no support in the northern districts. Pader district was created out of the southern half of Kitgum district. During this period, the Amnesty Act although intended primarily for the LRA, in practice proved more popular with non-LRA insurgent groups. When the Gulu diocese Justice and Peace Commission investigated the fact that less than 400 LRA members had taken up amnesty by April 2002, they concluded that ‘Groups in Acholi civil society have always held that a blanket amnesty is a crucial instrument in bringing a lasting peace to the troubled region. However, two and a half years after being passed by the Parliament of Uganda, the effects of the Amnesty Law in Acholi are not very much in evidence’.⁴⁰ Worse still, they found that over half of returnees were being pressurised to incorporate into the UPDF.

Throughout this phase, religious leaders made attempts to meet with LRA members, but these were generally disrupted by the UPDF. Meanwhile, pressure on the LRA from both inside and outside Uganda appeared to be increasing. The EU drew up a resolution in July 2000 calling ‘on individual EU Member States to ban LRA operations and travelling of LRA representatives within the EU and between EU Member States and non-EU Nations’ (2002, L12). In April 2001, the U.S.A.’s Department of State included the LRA on its ‘B-list’ of ‘other terrorist organisations’, and there was talk of using the Terrorism Act of January 2002 against LRA members in the U.K.⁴¹ UNOCHA reported that ‘With the development of the Uganda-Sudan relationship (by beginning of 2002), Kony has become increasingly isolated from external support and funding; especially as the U.K. has frozen bank accounts of known LRA and ADF collaborators as part of the crackdown on terrorism’ (UNOCHA, 28 February 2002: 31–32).

In March 2002 Uganda passed its own Anti-Terrorism Act. This largely removed the space for senior people to return from the bush and engage in reconciliation processes. Conventional rules of legal construction stipulate that where two legal instruments are in conflict, the later instrument, in this case the Anti-Terrorism Act, takes precedence. Thus while the Amnesty Act granted amnesty for engagement in ‘war or armed rebellion’, the Anti-Terrorism Act rendered punishable acts carried out for purposes of ‘influencing the government or influencing the public…and for a political or religious…or economic aim’.⁴² It made no reference to the Amnesty Act, and designated the LRA/M as a terrorist organisation, membership of which was a punishable criminal offence. In principle therefore it effectively negated the Amnesty Act,⁴³ prompting one Amnesty Commission official to argue that ‘the reason why top rebel commanders refuse to respond to the amnesty is because of the Anti-Terrorism Act’. It also put a serious damper on civilian attempts to make contacts with the LRA, as any dialogue with them could be interpreted as treason.

The discourse of a global ‘war on terrorism’ generated by the U.S.A. and its allies post-September 11 2001, translated into previously unthinkable anti-LRA actions on the ground. On 10 January 2002, Presidents Bashir and Museveni, together with then U.K. Secretary of State for Development, Clare Short, held bi-lateral talks while attending an Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD)⁴⁴ summit in Khartoum. They agreed on UPDF incursions into southern Sudan, with the stated aims of rescuing abducted children and capturing or killing Kony and his key commanders. In other words, an operation to deal with the LRA once and for all. UNOCHA reported widespread reservations about the operation's feasibility, its potential humanitarian impact and long-term political consequences, for it was seen as jeopardising ‘long-term issues of reconciliation both within Acholi society and between Acholi and the rest of Ugandan society’ (Weeks, 2002: 20–21). Religious leaders stated that ‘it seems as if the hawks are flying higher and higher. Although the doves are not yet dead they are hardly heard’.⁴⁵ Nevertheless, troops began massing in the border areas known as Aswa Ranch from January 2002 onwards, where the U.S.A. sponsored ‘routine training’ for 6,000 of them.⁴⁶

Phase V – Operation Iron Fist and its Aftermath (2002 to 2003)

Operation Iron Fist officially began on 8 March 2002, and a protocol was signed on 12 March with the Government of Sudan allowing the UPDF to attack Kony bases inside Sudan – with a deadline of 2 April. Although 10,000 Ugandan soldiers were deployed in south Sudan, and by the end of March claimed to have captured all four main rebel camps, this was at the cost of many UPDF soldiers’ lives and an escalation of civilian suffering to new levels – seen from northern Uganda the primary indicator of military activity was trucks carrying live soldiers northwards and corpses southwards. At the first extension of the agreement in late May, the army spokesman reportedly said that ‘this was “definitely the last phase” of the Ugandan army operation’ and that ‘Kony will either be killed or die of hunger, or surrender, within the next 45 days’.⁴⁷ There was, however, nothing to back up these claims, and by early June UNICEF pointed out that ‘Only two infants – of some 3,000 LRA abductees whose return had been included in contingency plans prepared by humanitarian organisations – had been rescued by the UPDF’.⁴⁸

Rather than capturing the LRA, Operation Iron Fist drove them into northern Uganda. By May 2002 insecurity was again severe, the operation was extended to 19 June and roads were built inside Sudan to facilitate the hunt for Kony, who, in a striking parallel with Osama Bin Laden, was allegedly hiding in the Imatong complex of hills. As UNOCHA reported on the IDP situation, established new offices in the north, and began working on a Government of Uganda policy on IDPs, UN involvement increased. The report was a first step in this process as it highlighted the many points of the UN's Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement which were not being addressed in northern Uganda (see Chapter 5).

In June 2002, the Government signed a formal ceasefire with UNRF II, a splinter group from the West Nile Bank Front formed in 1996. Some 2,500 fighters had taken up the offer of amnesty some months earlier, allegedly because of the pressure created by Operation Iron Fist.⁴⁹ At the same time, as the UPDF came under pressure, community leaders in Gulu and Kitgum were ordered to recruit at least five men each from their respective wards.⁵⁰ One extension of the agreement followed another, and by late August 2002 an estimated 30,000 UPDF forces were deployed in northern Uganda. Gulu alone was said to have contributed over six thousand Home-guards.⁵¹ In September 2002 an agreement between President Museveni and President Kabila of the DRC committed Uganda to withdrawing its remaining troops from the neighbouring DRC, in return for action against Congo-based rebels hostile to the Ugandan government. By October, long after the 45 days promised back in May had passed, Museveni announced 25 per cent cuts in social services budgets in order to fund the building of roads for the military in northern Uganda.⁵² In November 2002, President Museveni established a Presidential Peace Team (PPT)⁵³ comprising army officers, government ministers, and Acholi MPs, and he called on the LRA to assemble in designated areas, a call which was ignored. The pact with Sudan was extended again in December, to last up to the end of January 2003. It covered the same region as that covered by agreements on humanitarian access between the Khartoum government and the United Nations.⁵⁴

The PPT team was expanded in January 2003 to include representatives from all districts of the Acholi sub-region. Led by Salim Saleh, it attempted unsuccessfully to meet the LRA in March 2003. The latter also rejected a second call from Museveni to the LRA to assemble in designated ‘safe-zones’, and demanded instead that a cease-fire be extended throughout the whole region. By April the GoU's cease-fire offer had been withdrawn, and the PPT's efforts appeared to come to a standstill. In May the chair of the PPT, Eriya Kategaya (formerly Minister for Internal Affairs), was dismissed from Government. In the same month a ‘Dialogue for Peace’ workshop in Gulu resulted in the formation of another peace team (Uduru Kuc), but this never made any serious intervention. According to one team member, this was because the LRA failed to name a corresponding team, but several individuals and organisations claimed to have made offers to help link the PPT with the LRA, offers which were rejected.⁵⁵

In 2003 the LRA took the war into eastern Uganda, reaching as far as Soroti and Katakwi, as well as Lira district. As in the past, the LRA were not the only source of violence, but they bore principal responsibility. Abductions increased dramatically, with some estimates reaching as high as 5000 new abductions in the period June 2002 – March 2003 alone (HRW 2003). Nightly commuting, which had been one of the reasons for creating ‘protected villages’ in 1996, re-emerged on a massive scale. It featured prominently in attempts to draw the attention of the international community to the gravity of the situation, notably through initiatives such as the ‘Gulu Walk’. Less attention was given to an unprecedented escalation in militarization. In response to the LRA's incursions, people in the Teso sub-region formed an ethnic militia known as Amuka, a process speedily brought under government control. The government itself then encouraged the formation of a similar militia in the Lango sub-region (Rhino Boys) and ultimately in Kitgum district too (Frontier Guards), providing both arms and some minimal training. By this process at least 25,000 men were brought under arms in the space of little over six months, ostensibly to share the burden of protecting the civilian population and allow the army to intensify its pursuit of the LRA (Dolan, 2004).

Phase VI – November 2003 to June 2006

The visit to northern Uganda by the UN Secretary General's Special Representative on Humanitarian Affairs, Jan Egeland, in November 2003, was one of several crucial events that dramatically changed the whole situation. Against a backdrop of internal displacement which by then affected 80–90 per cent of the population in the Acholi sub-region (by early 2004, the WFP were providing relief distributions to over 1.5 million internally displaced people in northern Uganda, including hundreds of thousands in Teso and Lango sub-regions), his observation that northern Uganda was one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, sparked a significant increase in levels of external intervention over the next two years (notably from UNOCHA, UNICEF, OHCHR, UNHCR and its implementing partners). This had the advantage of drawing resources and attention to this hitherto seriously under-recognised situation, and the disadvantage of tending to depoliticise it by stressing its humanitarian dimensions. Whether there was benefit in the UN's decision to make northern Uganda one of the pilots for UNHCR's extension of activities to include IDPs, and for its controversial ‘cluster approach’, is not clear.

A second event, which further extended northern Uganda's role as guinea-pig for the international community, was President Museveni's decision in January 2004 to make a referral to the newly established International Criminal Court (ICC). His call for the Court to prosecute the LRA for war crimes was welcomed by the prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, although most civil society organisations active in northern Uganda viewed it with considerable scepticism. They pointed out that it was at odds with the provisions of the Amnesty Act of 2000, an act which had only been passed after extended lobbying of a reluctant government, and which the LRA had only just begun to take up in significant numbers. As the first referral to the ICC it came to be seen as a test-case for the viability of the institution, and supporters of the ICC quickly polarised the debate by arguing that critics of the ICC were opponents of justice and proponents of impunity.

A third feature of this phase was the elections of February 2005, in which Museveni's NRM received virtually no votes across the conflict-affected regions of the country. As a local UN official commented, ‘The north has always voted against Museveni's government, but this time it was clear. Now they [the government] have realised if they want to win the hearts and minds of the north, they have to do something.’⁵⁶ As part of the ongoing decentralisation process, Amuru district was created out of Gulu district during this period.⁵⁷ In addition to these internal changes, the installation of the Government of Southern Sudan following the Comprehensive Peace Accord in October 2005, and the holding of elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 2006, both considerably affected the regional environment.

Phase VII – June 2006 Onwards

When peace-talks between the LRA and the Government of Uganda were announced in mid-2006, they took many by surprise and were greeted with considerable scepticism given the history of failed talks in the past. Nonetheless, the events of Phase VI provided some explanation for the Government's shift away from its hitherto rigid refusal to engage in talks. Additional motivating factors included the need to be seen to take action prior to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in November 2007 – and the (albeit remote) prospect of the ICC turning its attention to government actors. The signing of a Cessation of Hostilities agreement in Juba on 26 August 2006 (and its renewal some months later) did, however, create some hope that these talks were serious, as did the signing of protocols on comprehensive solutions, as well as accountability and reconciliation. While the same period saw relatively large numbers of the IDPs in Teso and Lango return home, the IDPs in the Acholi sub-region remained far more sceptical about the peace process. Thus although there was some movement into government organised ‘decongestion sites’, this was not the return home many were waiting for. Joseph Kony's failure to sign the final agreement in April 2008 inevitably created doubts about whether any of the potential of the protocols would be realised.

The War As People Remember it

The broad outline given above focuses on what are generally regarded as key players, events and processes. But within this there are numerous more personal histories which easily slip out of our consideration, when they should in fact be central to it. A sense of how the macro- and micro- pictures interact can be gained from the summarised findings of a discussion held with thirteen members of a women's self-help group at ACORD's offices in Gulu, 10 February 1999 (see Chapter 2 for discussion of methods). The results were shocking in the extreme.

The women's dominant memories were around physical harm, killing and abduction of relatives, and loss of properties. Telegraphic bullet points describe truly gruesome events, reducing a book's worth of personal tragedies to a page of code. People do not forget – even after thirteen years the memory of loss was acute and detailed, down to how many sacks of which type of grain were looted. And there was no closure – one woman whose son was abducted back in 1987 still talked of her son as being ‘in captivity’, as did the woman who lost two grandsons to rebel abduction in 1988. And while the multiplicity of perpetrators was bewildering (NRA, Lakwena, UPDA, UPDF, LRA), the practices were consistent. Although in the overall picture, 1999 marked a lull in the violence, for the women in this group it was in many respects as dangerous as 1989.

When memories of things which happened in the respondents’ home communities over the same period were added in, the picture became even more distressing (Table 3.2).

Table 3.1 Incidents that Happened to Women and Their Immediate Families (Each Line Represents a Different Person's Memory)

Year	Incidents
1986	– 4 of my children were abducted by Lakwena. They returned after 4 months
	– 2 of my children died of a hand-grenade attack by the NRA
	– 2 brothers were killed by NRA (1 with a molten jerry-can, the other through beating)
1987	– My cattle (20 head) were taken, I was beaten and four girls were taken by Lakwena
	– Karimojong took 38 cattle belonging to my grandfather
	– My husband was arrested by the NRA for 2 weeks, came back ill and died 3 (cont.) years later
	– 2 of my brothers were killed by Lakwena
	– I was beaten, my son was abducted (returned after 1 year), and 5 goats were taken by Lakwena
	– My husband was killed, 28 cattle were taken, 4 huts and 6 granaries were burnt by NRA
	– My son, who was married with a daughter, was abducted and is still in captivity (LRA)
	– My brother drowned himself after NRA took 100 cattle
1988	– I was abducted and lived in captivity for 3 months. Some of my property was taken, others destroyed, one child taken who returned after 6 months
	– 3 of my brothers were killed by Lakwena and household property robbed
	– 10 goats robbed by Lakwena, 50 cattle by cattle rustlers
	– My husband was killed
	– 8 sons of my brothers were killed by NRA, who also took 30 head of cattle
	– UPDA burnt one hut, 2 sacks of millet, 8 sacks of sunflower, household properties, 2 granaries
	– 2 of my grandsons were abducted, one returned after 1.5 years, the other is still in captivity
	– My arm was shot by the NRA and had to be amputated
	– My brother was abducted by the UPDA
1989	– 4 of my brothers were burnt alive in their huts by the NRA who accused them of being collaborators
	– NRA burnt property including 4 huts, 3 granaries, 40 iron sheets, because the rebels had camped in the area
	– I was hit by a mine and my leg was amputated
	– My brother's son was killed by the LRA
1990	– 6 children killed by Lakwena (Bobi)
	– 1 man was killed by the NRA
1991	– My sister's daughter was abducted by LRA, and died in Agweng, Lira district
1992	– NRA took our maize mill
	– NRA took my brother's son's maize mill
	– NRA took my uncle's maize mill
	– My brother's house was used as an army office; to date there has been no rent payment made
1993	– LRA abducted my brother-in-law's son from Sir Samuel Baker School, he returned 1 year later
1996	– I was hit by an anti-personnel mine and lost my lower leg
1997	– I was hurt in the hip by a UPDF bomb
	– My brother-in-law's son was shot dead in the market place by the UPDF
1998	– LRA took 2 of my sons, they're still in captivity
	– LRA killed my father while he attended some funeral rights
1999	– LRA abducted seven children (1 girl, 6 boys), the girl returned after 2 weeks
	– LRA took 20 goats
	– UPDF burned 5 huts
	– LRA abducted 2 of my sister's children

Table 3.2 Incidents within the Immediate Community

Year	Incidents
1987	– 9 women and children were killed by UPDA, left unburied and eaten by pigs
	– Children were massacred while dancing in Lawiyeadul village
1988	– NRA killed 8 men and dumped their bodies in a stream
1991	– LRA kill 6
	– Serious NRA operation with people taken forcefully to various places for screening
1995	– Brutal killings (Atiak, Palaro, Alero, Pabo, Paicho, Patiko, Acoyo, Pawere, Awere)
1996	– 10 boys (10-12 years old) abducted by LRA, return after 2 weeks
	– 2 school girls abducted by LRA
	– 80 huts were burned by the LRA
	– Neighbour's shop was looted 3 times by LRA
	– 2 boys abducted but returned
	– Individuals were displaced in Gulu town
1997	– 9 children abducted (1 girl, eight boys: seven boys return, one killed)
	– 3 men killed by LRA
	– UPDF shoot dead a man when he failed to give the money they demanded
1998	– After the LRA had passed through the UPDF destroyed tobacco being fire-cured as well as other properties
	– 7 boys were abducted, 2 returned (LRA)
	– Dispensary looted (LRA)
	– 2 boys shot but survived in hospital (LRA)
	– 8 UPDF soldiers raped a woman in Laliya
1999	– February: 1 girl abducted and items looted by LRA
	– LRA shot dead a catechist and his wife

The women's own personal trauma was compounded by constant reminders of their extreme vulnerability in their immediate community. People were caught between army and rebels, with dozens abducted or killed by the LRA, and others rounded up and taken away as a result of the army's screening operations. Women were being gang-raped by their supposed protectors. It was a situation in which there was no one to turn to for safety (see Chapter 5).

This sense of vulnerability is deepened by an awareness of events in the wider war zone, and at national and even international level. From the collective memory of the thirteen women, five of whom had had no formal education at all, and only three of whom had completed secondary schooling, it was possible to construct a time line of many of the defining moments of the war at district and national level (Table 3.3).

Table 3.3 Incidents at District and National Level

Year	Incidents at a District Level	National Level
1986	– People forced by NRA from Olwiyo and Purongo to Karuma in Masindi district	NRA/NRM took over power from the Government
	– HIV/AIDS in Gulu and Malnutrition
1987	NRA shot at children during confrontation with UPDA; 6 girls die, as well as some boys	Holy Spirit Movement attempt to reach Kampala, stopped in Jinja
1988	NRA confiscated land without compensation (100 homesteads)	UPDA and NRA sign peace agreement
1989		Presidential amnesty to followers of rebels, not leaders
1990		NRA marched to attack Rwanda
1991	LRA maimings and mutilations	Acholi students at Makerere shot at by Uganda Police Force
1992	Landmines planted along roads
1994	NRA attack community in Atiak market place	Peace talks led by Betty Bigombe flop because some people
		brainwashed Museveni and he gave a 7 day ultimatum
1995	– LRA massacre in Atiak
	– Meningitis outbreak
	– Massive planting of anti-personnel mines
1996	– 80 huts burnt by LRA in Pece and Coyo	Sudan Government said to be supporting the LRA rebels
	– Jago of Anaka killed by LRA vehicle landmine
	– People forced into camps by UPDF
	– Scorched earth policy used by UPDF on people of Purongo
	– UPDF mobile raped women in market in Palaro sub-county
	– 2 elders killed by LRA (Okot Ogoni and Lagony) while pursuing dialogue for peace
1997	– 82 huts of IDPs burnt in Limo by LRA, 13 year old girl burnt and dies	– Uganda accused by Sudan of hosting rebels
	– 99 huts burnt in Go-down, Layibi by LRA	– Discussions on blanket amnesty in parliament
	– SPLA hosted and seen in Gulu town (Garang himself and various vehicles)
1998	– UPDF shot people at funeral, 2 die, others wounded	Outbreak of cholera in most districts
	– Vehicle shot by LRA, medical staff die
	– Bishop of Moyo killed in ambush on Gulu-Adjumani road
1999	– Vehicle shot/ambushed by LRA in Wiayago river
	– Houses burnt: Pabbo 70, Anaka 50, Parabongo 6

This group of women were very aware of what was happening elsewhere in the conflict zone – and often knew who the perpetrators were. Maimings and landmines were attributed to the LRA, people being forced into camps to the UPDF. That the SPLA were ‘hosted’ and seen in Gulu town was noted, as were specific incidents such as the killing of the Bishop of Moyo. They knew of the major peace initiatives, and of the tensions with the Government of Sudan. The shooting of Acholi students in Makerere University by Ugandan police force in 1991 was remembered, suggestive of the extent to which Acholi see themselves as a devalued minority group under attack in Uganda as a whole (see Chapter 7).

The exercise conducted with this group was repeated with nine other self-help groups of youth, farmers, and People Living with Aids (PLWA). A total of 171 people were involved (85 male, 86 female). Of the 136 who gave their educational status 10.2 per cent had no formal education, 46.7 per cent had 1–7 years of primary education, 25.5 per cent had reached GCE/GCSE‘O’ level, 3.6 per cent had GCE/GCSE‘A’ level, 6.6 per cent had further education, and 7.3 per cent had some tertiary education. Eighty-two per cent were married. Regardless of gender, age, formal education level or occupation, similar patterns of traumatic experiences, together with similar levels of observation, well-guarded memory and sophisticated analysis would emerge. Adolescent youth recalled as many traumatic incidents as elderly farmers (see Chapter 7 for youth analysis of the actors in the war).

Out of the 171 people in the focus groups, eight (4.7 per cent) had themselves been beaten/tortured by government soldiers, twelve (7.0 per cent) by rebels. One had been imprisoned by government, fourteen (8.2 per cent) had been abducted by rebels. One had been raped by government soldiers, while six (3.5 per cent) had been shot and wounded (three by government, and three by rebels). When the number of instances was expanded to include close relatives, the extent to which the general population had experienced violation was clear (Table 3.4).

Table 3.4 Summary of Experiences of Individuals as Drawn from Timelines (1986–1999) Developed with 10 Self-Help Groups, Gulu District, February 1999

Whereas abduction was clearly a rebel preserve, killing was not. Twenty-nine out of seventy-seven killings were attributed to Government troops. Four out of five rape cases were also attributed to Government forces. Thus although overall the rebels were responsible for 70.4 per cent of major traumatic incidents to individual persons, the Government was responsible for nearly one third. When attributing responsibility for damages to personal properties, the picture was more or less 50:50 (Table 3.5).

Table 3.5 Attribution of Responsibility for 157 Instances of Damage to Personal Properties by 170 Participants in 10 Self-Help Groups, Gulu, February 1999

If one puts all these figures together, remembering that they are drawn from a fairly representative sample of ordinary civilians in Gulu district, it becomes clear that the average civilian had, over the course of nearly two decades, experienced a relentless series of violations.

Discussion

When the outline of the major phases of the ‘war’ is juxtaposed with people's memories, it suggests that, from a longitudinal perspective, the LRA, rather than being the lead perpetrator, was one amongst many, including the UPDA, Karimojong, Lakwena, and NRA/UPDF. The levels of brutality, displacement and impoverishment, are extreme – and under-acknowledged. When Gersony argued that it was not possible to compare the violence in northern Uganda with the ‘large-scale mass murder and brutality that characterized UNLA operations in the Luwero Triangle in 1983/4’ (1997: 23), he seriously underplayed the devastation wrought on people in Gulu and Kitgum districts over nearly two decades (as compared with two years). Throughout my fieldwork I failed to encounter anybody who had not either experienced extreme abuse and atrocities first hand or witnessed them being exercised on immediate family members – often by government and rebels in quick succession.

Although the death rate and other impacts should have placed northern Uganda squarely on the lists of ‘deadly conflicts’ suggested by organisations such as the Carnegie Corporation in New York, it is not clear that the term ‘war’, as conventionally understood, adequately describes (let alone explains) what was happening. The fact that the elder quoted at the beginning of this chapter described people of Acholi as ‘in a dilemma’, a people who ‘don't know how to go forward’, is not surprising. The defining features were not the pitched battles between LRA and UPDF that conventional notions of war might suggest, but rather the phenomena of inexorably escalating displacement, dependency, debilitation, militarization, geographic reach and international involvement over time. Even humanitarians did not seem to grasp the extent of what was going on. It was only in November 2003, when the UN's Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs saw fit to describe the situation as worse than that in Iraq,⁵⁸ that the gravity of the situation began to be acknowledged.

What the above account does demonstrate is that even by the late 1990s, President Museveni and his government, although in some respects exemplifying an ‘African renaissance’, in others remained in a weak position and faced a problem of control. Internal divisions juxtaposed with the fact that over 50 per cent of its budget came from external donors, made their hold on power considerably more provisional than was generally perceived. Nor could these internal and external pressures be dealt with discreetly, as they were closely related both historically and in the present.

Back in 1986, with the memory of how post-independence political parties had been overlaid with and become synonymous with ethnic, religious and political agendas, Museveni and the NRM made the achievement of national unity and the elimination of all forms of sectarianism point three of their ten-point programme. This goal underpinned the ‘no-party’ system and continued to inform the Government's doubts about the move to multi-party democracy being urged from both inside and outside the country,⁵⁹ a move which was eventually made in time for the 2005 elections.

Underlying the positive political project of national unity were very real military and political imperatives. If the rebel NRM was to achieve any kind of national and international credibility as the Government of a country – rather than merely being seen as the occupiers of a nominal capital city – then it had to establish control of the north. As described above, for some months following the taking of Kampala the NRA had no presence in – and therefore did not exercise control over – those parts of the country north of the Karuma Bridge (River Nile). Even once they did establish a military presence, they were regarded by many as an occupying force rather than as fellow Ugandans – not helped by the fact that many members of the NRA were Tutsis from Rwanda who would eventually return to Rwanda as part of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) in 1990.⁶⁰

The real-politik objective of gaining control is suggested by Museveni's appointment of a Minister for Pacification of Northern Uganda (a term used by George Orwell to exemplify political euphemisms, words which serve ‘to mask, sanitize and confer respectability’ and to ‘insulate their users and listeners from experiencing fully the meaning of what they are doing’ (Cohen, 2001: 107)). Even with the amendment of this title to Minister for Reconstruction of Northern Uganda, the implementation of the Local Council system of non-party democracy, and the massive militarization of the north by the UPDF, the Government's authority was not fully established in 1999 and the relative importance of central and local government, members of parliament, religious and traditional leaders, remained in flux. While the interventions of national level church leaders, such as the call from the Archbishop of Kampala, Emmanuel Cardinal Wamala, to Kony, ‘to stop fighting and accept dialogue with the Government’,⁶¹ posed no direct challenge to the Government, those of Acholi religious leaders did, for they ‘appealed to the Government to declare Acholiland a disaster area and immediately enter into direct negotiations with Kony rebels. They have also demanded that Parliament revokes its recommendation for a military solution to the 12 year war which has devastated northern Uganda’.⁶²

Amongst Government representatives in particular, decentralisation raised numerous questions about who had most power, despite the claimed complementarities of the centre and the districts.⁶³ These ambiguities further aggravated doubts about whether the Acholi had ever been truly ‘pacified’ and brought under political control, doubts which themselves were fed by the possibility that the LRA's apparent resilience was at least in part due to covert support from civilian Acholi. Furthermore, despite a project of national unity, colonial discourses based on notions of ‘tribe’ had been deeply internalised and remained an organising principle in many people's thinking. For example, one peace activist stated to me that his loyalties were, in order of priority, to himself, his family, his clan, his tribe, his country, and to the human race. Ethnicised thinking continued to pervade political organising and entered into the literature of international agencies,⁶⁴ creating an evident challenge for a Government aiming at national unity. At the peace meeting convened by religious leaders in 1998, for example, one Catholic priest held that:

If the Acholis are united, who can come and separate us? If the Acholis are united, our voice shall be heard. Before the Movement system, how did the Acholi live? If they unite they will be like the Karimojong who responded to the raiders from Kenya by using students in Makerere to threaten secession and as a result were given weapons. Let the Acholi do the same.

He continued: ‘People in Acholi come together to dig a garden and successfully finish it. If they are united they will be respected by other tribes. The tribe is something that comes from God. To be peaceful we should accept God into our lives’.⁶⁵ In one short speech he thus clarified that his vision of ‘unity’ was of the tribe not the nation, he also distanced the Acholi from the Movement, aligned them with the Karimojong and their approach to making demands on the state (including the threat of secession), conjured up the promise of tribal identity as the basis for respect, and brought God on side too. In doing so he exemplified a broader tendency to mythologize Acholi identity. This was further demonstrated in the religious leaders’ appeal for Third Party Mediation published in the daily newspapers on 8 March 2004. This blended religious imagery with pan-African and ethnic rhetoric: ‘We were moved by our moral and religious obligations as shepherds of God's people, especially of the weak and vulnerable. But we also found warrant for such solidarity in our noble African tradition best captured by the Lwo saying oyoo opilo too ikom litinone (The mother rat will die with her children)’.⁶⁶ The appeal describes how ‘the Acholi traditional, social and moral fabric that once formed one of the most beautiful cultural tapestries in Africa is now in tatters’. It calls for mediation from internationally renowned Africans, with only the San Egidio community mentioned as possible non-African mediators.⁶⁷ Somewhat perversely, therefore, local ‘peace activists’ who claimed to be seeking a way out of the situation were doing so by appealing to the very factors used to divide and rule people in the first place.⁶⁸

Ethnicised thinking was further evident in the call of the former Minister of State for Reconstruction of Northern Uganda for a conference which would ‘include all the stakeholders in Acholiland and enable them to resolve the contradictions between them, before bringing in the international community’.⁶⁹ It was also reflected in formations such as the Acholi Parliamentary Group, and shaped donor and interventions such as the EU's ‘Acholiland Programme’.

Alongside the conceptual climate created by discourses of ‘tribe’ was the concrete reality of a lack of military control. A WFP report of 1999 described how the organisation was adopting a partial approach and only assisting the population ‘already under firm government control’ (WFP 1999: 33), and one elder I interviewed argued that ‘In the camps people are protecting government soldiers. People are failing to pay taxes as they have no source of income, therefore we can say they are under rebel control’.⁷⁰

The sentiments of most Acholi towards the Government were clear, as they pointedly refused to vote for Museveni in presidential elections in 1996, 2001 and 2006, and, in opposition to the Government, called for a negotiated rather than a military solution to the conflict.⁷¹ Equally in the Teso sub-region, the spontaneous formation of ethnic militias from late 2003 to early 2004, and the speed with which the UPDF moved to bring these under its own control (Dolan, 2004), was an indicator of how fragile the government felt the earlier pacification of the sub-region to have been.

The most pressing reality, though, was the glaring inequality between the north and south of the country, and the grievances this both reflected and gave rise to. As one New Vision commentator observed:

Let us face it: life up there is what some defunct philosopher would call nasty, short and brutish. And it is being lived in the same country and under the same government with the rest whose most urgent problem is to cut down on the fats in their bodies…Those fellows who did not know what their president looks like live in the same country with several thousand who surf the internet and communicate with friends all over the globe via email…⁷²

The degree of inequality was beyond ready redress. The task of holding together a country which did not fully feel it was a country was not made easier by being beholden to international donors for support. Paradoxically, Uganda's status as a success story and show-case for international policies was also an indicator of the extent to which its room for an independent development trajectory towards national unity had been compromised. When as a student at Dar-es-Salaam University in the late 1960s, Museveni wrote that he and his fellow students were ‘probably reactionary puppets of neo-colonialism in the making’ (Museveni 1970: 7), he was unnervingly close to predicting his own future.

Under structural adjustment policies, state services and large-scale infrastructural developments were cut back and the possibility of buying favour with the population at large was reduced. Restrictions on military expenditure and demands for demobilisation weakened the use of the military to keep a grip on power. Under an internationally driven agenda of multi-party democratisation, Museveni's ‘no-party’ system was coming under increasing challenge. And under de-centralisation policies, power at a local level was re-ethnicised and the whole concept of national cadres of civil servants was diluted. Indeed, even donor support for the re-anointment of traditional leaders could be seen as undermining a national project of anti-sectarianism. The development of a national IDP policy mentioned above involved developing institutional mechanisms to ‘include direct participation of donors, UN agencies and NGOs in all IDP planning’, and the early warning system was to involve an ‘interagency Vulnerability and Assessment Mapping Group consisting of WFP, OPM [Office of the Prime Minister], SCF-U.K., FEWS [Famine Early Warning System] and IOM’. In short, the Government was becoming a minor player in its own major issues. The referral to the ICC which was made in 2004, and which was to become such a stumbling block to the peace talks in 2006, was in some respects an admission of loss of control, insofar as under the Rome Statute such referrals are only to be made where the state concerned is unwilling or unable to bring perpetrators to account.

That these frameworks imposed by the international donors were something of a straitjacket for the Government is evident from many defiant statements made by the President. An article in The Monitor, for example, went under the headline ‘I will not kneel before donors, swears Museveni’.⁷³ At times donor-government tensions over issues such as levels of demobilisation, amnesty, and defence expenditure resulted in open wars of words between them. On 25 February 2004 MPs passed a resolution calling for the north to be declared a disaster zone. In March, following attacks on IDP camps in Lira district, tensions were such that the Donor Group on Northern Uganda, Amnesty and Recovery from Conflict⁷⁴ issued a statement in which they endorsed Parliament's February resolution and rejected ‘the assertion that Donor's restrictions on Defence expenditure have impeded the UPDF's capacity to defend citizens from such attacks’. In May 2004 the donors rejected the proposed 2004/5 budget ‘citing excessive public administration costs and unjustified increases in defence spending’.⁷⁵

There were attempts to escape the straitjacket. The rapid subdivision of existing districts into smaller ones (e.g. Kitgum district became Kitgum and Pader districts) can be seen as a necessary ‘divide and rule’ tactic to counter the re-ethnicising influence of decentralisation – if ethnic identities could not be overcome through a super-ordinate national system then breaking them down into sub-ethnic groupings was an alternative.⁷⁶ Exercises such as mchaka-mchaka (political education – see Chapter 5) could be seen as an attempt at generating a national perspective; placing the President's brother Salim Saleh in charge of reserve forces could be interpreted as an evasion of the constraints of demobilisation. All these, however, might be termed political bricolage, making do with the little that is to hand.

The reality was that, with the de-fragmentation of the national pearl still unfinished business, with externally driven agendas threatening a degree of re-fragmentation, and lacking the resources to glue the ethnicised fragments together with large-scale economic development, the Government was left with relatively few options. While hard-won political independence demanded that the state control its own population, it offered little in the way of economic power with which to exercise this control.

Some Concluding Questions

The above narrative provokes numerous questions which are addressed in the following chapters. First, what can be said about the nature and motivations of the ostensible protagonists, the LRA and Government of Uganda, and indeed, are they the only actors who should be considered? Was the LRA much more successful than is generally allowed, or was it a less important player than it was usually made out to be? Given that it survived nearly two decades while numerous other rebel groups came and went, was this due to a particular resilience on its part – or was it allowed to survive? Equally, and related to this, was the Government serious in its stated intentions to find a solution to the war? Given that non-military solutions (Pece peace accord 1988, Bigombe peace talks 1994, Uganda-Sudan peace accord 1999, Amnesty Bill 2000) and military ones alike (Operation Iron Fist 2002, ethnic militias 2004) resoundingly failed to bring about any resolution to the situation and succeeded only in aggravating it, the integrity of purpose of those who designed and implemented such ‘solutions’ has to be open to scrutiny.

Particular questions also arise over the Government's integrity of purpose with regard to internal displacement. The increasingly destructive impact of living for extended periods in ‘protected villages’ led to growing calls for decongestion and resettlement but, until late 2006, virtually no steps were taken to do so. What then was the real function of a phenomenon which most people at least purported to regard as having negative consequences?

The escalation of non-military phenomena also prompts questions about the nature of the relationship between long-term and severe impact on civilians and the perpetuation of conflict. Did the inexorable escalation reflect self-perpetuating, indeed self-aggravating dimensions to the dynamics of the war? At times the conflict between the Government's stubborn adherence to seeking a military solution, and the equally strong resistance to this from an increasing range of civil society actors (Acholi MPs, religious leaders, traditional leaders, various UN bodies and NGOs), appeared to be as important as the conflict they all purported to be seeking a solution to. Indeed, at times even the civil society actors seemed to be fighting over who would be the one to bring peace. More importantly, perhaps, young men in their thousands were driven to join armed forces, whether the UPDF, the various militias set up in 2003, or indeed the LRA itself. What lay behind this phenomenon?

And what, given the evident involvement of international actors in various dimensions of the situation, are we to make of their relative importance in resolving or perpetuating the conflict? External involvement went beyond funding humanitarian or developmental schemes to include military training and other types of ‘non-lethal assistance’. External support was also critical to what initially appears to be a very ‘local’ initiative, namely the revival of traditional leadership structures. This initiative was almost entirely driven by externally generated ideas and funding. Yet calls for an explicitly political intervention by the United Nations were ignored.⁷⁷ This prompts many to ask ‘How bad does a situation have to get before action is taken?’, beneath which lies a possibly more important question, namely what exactly is it that enables decision-makers to excuse their own ‘inaction’? How was it that in an era of global communications, there was so little international outrage over this situation which, rather than being hidden away in torture chambers, could potentially be made visible to the public eye through various media, with the threat of at the least possible comparisons with the situation in southern Sudan, and at worst politically and economically damaging charges of complicity in abuses and atrocities? Where, in a world of ‘human rights’, ‘democracy’ and ‘good governance’, were those with the power to influence and intervene, and why were they not more active?

Notes

1. For an exploration of these tensions with regard to conflict in East Timor, see Dolan, 2004.

2. Samuel Baker built Patiko Fort in 1872 on the former site of an outpost for slavers.

3. This is not to mythologize the past; it is clear that subsistence in northern Uganda was always more difficult than in what is now southern Uganda. R. M. Bere, one of the first British administrators of the Acholi District, argued that ‘A struggle for existence has governed much of the tribal history’ (Bere, 1947: 5).

4. By January 2002, the District Veterinary Officer reported that Gulu had 6,800 head of cattle, 2010 of which came through the unpopular government programme of restocking, while others were bought from neighbouring districts (KM e-newsletter no 5, 15 February 2002).

5. For discussion on the extent to which considering the Acholi as purely a colonial construct may itself be a continuation of an ‘imperial dialogue’ which ignores pre and post-colonial identity formation processes, see Finnström, 2003; Chapter 2.

6. Gulu, 4 August 1998. He also reported that in World War II there were some 1,600 members of the King's African Rifles from Gulu and Kitgum (at that time all Gulu district), of whom about 800 were still alive and members of the King's African Rifles Association.

7. One explanation offered to me for why the Catholic Church in Gulu was slow to set up its Justice and Peace Commission (on 1 June 1998) was that ‘the Gulu church is more DP sympathetic, while Kampala Peace and Justice is more NRM aligned’ (discussion with Pax Christi representative, 5 June 1998).

8. For discussion of the ways in which anthropology was used to legitimise regional differences, see Finnström, 2003; Chapter 3.

9. Exactly who was actually involved in each of these examples is highly contested, in particular responsibility for atrocities in the Luwero triangle.

10. Gulu, 7 June 1998. When a local NGO, Peoples Voice for Peace, attempted to document the matter, they found it almost impossible to interview the victims themselves, and were obliged to interview women who were familiar with the cases instead (personal communication).

11. According to O'Kadameri these were actually started in 1992 by Betty Bigombe (2002: 36).

12. A wide open space near the middle of Gulu town, used for various public purposes.

13. Awere and Awac in 1993, Atiak in 1994 – all were displaced again (see Chapter 5).

14. The first major meeting was held on 25 November 1993 in Pagik parish, Aswa county, and a second followed on 10^th January 1994. A third meeting was held at Atoo Hills on 22^nd January, and a fourth on 2 February 1994.

15. Interview with elder, Gulu 8 August 1998.

16. Examples included 11 August 1996, 29 August 1996, 4 September 1997, 4 July 1998, 16 January 2000 (see also Finnström, 2003: 240).

17. The Monitor, 11 December 1997, ‘Museveni Admits U.S. Help Against Sudan’.

18. New Vision, 8 June 1998, ‘Kony: DP Attacks Albright’.

19. Gulu, 27 September 1999.

20. A tongue-in-cheek reference to the Museveni Government.

21. An allusion to the U.S.A.

22. The issue of the SPLA included their mobilisation within Uganda, with support from the Ugandan government (Professor Barbara Harrell-Bond, 30 September 1999).

23. New Vision, 26 June 1998 ‘UNICEF Condemns Kony’.

24. New Vision, 11 July 1998, ‘Ethiopian Pilot Killed In Crash’.

25. The Monitor, 14 July 1998, ‘LRA Claims It Shot Down Chopper’.

26. New Vision, 2 April 1998, ‘Kony for London Acholi meeting’.

27. Odek Pilot Report, 21 July 1998.

28. New Vision, 11 June 1998, ‘Acholi Exiles Criticise Museveni’.

29. New Vision, 18 July 1998, ‘Kony Gives Conditions For Peace Negotiations’.

30. New Vision, 17 July 1998, ‘War Damages Uganda's Image’.

31. The Monitor, 3 February 1998, ‘Saleh Admits UPDF's Mistakes’.

32. Hon. Norbert Mao and Hon. Daniel Omara Atubo.

33. Parliamentary Buildings, Kampala, Uganda, January 1997.

34. The centre opened on 23 March 1997 with only 10 children. Designed to handle 75 children at a time, by January 1998, when I first visited, it had 263, of whom 32 were girls. The most recent arrivals said that once a girl has conceived she is taken to Sudan, from where it is more difficult to escape, hence the lower number of girl returnees. Since March they had reunited 306 boys and 60 girls with their families. Some children were directed to GUSCO by the RDC, most came from the military. GUSCO informed the army if they had any weapons on them. UNICEF had provided a lot of mattresses and nominated the centre for an award, WFP had given high protein biscuits, and the British High Commission had given 33 million Uganda shillings.

35. New Vision, 3 March 1998, ‘Kony Victims to Get Sh 44m’.

36. The Monitor, 26 March 1998, ‘Mrs Clinton Blasts Kony’.

37. New Vision, 4 July 1998, ‘Acholi Leaders to Meet Kony Men’.

38. Correspondence on the diaspora listserve Acholinet estimated the figure at a questionable 25,000.

39. www.idpproject.org: Profile of Internal Displacement: Uganda, 11 October 2002, p 78.

40. Justice and Peace News (Gulu Diocese), Vol. 2 No 3, June 2002.

41. New Vision, 20 January 2002, ‘Uganda Rebels Face U.K. Courts’.

42. Under Section 7 of the Anti-Terrorism Act, these include placing explosive or other lethal device in public places with intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, direct involvement or complicity in the murder, kidnapping or maiming or attack on a person or group of persons, and seizure or detention of hostages in order to compel a State, an international or inter-governmental organ, a person or group of persons, to do or abstain from doing any act. Persons found guilty of these acts ‘shall be sentenced to death if the offence directly results in death of any person or…in any other case, be liable to suffer death.’

43. Ibid, Section 10, as well as the Second Schedule thereto.

44. IGAD comprises Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, Somalia and Uganda.

45. Justice and Peace News, May 2002, Vol. 2 No. 2.

46. Announced on 22January by Army Commander Kazini (KM e-newsletter no 6).

47. IRIN, 25 May 2002, UGANDA-SUDAN: No Rapid Solutions in Anti-LRA Campaign.

48. IRIN, 6 June 2002, UGANDA: Little Acholi Gain from Anti-LRA Campaign. See Also KM E-Newsletter No 10.

49. IRIN, 19 June 2002, UGANDA: Government in Peace Deal With UNRF-II Rebels.

50. IRIN, 6 June 2002, UGANDA: Little Acholi Gain from Anti-LRA Campaign. See also KM E-newsletter No 10.

51. The Monitor, 24 August 2002, Army Deploys ’30,000’ Troops Against Kony.

52. IRIN, 21 October 2002, Budget Cuts Aimed At Boosting War Against Rebels.

53. IRIN, 6 November 2002, President Sets Up Team For Talks With Rebels.

54. IRIN, 3 December 2002, Anti-LRA Pact Extended.

55. Gulu, 19 January 2004.

56. Interview with UN official, Kitgum, 16/8/06.

57. Decentralisation, advocated by the World Bank, took on its own peculiarly politicised momentum in Uganda. From 1999 to 2006 the number of districts virtually doubled from 43 to 81, at times leading to increased ethnic tensions and even splits within ethnic groups. Yet at the same time, there was a re-centralisation of certain key powers. Thus the appointment of the Chief Administrative Officer was taken away from District level and centralised. Equally, the removal of graduated tax, which had been collected by District authorities, decreased local control of the tax base.

58. IRIN, 28 January 2004, The 18-Year Old War That Refuses To Go Away.

59. As pressure grows for multi-party democracy in Uganda, Museveni continued to warn ‘against pluralism based on ethnicity, religion and other divisive factors’ (New Vision, 9 June 2004, ‘Museveni Advises on Multipartyism’).

60. This was also true of the NRA in Teso sub-region according to one respondent who had been tortured there in the late 1980s: ‘Each of us was caned 12 strokes on the buttocks and then told to lie facing the sun for the entire day. We had to keep turning so that we really faced the sun. Every two hours we were asked [various questions].…At that time all the NRA commanders were Rwandese, and they were the torturers’ (Gulu, 7 June 1998).

61. New Vision, 9 April 1998, ‘Accept talks, Cardinal tells Kony’.

62. New Vision, 20 January 1999, ‘Acholi Want Disaster Zone’.

63. In late 1999, for example, the LCV Chairman of Kitgum district, without consulting the District Council, closed down the ACORD programme in the district. The then Minister for the North was unable to call this self-styled district ‘President’ to order.

64. E.g. UNICEF, 2001: 3–13

65. Bedo Piny pi Kuc, 27 June 1998.

66. The Monitor, 8 March 2004.

67. For full text see KM E-newsletter No 47, 7 April 2004 (www.km-net.org).

68. This exemplifies the (unconscious) collaboration of the oppressed with the agents of oppression and domination discussed in Finnström (2003: 68), but contradicts his view that ‘secession of the north has never been an issue’ (2003: 148, 160).

69. Hon. Owiny Dollo MP, Gulu conference, 29 September 1999.

70. Interview, Gulu, 4 August 1998.

71. Perhaps this prompted the resolution passed at a meeting in Kitgum district ‘that if you want to bring a solution, you have to accept that you are both an Acholi and a Ugandan’ (comment by participant at Bedo Piny pi Kuc meeting, Gulu, 26 June 1998).

72. New Vision, 22 March 1998, ‘Fats kill in Kampala as Kony kills Acholis’.

73. The Monitor, 17 May 2004.

74. This comprised the head of delegation from the European Commission, the ambassadors of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden, United Kingdom, Norway, U.S.A., Japan, as well as representatives from UNDP, World Bank and USAID.

75. IRIN, 14 May 2004, Donors Reject Proposed Budget on Grounds of Defence Spending.

76. The relationship between what Girling terms ‘domains’ within Acholi is a historically complex one, with the western domains (effectively Gulu district) more closely linked to the Bunyoro kingdom than the eastern ones (Kitgum/Pader), and quicker to make alliances with the British (Girling 1960). The reality of divisions within the Acholi was apparent in the run up to the Betty Bigombe peace talks when elders from Kitgum were pitted against those from Gulu (see Chapter 4).

77. This was in contrast to the steps taken with regard to the Darfur situation in Western Sudan from 2003 onwards.