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Peace talks with Kony are worth everything Sverker Finnstrom
[Monitor Online, Monday, July 10] The war in northern Uganda has dragged on for 20 years now. As a matter of fact, ever since Yoweri Museveni himself seized state power through the barrel of the gun, northern Uganda has been war-torn. One could argue that war in Uganda changed from central to north and over the years, it has indeed evolved. The anthropologist Michael Jackson, in his recent book on the Sierra Leonean war, presents a very important conclusion: a conflict always “takes on a life and logic of its own”, and with time, this violent logic detaches itself from the original motivations; the root causes fade. Old alliances disappear and new ones are built. But violence and bitterness prevail. The LRA rebels’ gross violence and mass abductions of minors have drawn much international sympathy for Museveni’s government. Not least the media focus on the child abductees has justified a non-negotiation stance by the Ugandan government (although this stance is now changing with talks between the government and the LRA rebels slated to open in Juba, Southern Sudan, tomorrow, Monday - ed), in recent times supported by powerful donors like England, the US, and Denmark, and, of course, the International Criminal Court (ICC). After the September 11 attacks, the US even included the LRA on its list of global terrorist organisations. So it is difficult to say if Riek Machar’s efforts to mediate will lead anywhere. Ignoring that Machar actually have had several face to face meetings with the LRA leadership, something that has not happened for many years, the named donors have all declared that they want to “eliminate” Joseph Kony. To them, if this happens, Uganda will face what we can call the Angola scenario: when Unita’s leader Jonas Savimbi was killed, the conflict basically died by itself, like a balloon which slowly lost its air, because so many Angolans, not least within Unita ranks, were completely tired with war. Some scepticism: For me, I remain sceptical. I do not think such a scenario will solve Uganda’s or the region’s problems. To speak metaphorically, in the 1980s, the “spirit of war” was passed on from Alice Auma Lakwena to her father Severino Lukoya. Left today, as we know, is Joseph Kony and the LRA. So how can we be so sure that if Kony is out of the way, the “spirit of war” will not be passed on to someone else? Could not a new Kony take his place? As a Diaspora Ugandan once told me: “We are told by Museveni that the LRA belongs to past governments. But the LRA children are born under Museveni’s rule.” True, today northern Uganda may not be fertile grounds for launching yet another armed conflict, because people there are, like their brothers and sisters in Angola, completely worn out after all these years of war. Yet others may say that if Kony is out of the picture, there is an opening to reform the LRA into something more genuine. A third opinion can be found among those of my informants who see the rebel leadership’s violent conduct as a primary obstacle to peace but who nevertheless are willing to forgive him, for rather pragmatic reasons. “People just want peace, full stop,” as one young student justified his sceptical position on the involvement of the ICC. His somewhat ambivalent and perplexed stand exemplifies the Primo Levian “gray zone” that he and his fellow Ugandans live with, where there are no easy divisions of black and white, or of good and bad. Rather, it is a kind of acceptance of the situation so that life can go on. This standpoint, based on many years of lived experience in the war zone, is essential for us in the international community to take into account when we analyse the complexities of contemporary Uganda and try to understand what the future may hold for the country and for the region. As we know, in October 2005, the ICC warrants of arrest for the LRA leadership became public. And now some Ugandan government representatives refer to these very warrants, when they say that they cannot meet the LRA team in Juba. The warrants provoked rebel attacks on international NGOs and western individuals last year. Sad as this development is, I am however not that surprised. The renowned scholars Caspar Fithen and Paul Richards’s conclusion on the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels in Sierra Leone also says something about the Ugandan rebels. “Collapse into fatalistic violence and random killing is a development which might have been foreseen by opponents of the RUF,” they argue, “had they been less busy denying the movement’s reasons to exist.” Targeting NGOs: So, why were international NGOs targeted last year? Seldom can aid and humanitarianism of the international community be neutral in the eyes of the locals, and even less so in the eyes of the rebels. When humanitarian organisations take over many of the functions of the Ugandan government, some will also be perceived, as the government is, as a parallel partner to the army. In the 2000 national referendum on political systems, government representatives obviously took advantage of the situation. In their campaigning, in which they benefited extensively from logistics provided by the Ugandan army, they told people in the camps that relief and humanitarian assistance would be withdrawn if they did not vote for the government’s no-party system. The multiparty political opposition, on the other hand, was stopped from campaigning by the Ugandan security forces; when the referendum approached, few opposition politicians were even allowed to leave Gulu town. Some of these malpractices were repeated in the campaigns for the 2006 presidential elections. Again people in the war-torn north were told that humanitarian aid and military protection would be removed if the sitting President lost. I am not revealing any secret here, as a matter of fact; this is common knowledge also among influential donor countries and the big humanitarian organisations. But this public secret needs a proper address. Yet humanitarian organisations rarely consider the perennial problem of war and insecurity. Sometimes representatives of these organisations even confuse neutrality with an explicit anti-participatory ideology. The more we ignore about the complex socio-political history of the war, and the less we interact with our local counterparts and beneficiaries, they seem to reason, the more neutral we are. At the same time, a Muganda informant living in Gulu town argued, the international NGOs now “take a lean on the government” to the extent that they are “welcomed as its lovers”. This love relationship, he told me in late 2005, is “directed” by the government “but not according to the needs … of the community. And that is going to cause a big-big-big problem, because people are politicising everything now.” With direct reference to the increasing humanitarian apparatus, some young Gulu University students told me that “this war is a project for both the NGOs and the government”. It has become a self-sustaining “business”, while ordinary Ugandans are “rendered useless”. And therefore, the students concluded, the international NGOs will not bring peace. Catch-22 situation: Over the years, humanitarian organisations have become entangled in the structuring of the camps, and eventually caught in a catch-22 situation. Humanitarian aid and relief programmes, as we know, are the response to a state of emergency, when something must be done at once. They are by definition to be temporary. But after two decades of war, it is increasingly difficult to talk about a state of emergency in any conventional sense, if this is to imply that such a state is not increasingly permanent. Some of the camps for internally displaced people in Acholiland have been in existence for more than 10 years, and so have the international organisations’ measures to lessen the human suffering in these same camps.
Ironically enough, in their effort to assist, the UN and other representatives of the international community partly uphold the camp structures. As already indicated, war is processual, and emergency relief operations will therefore increasingly be entangled with the politics and practices of war. So when the ICC arrest warrants closed yet another door to a settled solution in northern Uganda, we need to realise another fact of war, as violently demonstrated by the rebels last year: the international community is deeply involved in the realpolitik of war. The war is partly sustained by the complex relation between the military and humanitarian efforts to end the war. Humanitarian aid is no longer impartial but shapes conditions it hopes to improve. If we do not self-critically assess this development, then relief assistance, even with the best of intentions, will booster those who exploit the suffering to further their own businesses of war. The LRA and the Ugandan government now need to show their seriousness in talking peace, but also the international community has a big responsibility in the success or failure of Riek Machar’s effort to mediate. Please prove my student informants wrong. Unless the political issues at stake are seriously addressed on the national level, amnesty laws and cultural practices of reconciliation on the local level may function, intentionally or unintentionally, as weapons of war and mistrust rather than as tools of genuine peace-making. It's the politics: Neither culturally informed practices of reconciliation nor international retributive justice can replace political efforts at peacemaking, as has been the development in Uganda. Perhaps it is even too early to talk about reconciliation or justice. Reconciliation can come in only at a later stage in any future peace process. But perhaps more importantly, it would be “an act of romantic willful naïveté”, as anthropologist Richard Wilson has showed in the case of South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to conclude that African discourses on reconciliation alone are capable of bringing peace to social settings suffering from long-term armed conflicts or extreme political oppression. But I am equally unsure if international justice can end impunity in Uganda. Instead, to start with, peace talks are urgently needed. Too much has been speculated about the LRA’s objectives, not least the spiritual aspect and the personal character of Joseph Kony himself. Riek Machar has offered the opportunity for Ugandans and the world to hear what Kony and the LRA really have to say. So why not listen? Again, it would be a kind of acceptance of the situation, with all its complexities, so that life in Uganda can go on. Mr. Finnström is the author of Living With Bad Surroundings: War and Existential Uncertainty in Acholiland, Northern Uganda (Uppsala 2003), he can be reached at: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it |
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