Friends For Peace In Africa

Dear fellow Ugandans, and people of the world:

I personally give glory to the Almighty God for the opportunity He has given me to give my testimony, to the Episcopal Church of the United States of America through its General Convention, on the genocide that has been unfolding in Northern Uganda for the last 20 years, while the whole world turns a blind eye to it, as both the Church of Christ in the world and the international Community did about the genocide in Rwanda in 1994.The consequence of the world's conspiracy of silence about the genocide in Rwanda has been the terrible loss of human lives of the innocent children of the minority Tutsi.

What message does the world or the Church of Christ have to tell the people of Rwanda today who have survived the genocide in Rwanda in 1994? Tell me the answer if you have any to offer to the people of Rwanda about our failure to stop the genocide happening on our watch in 1994, when we had all the possibilities to do so.

As for what is happening in Northern Uganda for the last 20 years, it is nothing less than genocide in the truest sense of the word. It is a situation which cannot be allowed to happen even in Kampala in Uganda or in London in UK or in New York and Washington DC, in USA. That is how bad it is. It is genocide against humanity, if it is happening in Kampala in Uganda or in London in UK or in New York and Washington DC, in USA. That is why such a situation cannot be allowed to prevail even for a minute in Kampala in Uganda or in London in UK or in New York and Washington DC, in USA.

The question is, why such unspeakable, unbelievable, and unimaginable situation has been allowed to prevail in Northern Uganda for the last 20 years? The fact that inhuman and appalling conditions in the IDP camps have been killing the children of Northern Uganda at the rate of over 1000 children per week for over a decade, is clear evidence of deliberate genocide against humanity in Northern Uganda by the NRA/M Government in power in Uganda today.

As the Prophet Isaiah says a leader cannot be separated from his or her words and walk because people do what people see in their leaders. The measure of a leader is what he or she does with power given him or her by God. A leader must touch a heart before he or she asks for a hand from the people. For the last 20 years the NRA/M leadership has failed to touch a heart of the people in Northern Uganda. Have we taken the trouble to ask ourselves, as citizens of Uganda, why this has been the case with the Leadership of the NRA/M for the last 20 years? Why there is much division and disagreement within the NRA/M leadership that has led to open challenge to the NRA/M leadership in the recent years concerning its policy towards the peoples of Northern Uganda?

Let us be clear, my dear brothers and sisters in God, in Uganda and in other parts of the world, that a divided leader will eventually produce a divided nation and people. If what is happening in Northern Uganda cannot be called genocide by some peoples, particularly in Uganda, it is because the NRA/M Government does not lead by principles, but by emotions. Otherwise the situation prevailing in Northern Uganda could not have lasted all these 20 years without putting an end to it. Therefore do not just deny that there is no genocide in Northern Uganda without seeing what is on the ground, the reality on the ground in Northern Uganda. Please stand on the truth, commitment and principles in life for all future children of Uganda including the children of Northern Uganda.

Today the children of Northern Uganda have been denied the rights to life, growth, development of their God-given potential, just like any other children of the world. If you want to know the gravity of the situation of Northern Uganda you only need to go and attend any graduation ceremonies in any University campuses in Kampala , you see the reality on the face that the Country has already been polarized for too long by this NRA/M Government. Almost every graduate comes from the Southern part of Uganda which is peaceful and prosperous and no students from the poor war-ravaged Northern Uganda. The truth of the matter is there will be no educated people from Northern Uganda who are qualified enough to participate in the development of their Country in the future. This is not Uganda many of us would want to see for the destiny of our future posterity in Uganda. Therefore this unbelievable situation in Northern Uganda is called genocide by its rightful name, if you do not know yet. I say this in the name of the truth in God who has created humanity in His own image.

Amen! 

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BISHOP OCHOLA'S PRESENTATION TO THE GENERAL ANGLICAN CONVENTION

PRESENTATION BY THE RT. REV. MACLEORD BAKER OCHOLA II, RETIRED ANGLICAN BISHOP OF KITGUM DIOCESE, NORTHERN UGANDA, TO THE 75TH GENERAL CONVENTION OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

JUNE 2006

The Presiding Bishop, all the Bishops, Clergy and Laity of the Episcopal Church of the United States of America, and all Members of the GENERAL CONVENTION in your various capacities, Ladies and Gentlemen, I greet you all in the precious Name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

First of all I want to thank you all for according me this golden opportunity to address all the delegates and guests of the 75th GENERAL CONVENTION of the Episcopal Church of the USA, on an issue of great importance and urgency; a matter of life and death in Northern Uganda. I have come in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to tell you about the GENOCIDE that has been going on in Northern Uganda for the last 20 years.

You will be sad to know that terrible crimes against humanity have been committed with impunity in Northern and Northeastern Uganda by both the so-called Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Uganda People’s Defense Force (UPDF). Many people have been maimed permanently for life. Many people have suffered mutilation of limbs, noses, ears, and lips at the hands of the warring factions, especially the LRA. Over 30,000 children have been abducted and taken into captivity in Southern Sudan. Children have been abused and used as child-soldiers, as sex-slaves, and as killing machines against the civil population.

The Government of Uganda has also used violence to force a majority of the population into the Internally Displaced People’s (IDP) camps. The harassment and forcing of the people into the IDP camps started in 1996 in Gulu. As result, many people have lost their lives due to the conditions of congestion in the IDP camps. At the beginning of 1997, the people of Lamwo County in Kitgum District suffered terrible massacre of over 400 people at the hands of the LRA rebels. Thus, the people of Lokung, Padibe, and Palabek Gem and Palabek Kal, fled from their villages and sought safety and security into Kitgum Town in 1997. This was the beginning of the massive displacement in Kitgum District. While in Lamwo County the people fled from their villages in fear of being killed by the LRA rebels, it was a different story in Aruu County where the people were forced by the UPDF into the IDP camps in 1997.

There were outbreaks of cholera, meningitis, measles, diarrhea, and many other related diseases due to congestion in the IDP camps. As a result many people lost their lives in the IDP camps in 1997. There were over 500,000 people living in the IDP camps, both in Gulu and Kitgum in 1997, under very appalling conditions. By 2002 the number of the people living in the IDP camps had jumped from 500,000 to 800,000 people. At the beginning of 2003 the number of the IDP camps reached its peak of over 2.6 million people uprooted from their homes in Northern and Northeastern Uganda. Currently over 1.7 million people are still languishing in the IDP camps.

The death rate of 1000 people dying every week, according to a health and mortality survey of July 2005, is due to the appalling and inhuman conditions in the IDP camps. The Government of Uganda has carried out this survey in partnership with international organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and other UN organizations. While the terror by the gun of both the LRA and UPDF has killed the people of Northern Uganda, the catastrophic and inhuman conditions in the IDP camps have had a greater toll. Whether death by the LRA, death by the UPDF, death by diseases and malnutrition; the people of Northern Uganda have died like flies or rats and continue to suffer in squalid conditions in the IDP camps. This is the genocide I have come to talk about. I have not come to defend which party to the Northern Uganda conflict is more demonic or has killed more people than the other because all who have died, all who have been raped and abused whether by LRA, UPDF or those who have died due to preventable diseases because of the inhuman conditions in the IDP camps are all our children!

Many of the 1000 dying per week have been children dying of malnutrition. It is significant to point out that children did not die of malnutrition before the massive displacement into IDP camps. Malnutrition was not known in the world of plenty of Northern Uganda before the war. Just like your own children, our children too are great resources to our society and the world. Our destiny depends on our posterity. But both the LRA and the Government of Uganda have denied the children of Acholi, Lango and Northern Uganda their God-given dignity and rights to life. As a result, Northern Uganda is the most dangerous place for children to live in.

The children of Northern Uganda have had their growth and God-given potential in life stifled by both the LRA and the UPDF. The LRA has done this through abduction, brutal killings, maiming, mutilation, and gross violations of our children’s rights. On the other hand, the Government of Uganda has been unable and unwilling to improve the inhuman conditions it has created for the children of Northern Uganda in the IDP camps for over a decade now. The Government of Uganda deliberately refused to implement a unanimous resolution passed by Parliament of Uganda in 2004 to declare Northern Uganda a disaster area.

On many occasions the Government of Uganda deliberately derailed the peace process in Northern Uganda at critical points. For example, the President of Uganda Mr. Yoweri Museveni gave a 7-Day Ultimatum to the LRA rebels to come out of the bush in February 1994, when peace was about to be concluded. The 7-Day Ultimatum only marked the beginning of fresh brutalities by the LRA in Northern and Northeastern Uganda. To tell the bitter truth, up to today, the Government of Uganda has not flushed out the LRA rebels from the bush despite the 7-Day Ultimatum to do so.

Rape has been used as a weapon of war against the women, girl-children and people of Northern Uganda. Our wives, daughters, sisters, mothers and grandmothers have been raped. While their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, daughters and grandchildren were forced to watch humiliated, helpless and powerless. All these have been done to humiliate and dehumanize not only the victims but the whole Acholi and Lango communities. Our own Government in Kampala has framed us the people of Northern Uganda, especially the Acholi, as ‘backward and primitive’, but worst of all we have been framed as collaborators of the LRA that is killing our own children.

Because we have been so demonized, our children have become ‘invisible children’. We have become ‘forgotten people’ and our holocaust has been called the ‘most forgotten humanitarian catastrophe in the whole world!’ We the people of Northern Uganda, especially the Acholi and Langi have become ‘invisible people’ in the eyes of the world. We have therefore been killed and we have died quietly while the Church and the world carry on with business as usual. Why, because our destruction has been accepted and justified since we have been framed and projected to the whole world as ‘demonic’ as the LRA rebels! Thus, the peoples of Acholi, Lango and Northern Uganda have been humiliated, dehumanized, demonized, and stigmatized by our own Government in Kampala on the watch of the Church and the international community.

According to Mr. Elias Biryabarema, a Ugandan journalist, ‘there is no justification for the sickening human catastrophe that has been going on in Lango and Acholiland for the last 20 years. People have been subjected to degradation, desolation, and the horrors, all resulted into killing off generation after generation’. Biryabarema described what he saw in the IDP camps as ‘a slow extinction facing the peoples of Acholi and Lango’. “In the IDP camps, I encountered unique and heart-stopping suffering. It is here in (Acholibur) IDP camp that I met shocking cruelty and death stalking a people by the minute, by the hour, by the day, for the last two decades”.

Another Ugandan journalist, Timothy Kalyegira, had this to say, “For 20 years the rest of Ugandans did nothing when their fellow Ugandans from the North were tortured, reduced to slave like living conditions in unspeakable grass-thatched IDP camps in Gulu, Kitgum, and Pader Districts. The Bantu speaking peoples of the Southern Uganda, have taken revenge against the Nilotic peoples in Northern Uganda for the suffering they went through during Obote and Amin and Tito’s regimes. It was therefore time for the Northerners to be paid in their own currency what they did to the peoples of the South who suffered for 24 years under the Badokolo Northerners’. Timothy Kalyegira has written recently again in the independent Daily Newspaper that no people in East Africa have suffered in the last 100 years what the Acholi people have been made to suffer in the last 20 years!

Yet another Ugandan journalist, Mr. Andrew Mwenda, has also written recently in the independent Daily Newspaper that the demonization of the people of Northern Uganda has been one of the major factors that have served a political function that has kept the war in Northern Uganda going on for the last 20 years. I commend these Ugandan journalists for their courage to ‘speak truth to power’, but I am sad to note that the Church in Uganda, as the Body of Christ, has not spoken out against the dehumanizing and unacceptable death sentence passed on the people of Northern Uganda, especially in Acholi and Lango, by both the LRA and the UPDF in the last 20 years.

If I commend the brave Ugandan journalists who have been prophetic, I note with sadness that the Church of Christ in Uganda has been mute about the genocide in Northern Uganda all these last 20 years. For example, the UGANDA JOINT CHRISTIAN COUNCIL (UJCC) recently met at its Plenary Session in Kampala and passed many resolutions including one on Northern Uganda. There was no acknowledgement in the resolution on Northern Uganda that the genocide in Acholi and Northern Uganda is wrong and unacceptable in the first place, especially since the people of Northern Uganda are also made in the image of God. Moreover, the conflict in Northern Uganda came third in priority in the order of the UJCC Resolutions. It does not say anything about the children who have died at the rate of over 1000 per week in Northern Uganda due to unacceptable, inhuman and appalling conditions prevailing in the IDP camps.

But today I pay special tribute to the Dioceses of Southwest Florida and North Carolina whose Conventions passed unanimous resolutions against the genocide that is taking place in Northern Uganda. My brief stay on sabbatical in the USA here has helped me to appreciate something fundamental about America. No matter what problems or what failures you may have here as a people, please permit me to say that I have appreciated one thing that truly makes America and Americans great indeed. It is the belief in freedom inherent in fundamental human dignity as people created by God. I have seen this one fundamental belief affirmed across religious, racial or political divides here in the USA.

This does not mean that America is perfect. America also has its own problems as we also have our own problems in Uganda, especially in Northern Uganda. But given this fundamental belief in human dignity and freedom that I have seen and admired since my arrival, I call upon you to take this window of opportunity opened by my story and testimony today. I call upon you to stand together in solidarity with us the ‘invisible children’ and the ‘forgotten people’ and the ‘demonized people’ of Northern Uganda. We are the only people in the world today who have been denied the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, by both the LRA and the Government of Uganda.

I have come therefore to appeal to you, my brothers and sisters, in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to make our invisible children of Northern Uganda become visible again. I call upon you to remember our forgotten people of Northern Uganda and to reach out and touch us in Northern Uganda who have been demonized and stigmatized for the last 20 years. I appeal to you, my brothers and sisters in Christ, to become a prophetic voice of Jesus Christ in the world today.

I plead with you to call upon your Government of the United States of America to use its diplomatic influence and power to stop the genocide in Northern Uganda, as it can be seen in its commitment to ending the genocide in Darfur in west Sudan. I appeal to you therefore, as part of the Body of Christ within the worldwide Anglican Communion, to join hands with us the hurting, weak and vulnerable people of God in Northern Uganda who are also part of the Body of Christ, and contribute generously towards the healing, reconstruction, rehabilitation, revival and regeneration of Northern Uganda. .

Lastly, but not least, I appeal to you, in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ, to join hands with us, the family of the late Archbishop Janani Luwum on whose behalf I speak, all well wishers, and all the people of God throughout the Anglican Communion and the world at large to celebrate the 30th Commemoration of Archbishop Janani Luwum, martyr of Uganda, Africa’s 20th Century martyr from Acholi, Northern Uganda. The celebration will take place at the martyr’s gravesite in his childhood home of Mucwini, Kitgum Diocese, Uganda, next year in February 2007. Please make sure that you collect the two documents concerning Archbishop Janani Luwum that have been made available for your information.

I thank you all in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.