ELIAS BIRYABAREMA
GULU
Now and then, inhibiting feelings of resignation, submission and
stoicism by a people who have long endured dehumanising treatment by
their government or any authority, break and those people rush
triumphantly to celebrate their newly won freedom, initially, in
cathartic violence.
Then follows the secondly and more devastating violence that stems
from the struggle between the Old Order seeking to restore its unjust
and loathsome power and the hitherto oppressed people hell-bent on
liquidating their past master and sustaining their hard won freedom.
It was true of the Israelites extracting themselves from the Pharaonic
tyranny (though with a God's Providence ), the Americans fighting King
George's despotism up to their independence in 1776, the French
against aristocratic excesses in 1789, the Africans against European
colonists and slave perpetuating savages.
This will be true of northern Uganda . Just one day. It might take
half a decade, a decade, a generation.
It will happen
Not a single explanation on earth can justify the sickening human
catastrophe going in Lango and Acholiland: the degradation, desolation
and the horrors killing off generation after generation.
Coming from Western Uganda and knowing the rest of the country pretty
well, what I saw in Acholi Bur IDP Camp and the adjoining areas on a
recent visit there, convinces me that perhaps only a callous
government such as one of President Museveni is capable of keeping its
people in such conditions.
Frankly, It's not entirely imprecise to describe what I saw as a slow
extinction facing the Acholi and Langi peoples. I have traveled to
nearly all of rural Uganda . The lot of a typical poor man, woman or
child elsewhere— in Kabale, Mbarara, Bushenyi, Mbale—is hardly
impressive. Yet it is only here in Acholi Bur, as is similar or worse
all across much of the region that I encountered unique and
heart-stopping suffering. It is here, in Acholi Bur, that I met
shocking cruelty and death stalking a people by the minute, by the
hour, by the day; for the last two decades.
When you meet such sort of a situation you ask yourselves why? These
children, these women have committed no crime to deserve this. They
deserve an explanation from their president. Museveni must tell these
children why he took a Bible in his hand solemnly promising God that
he would secure his people's rights of life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness and instead allowed barbarity and unspeakable
wretchedness to engulf them.
Museveni owes these children, these women an answer: they deserved it
yesterday, they do today and will do tomorrow.
That he has chillingly failed to provide that answer and used state
machinery to continue to claim sovereignty over them should never be a
means to preserve this tragedy.
Never
Museveni himself must engage cerebral members of his intelligence
community—Noble Mayombo and the like—to draw interpretive projections
on the long term implications of the continuing indifference to the
human catastrophe in Uganda .
Museveni and any farsighted Ugandan must know that the squalor in
Northern Uganda , the hopelessness and the slow death cant continue
for long. It's a powderkeg that will explode anytime. History shows us
that unjust situations in a society go so far as no revolutionary man
has emerged to galvanize the little energies and the resilience of the
oppressed and transform them into a force potent enough to break the
yoke of bondage such as the one that confines Acholis and Langis in
the death-inducing IDP camps.
There's enough indignation in Acholi, in Lango and Teso. One day a
lightening rod in form of young man, like Museveni himself brimming
with patriotic and revolutionary fervor of the late 1960s and 70s,
will spring up and remove the spigot on that cauldron of anger.
What will gush out and its ferocity, only God can foretell.
America 's founding father and the author of the Declaration of
Independence adopted by Congress on July 4th 1776 , George Washington,
noted in it that document that mankind is more disposed to suffer and
summit to a government long established.
There reaches a time though when a government willfully, to use his
word, becomes "destructive" of a peoples' rights in which case it
becomes their duty to seek abolition of that government. What is
happening in Northern Uganda , I believe, are not mere light and
transient causes said by Washington not to be significant enough to
justify secession.
They are a train of abuses by a government that has all but abdicated
its duty to care for a people over whom it rules. And the abuses are
appalling enough as to amount to a justification for seeking
self-rule.
For long I thought Norbert Mao with his fiery championing of his
peoples' struggle for emancipation might turn out that ferocious
malcontent that will ultimately inspire Northern Uganda to seek a
separate state that can probably care for its people. Time has proved
me wrong; Mao can as well be said to be a spent force.
Still, Museveni must think and think hard about the tragedy of
Northern Uganda . That situation can persist only up to a certain
point: that seeming complacency, the notion that the region has been
contained must stop. We should foresee a scenario where Uganda
simultaneously collides with Southern Sudan while fighting separatist
insurgents in Northern Uganda intent on splitting the country around
Karuma and also visualize the possible scale of destruction and the
wider impact on Uganda 's development.
If Museveni doesn't do that, he will have left not only a most
terrifying time bomb but also one of the most tragic legacies.
Biryabarema is journalist
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
