Northern Uganda Messenger Post

NORTHERN UGANDA MESSENGER POST: Why Museveni is Undermining a Negotiated Peace Settlement

Why Museveni is undermining a negotiated settlement Garamba Sideshow: Divide and Conquer Dead or alive, the fate of Vincent Otti, if Joseph Kony is to be believed, may well have been foreshadowed a year ago (LRA leader speaks out on deputy Otti, Monitor 8 Nov. 2007). It was reported then that the Ugandan government had focused its efforts at a parallel contact with the LRA fighters, rather than the official Juba Talks, as a preferred means to ending the conflict (Kony wants to talk to Museveni, Monitor, 23-29 July 2006). Such a strategy aimed to achieve one or more of the following objectives: to avoid addressing the root causes of the conflict; to isolate the LRA military leaders and fighters from its political leadership; and also to pre-empt the risk of issues raised at the Juba talks cohering with grievances and concerns over abuses in northern Uganda, which had sporadically been raised by civil society, political leaders, opposition parties, the media and rights groups. The sides

NORTHERN UGANDA MESSENGER POST: Will Joseph Kony Stick with his confessing Peace Emissaries?

Nobody seems to notice, or only cursorily and disinterestedly if at all, that Ojul and Dr. Obita et al are embarrassing themselves and have completely forgotten the Terms of Reference of their so called consultations. And they seem to make statements that they did not have authority to make at any one session of the Juba talks. But now, they seem to have very wide latitude to act without sprinting back to Garamba for debriefing and guidance and delegation on each and every line of contention. Now they seem possessed with their apologies that seem to undoubtedly propel them very openly and unguardely along the paddocks of the ICC tribunals. I have no doubt that Ocampo and the political and diplomatic powerbrokers are smiling and requisitioning bunkbeds for those cells for Joseph et al. Why not, with their heads of delegation making those confessions? The peace negotiation is yet to be concluded and responsibility and accountability is still a contentious agenda, for crying out loud. If

NORTHERN UGANDA MESSENGER POST: Freedom and the Individual: Existentialist Crisis in Acholiland

MAKING AUTHENTIC CHOICES IN TIME OF CRISIS. Sverker Finnstrom’s recent work on northern Uganda picks up and continues a particular theme of existential inquiries that echo Shakespeare, de Sade, Tolstoy, Proust, Kafka and Moravia. Living With Bad Surrounding re-states the nature of daily human and individual struggles to live under turbulent circumstances (Piny Marac) in northern Uganda. Read in broad existentialist terms, the Ugandan State and regime are absurd worlds, from which its citizens in the north have been alienated from themselves and estranged from the popular view of national normalcy. Trumpeted NRM/A revolution, liberation, peace and prosperity, contrast very sharply with their lived realities of violence, abduction, murder, rape, diseases and social dislocation. The fish-bowl existence in the concentration camps, characterised by rights abuses, sexual violence, suicide, prostitution, idleness, and a host of other social ills and diseases, is for many individuals and fam

NORTHERN UGANDA MESSENGER POST: Mato Oput is a Cloak for Impunity in Northern Uganda (I)

NORTHERN UGANDA MESSENGER POST: Mato Oput is a Cloak of Impunity in northern Uganda (II)

Proponents of mato oput Advocates and promoters of mato oput can be loosely divided into four subgroups with their international barnacles. The first group are a section of Acholi elite imbued with imposed self-doubt and collective guilt, who are emotionally and mentally dazed and dizzied by twenty-one years of violence, blood and death, and have internalised Museveni and NRM/A propaganda of Acholi collective complicity in Uganda’s historical socio-political pathology, perceiving their current predicaments as some just divine retributions for past evil deeds of their forebears or kith and kin. For them, mato oput is just penitence. The second group of Acholi who embrace mato oput and support its use in northern Uganda over post-Nuremberg international humanitarian and human rights norms and special war crimes tribunal practices, are those who see its adoption as a matter of cultural pride and international recognition for an otherwise obscure and nationally marginalised minority group.

End of conflicts must ensure human rights The perception of whether justice has been served or injustices committed in the course of a war is a judgement that follows from two possible lines of assessment. First, opinions are formed on the general accounts of the conduct of the conflict and a verdict is passed. Second, we may choose to look at individual acts or events in the course of the war and give separate judgements of their just or unjust characteristics. Depending on the approach we adopt, it ought not to be an “either –or” judgement that glosses over complex and serious issues that demand careful considerations. Mato oput and partial ICC indictments of the LRA, suffer from such generalisation and limited focus to a truncated period of the conflict. It is partly for this reason that I would like to argue against mato oput - the Acholi traditional practice of conflict resolution -and the limited and selective ICC investigations and indictments, as suitable complementary models f

NORTHERN UGANDA MESSENGER POST: The Buganda Question and the Forging of a Nation-State in Uganda

By Yoga Adhola Elections in preparations for independence were held in Uganda in 1961 and again in 1962 . To understand these elections we need to go back in history to the governorship of Sir Andrew Cohen. Andrew Cohen became Governor of Uganda in 1952. Prior to that, he had been Under-Secretary at the colonial Office in London. In that capacity he had earned the reputation of being dynamic and very positive to decolonization of Africans. He had been involved in the formulation of the Creech-Jones dispatch of 1947. Two major principles guided Cohen's administration. One, the belief that it was urgently necessary to increase the participation of Africans in the formulation and implementation of government policy at all levels of government. Secondly, that Uganda must move towards independence as one unit, and not fracture into several rival tribal states. There had been strong fears that the kingdom of Buganda might want to sever itself from the rest of the colony from around 1949.