Northern Uganda Messenger Post

If there is a reason for the ICC indictments and investigations into war crimes, crimes against humanity and rights violations in northern Uganda to be dropped or withdrawn, the current Betty Bigombe led and Washington’s Northern Uganda Peace Initiative ( NUPI) managed political and diplomatic posturing as peace talks, is none of it (See Drop ICC Case, NGOs tell govt., the Monitor, March 4, 2005). First of all, if Yoweri Museveni were serious about finding a political settlement rather than pointless military victory for egotistical and megalomaniac reasons, a comprehensive and permanent ceasefire should have been declared over the entire northern Uganda. But in this case, limited ceasefires after ceasefires have been declared, each time punctuated with all out onslaught of war and bellicose rhetoric. It is preposterous to think that meaningful negotiations can be carried out with LRA peace negotiators in some secure zone in the bushes of Acholi, while down the road from such a venue,

Many commentators have sought to explain Museveni’s continuing life-and-death hold onto power in terms of a desire to protect his family and cronies’ ill-gotten wealth and property. While that may be partly true, his greater motivation is to continue to control and protect classified information about tactical and strategic campaigns they employed during the guerrilla war in Luwero, as well as counter insurgency strategies used in northern Uganda. The perpetuation of the official versions told by the NRM/A is key to the NRM project of re-writing Ugandan social and political history, particularly around Luwero and northern Uganda. No doubt, there is the official, popular, filtered and controlled versions the public has been fed; and there is the classified version which only the fighters and senior political ideologues are privy to. Witness the swift and decisive action to stop in its tracks, the bush war stories series in the Daily Monitor in 2004, when some bush war “heroes” unguard

If you spent four months weaving your way about and sleeping in IDP camps as I did during the last electoral mobilisation and campaigns, you would understand how it is indisputable that 1000 people should die a week in Acholiland. And that 41% of such deaths should be children under five, and also that the rate of violent deaths should be three times higher than in Iraq. Amazingly, Museveni and his henchmen are busy discounting and dismissing such studies, reports and policy briefings, without as little as offering situation reports and policy briefs that undermine such findings. Once you visit and sleep in these camps, and have spoken with the residents, you cannot help but come out feeling, perception and conclusion that, the Buturos and military spokesmen speak about a different country, when they issue denials on events in northern Uganda. Official denials and the rosy pictures they paint, whether by understatements or dismissive bravado, clash very sharply with lived daily realit

Okello Lucima It is appalling how the Yoweri Museveni regime continues to get its priorities wrong. Uganda is a pan-handling nation-state. Despite its beggar status, it wants to spend over thirty billion shillings it does not have (EC wants Sh63b for 2006 election, The Monitor, 05, March 2005). All this spendthrift mood, while over 52% of its budget is scrounged from charitable governments in the West (UK aid cut pressures Uganda, BBC News, 29, April 2005; Aid: Govt blasts UK, The Monitor, 30, April 2005; and Britain blocks aid to Uganda, The Monitor, 29, April 2005). If there were a lack for where to spend this referendum money, 1.8 million of our citizen are internally displaced in concentration camps in northern Uganda. For their survival, the IDPs depend entirely on international humanitarian charities for their basic and daily needs (80% of IDPs are Women, Children, The Monitor, 19, April 2005; Encampment is NRM, LRA 11th point programme, commandme

Okello Lucima. Recent Pa Raa retreat for “Ächoli leaders” had less to do with exploring problems facing Acholi, the wretched of IDP camps and charting realistic exit from the impasse. What transpired in Pa Raa, was a valiant but inconsequential attempt to salvage the collapse of the movement or NRM/A & O in Acholi, and bolster flagging fortunes of its political dummies in Kitgum, Pader and Gulu (See Pa Raa Declaration, Justice and Peace News, July 2005; Museveni meets Acholi leaders, New Vision 28 June 2005; Tracing the roots of the Acholi people’s suffering, Monitor 28 June 2005, and Moving towards total liberation of the north, New Vision 29 June 2005). If Pa Raa summit were a serious soul-searching and thinking moment for the obvious problems in Acholi, demanding creative, bold, immediate and realistic actions, the participants would have been hard-pressed to ignore the preponderant evidence to the fact and realisation that Yoweri Museveni, and plausibly, his government and the