Northern Uganda Messenger Post

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.

NORTHERN UGANDA MESSENGER POST: The FDC Party has failed to govern local governments in northern Uganda

Local leaders of Acholi District Councils in Gulu, Pader, and Kitgum were massively given a mandate by the people of these respective districts, on very clear non-NRM policy agenda. Their voting for a DP chairperson in Gulu (Mao) and FDC Chairpersons in Kitgum (Ogwok) and Pader (Odok) signaled a necessary policy change in local governance and the majoir issues of importance to the lives of the people in this region. Personal security and general peace, through a peaceful and negotiated settlement was one of them. Dismantling of the concentration camps and resettling people in their ancestral homesteads was another. Rehabilitation of social and economic infrastructures; schools, dispensaries, water wells and boreholes, roads and anciliary services were among popular policy themes on the lips of our people and in the manifestos of the opposition parties that got themsevles elected to lead Acholi district councils. However, all of these leaders without exception; Mao in Gulu (DP); Ogwok i

NORTHERN UGANDA MESSENGER POST: Che! Che! Che! International solidarity and struggles for human liberation lives on

Che! Che! Che! International Solidarity and the Struggle for human liberation Lives on! Che (Ernesto) Guevara was the quintessential lieutenant of the proletarian socialist internationalism and its ideals of human solidarity across racial lines, cultures, religion, geography and narrow nationalist chauvinism. Born and bred Argentine and Latin American, he lived and died a proletarian internationalist revolutionary; a global citizen per excellence, who fought against imperialist oppression, exploitation, and inspired worldwide struggles for independence and national liberation across continents. Forty years after his cold-blooded, dastardly execution by reactionary Bolivian forces and their CIA agents on 9 October 1967, world democratic forces for human solidarity, social justice and a just and peaceful world remember and salute him today. Even as we invoke his name today, Che! Che! Che! in remembrance of the ideals he stood for, fought for and died for forty years on, the majority of p

NORTHERN UGANDA MESSENGER POST: Petty-Bourgeois Politics and Class War Over Land in Acholi Part I

NORTHERN UGANDA MESSENGER POST: Petty-Bourgeois Politics and Class War Over Land in Acholi Part II

NORTHERN UGANDA MESSENGER POST: The historical and social bases of problems of leadership among Acholi of Uganda, Part IV

NORTHERN UGANDA MESSENGER POST: The historical and social bases of problems of leadership among Acholi of Uganda, Part III

NORTHERN UGANDA MESSENGER POST: Colonialism and Social Transformation: Elite formation and social inequalities among Acholi of Uganda

NORTHERN UGANDA MESSENGER POST: Social inequalities and the problems of leadership in Acholi (Recaps

NORTHERN UGANDA MESSENGER POST: A Clash of Identities: Modernity and Traditional Moral Economy Among the Acholi of Uganda

NORTHERN UGANDA MESSENGER POST: NRM, Museveni not part of the solution in northern Uganda

NORTHERN UGANDA MESSENGER POST: State and Policy Failures in Uganda

NORTHERN UGANDA MESSENGER POST: Rejection of Museveni in northern Uganda a Moral Imperative

NORTHERN UGANDA MESSENGER POST: Democracy and the struggle for Social Justice in Uganda

NORTHERN UGANDA MESSENGER POST: Choosing between a flawed peace initiative and ICC Process

NORTHERN UGANDA MESSENGER POST: MPs Car scheme is State corruption and bribery!

NORTHERN UGANDA MESSENGER POST: MPs Car scheme is State corruption!