Contextualising Joseph Kony: Being is individual, personal and problematic Part IV
Intersubjective Communication Gaps and political and moral leadership failures in Uganda: Is Joseph Kony an “unredeemable villain” or an “existentialist hero” of Uganda’s violent political order and imprisonment of individual freedom and conscience? An existentialist response to Opiyo Oloya’s “Kony has come to the end of his tether.”
Part IV
Being is individual, personal and problematic
In the face of decades-long, well-orchestrated concealment and revisionism through paid western intellectual brokerages in academia and public relations firms, our desire to engage Opiyo Oloya-type arguments farther in an attempt to humanise and repatriate Joseph Kony back to the realities of existence in Acholi in 1986, and journey with him to the present, is a difficult and contentious one that readily exposes proponents as easy targets for dismissal as LRM/A ideologues and sympathisers at home and in the diaspora. However, we feel that it is a worthwhile enterprise to undertake, and we are confident of the safety and protection under the armoured cloak of the core precepts of existentialist philosophy, to illuminate the choices and actions individuals make and take, based on their circumstances, to resist the imposition of limitations on human freedoms.
We want to build our arguments on the central, unifying thesis of the many streams of existentialist philosophy, which is the proposition that our lives as human beings are rooted in realities and consist of a series of crises that impose a range of choices and require certain actions from us to validate our lives. The critical consideration in making choices and taking actions under existentialist framework is not in judging what is wrong or right action, but choosing wrongly or choosing correctly-making authentic and inauthentic choices. This is because, as conscious beings, unlike inanimate objects, we do not only observe and understand things around us, but we feel, we make choices, and we actively seek to transform our environment to our will. Martin Heidegger noted that, we do not merely know and acknowledge things around us, but we manipulate and deploy them as implements to mediate our worlds. Not only does such interaction and relation deepen our awareness of our surroundings, but it simultaneously sharpens our sense of personal awareness and the ego as a result of our experiences with others and things constitutive of our environments.
Fundamentally, existentialists profess living as individual and personal. For the individual being, living is the problem of how one lives, and what meaning such a life is for the particular individual. Living, a person’s life, and how particular individuals live it, is a choice that one must make for oneself, from many and differing options, and stick with the choices and live it meaningfully. The options one must choose from to make one’s life meaningful are made of a cobweb of one’s interconnectedness with things and other people in their particular world; which are historically time-bound, and determinative of one’s choices and actions. Consequently, it would be pointless to try to deconstruct man in order to understand him better. Man is neither elemental nor a complete reality that we can know by breaking into its component parts. In that case, conventional analysis employing idealism, reason and objective or scientific methods abstract and deal with realities external to man and his existence. Therefore we must not approach the subject of man’s choices and actions in life with preconceived notions of necessary and immutable characteristics; because one’s life is a result of possibilities, choices and actions, which must at the same time, recognise other existences. However, such knowledge is not by way of abstract, intellectual idealism, but through one’s lived, experiential relationships with and acceptance of others beyond oneself.
Existentialism can assume a belief in God; or that man can play god himself; or even that man is a transient being who must make the most of his circumstances and the possibilities and choices fate has dealt him. This is the political and moral existentialist humanism we would like to adopt in our quest to complete the picture of Joseph Kony. We agree with Soren Kierkegaard that unlike other things in nature, human beings are free to make of themselves what they choose to be in life; or according to Jean-Paul Satre, we are free to take whatever actions make life meaningful for us. The advice here is that we ought not to misunderstand constraints such as theological moral templates and societal dos and don’ts as determinative of our choices, but we should rather take them as conditioning and limiting to the options and latitude of actions available to us. This is in recognition of the fact that human existence deals with environments in constant flux; dynamic possibilities and impossibilities that in themselves are not obvious until we make choices and take actions. In other words, instead of a set of immutable rules and values, existential realities are matrices of choices and actions possible and variable in our individual and specific situations.
According to Heidegger, individual freedom is the autonomy and ability to choose rightly or wrongly, or make authentic or inauthentic choices. On the other hand, Satre asserts that acting on our choices can be driven by honesty or deception. When we obsequiously jump onto bandwagons-as when we sing NRM no change while we know our people cannot wait for change- or limit our thoughts and possibilities within the confines of the ICC institutional framework and think that there are no other transcending moral arguments to make for justice or possible alternative framework than the Hague for the way forward in northern Uganda. Karl Jasper observed precisely that, limitations imposed upon us by our specific situations, underscore the importance of choice and action, under context that sometimes is incomprehensible and defies rationality. It would seem that the Kony insurgency has largely defied rationality, that is why conventional analyses rendered by Opiyo Oloya, John Prendergast et al fail to discern any meaning than nihilism and self-negation; if not lunatic abnegation.
In cases such as the conventionally labelled Kony aberration, what matters is not conformity with some moral prescriptions outside of our existential realities, but that we must be responsible for our actions and the choices we make. Accordingly, for our existence to have meaning, we must be free to choose and act, and also be responsible for these actions and choices, but resist conformism and actions that impose limitations to human freedom. Unfortunately, those willing to hang Kony are not willing to seek to understand Kony’s existential truth and the circumstances that made him and many of his compatriots choose rebellion in 1986. Pascal and later Satre, pointed out that human existence is suspended between being and nothingness. According to Pascal;
“We burn with the desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.”
Were the actions Kony and his peasant Acholi compatriots took to resist Museveni’s military dictatorship, like all peasant rebels before them who revelled in archaic forms of social movements in human history, attempts to save their “whole groundwork” which had cracked and “the earth (opened) to abysses”?
Opiyo Oloya observes that, when faced with challenges, particularly negative and baffling situations, Joseph Kony turns inwards; recoiling into his spiritual interior, so to speak, in order to make his choices and take actions that only he alone understands and counsels. Although he is onto something insightful and fundamental, Opiyo seems unaware of the importance of his discovery. Unfortunately, all he can see in this withdrawal on the part of Kony, is the conventional man that is defeated in the conventional sense and without any other possibilities except surrender and conformity with the world external to himself and his existence. However, Gabriel Marcel, Satre, and Dostoyevsky would have understood Kony’s recoiling into his spiritual interior as a nihilistic scenario of man’s repeated failure on account of his choices, and his unrelenting nature, but only to be confronted time and again, with the mystery that is himself, and more choices to make and actions to take, in the ceaseless struggle to unravel himself, his being and his problematic existence.
We learn from von Schelling that existence must not conform to reason. And for many commentators, Kony himself and his rebellion neither conform to reason nor satisfy any rationality. For them, there is even no need to waste time trying to impute meaning to Kony and his twenty-year insurgency. For our part, we want to take von Schelling seriously and insist that, we must make efforts to know Kony in his particularity, without resorting to scientific methods or objective idealisms. Instead, we must use understanding, and perhaps, heed Dilthey, and walk a mile in Joseph Kony’s 1980s and 1990s Acholiland shoes, and probe how we feel, what choices we might have made and how we might have acted, given the circumstances.
But our compatriot Oloya, the ICC’s Moreno de Ocampo, or International Crisis Group’s John Prendergast et al, are completely different creatures. In the first instance, they are formally schooled, immersed in objectivist and scientific idealism and reason. They are unwilling and unable to have a meaningful conversation on and with Joseph Kony, because they lack the mode of communication and the temperament necessary to reach him and create a mutual understanding. Unlike them, Joseph Kony never went to school; he has neither heard of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, nor read Frantz Fanon, Carl Marx, nor Paul Frerie nor Roger de Bray. Were they interested to know, they would find that in 1986, Kony was functionally illiterate. He had neither political ideas nor ambitions. It should not be of great surprise or a point of importance therefore, to find that he should have neither intelligible political programme nor secular, polemical socioeconomic ideological dogmas to organise, govern and direct his insurgency in a rational, radical or reactionary mode recognisable by Oloya, John Prendergast et al. Kony learned about his world and others through direct contacts, interactions, utility, actions, feelings, emotions, sympathies and reactions to negative unconquerable “limit situations” such as deaths and sufferings of kin and friends; the pathos of his village was both personal and collective.
Kony’s world has been shaped by concrete experiences of existence as a hapless Acholi boy in 1986, who suddenly was surrounded by corpses, wounded, displaced, disappeared, and humiliated kinsmen and women and children. His once ordered, settled and predictable world collapsed and evaporated right before his eyes; in a flash, he was violently hurled from being and hurtled towards nothingness. He had to rely on his instincts and willpower to survive. These experiences have taught him to depend on his intuition, his inner voice; because existence, even in a stable environment, is problematic. Unsophisticated village boy as he were, Joseph Kony knew pretty well that, taking up arms in 1986, was not a casual choice and pleasurable action, but a situation imposed upon him by his specific circumstance of being an Acholi youth swept up by the tide of Uganda’s violent political succession order. Therefore, uncertainty, suffering, mutilation, death or resistance with increased risks of death, were the range of possibilities that confronted his existence in pre-rebellion Acholi under social, political, cultural and moral collapse in 1986.
Many and most Acholi elite and intelligentsia chose flight and exile. But Kony and other Acholi underclass; the illiterates; the rustics; the peasants who from time immemorial tilled their land and dutifully performed their civic citizenship obligations without knowing what the national issues of contention were, chose resistance and self-defence in the face of death; in the search of personal inner truth once the familiar world they knew was under inexplicable threat. Therefore, without the willingness and patience to learn their truth without judging them on our own sets of rationalities that are meaningless to their situations then, we miss and lack knowledge and experiences and unity with and understanding of the concrete experiences and realities of 1986 Acholi, that made resistance an authentic choice for Joseph Kony and thousands of his village millenarians. These shaped their worlds and informed the logic of their existences; according to Satre, they understood quite well that; “the other is the hidden death of my possibilities.”
Furthermore, Kierkegaard and Kafka have taught us that, human existence is characterised by a futile search for security, stability and utopian reality. And that we constantly live with dread because we are convicted and condemned for crimes we do not know about, moreover, did not commit ; but we are powerless to contest and change it; yet we know quite well it ends in self-annihilation for us-the reality of our suspension between being and nothingness. Therefore, rather than being individual and personal tragedy alone, the supposed delusions, aberration, self-abnegation, and psychopathology that is Joseph Kony, is the expression of the pitfalls of the existential possibilities –of the determinants and limitations of choices and actions-of human existence in the Ugandan polity. Consequently, Joseph Kony may just turn out to be the only Ugandan, who has been able to live free and push the limits of human freedom under the Ugandan military dictatorship and institutionalised personal rule of Yoweri Museveni, who for 22 years has proclaimed himself as the only and ultimate truth Ugandans should seek; a proclamation many have meekly heeded and submitted to, but Kony alone has successfully rejected and resisted.
In our considered view, we believe that there is very little to choose from, between Yoweri Museveni, his road to power and how he has maintained power; and Joseph Kony, his road to resistance and how he has continued to exist outside the confines of control and delimited freedom imposed by the Museveni dictatorship, while others have given up and submitted themselves to such dictates. Authenticity of choice and actions must not be measured in terms of success or failures of a project; that Museveni succeeded and seized control of the state, and therefore acquired legitimacy and authenticity; but Kony has not so far succeeded and therefore, his choice and continued resistance must be judged inauthentic and unnecessary. Perhaps, no better authority than Satre, should come to our rescue and point us in the right direction on this subject of being, possibilities and choices and actions. Satre observed that:
"It is true that the possible is-so to speak- an option on being, and if it is true that the possible can come into the world only through a being which is its own possibility, this implies for human reality the necessity of being its being in the form of an option on its being."
We therefore take the view that, horrified with the mode of his resistance as we may be, Kony is as much a victim as a villain in equal measure of the failure of political and moral leadership in Uganda; a victim and a villain and the product and symptom and realised possibility of the conditions of limitations imposed on human freedom under the Ugandan state under Museveni’s institutionalised autocracy. To continue to abstract Kony from and judge him outside the realities of existence under the Ugandan state through the years, perpetrates deception that only leads us into a cul de sac. If we want to get closer to dealing with the problems of northern Uganda and Uganda, we must be courageous enough to deal with the realities of people’s existences, but not harping on assumptions and idealisms and set of rules that in 1986 were neither options and possibilities, nor choices and actions available to help Kony and his villagers in Acholi salvage their world and recreate meaning and positive possibilities for their being and existence.
Rather than a call to talk to Kony and continue on the limping Juba framework, the most realistic clarion call ought to be to the international community, the Acholi moral and political leaders, and human rights fraternities, to recognise their grievous mistakes and the rare second chance offered by the collapse of the Juba process, for them to correct their blunders. What is needed is to recognise that Juba as adjunct to ICC process, is impractical, unfair and could not be expected to deliver a just peace and future stability for northern Uganda.
What is to be done?
As we have said before, we need to sustain the spirit of the ICC, and even the LRA indictments. But for justice to be done-and to be seen to be done-, the ICC needs to be complemented by a special tribunal for northern Uganda, to deal with atrocities committed before 2002. There are precedents in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda and former Yugoslavia. Therefore, northern Uganda, where the conflict and violations spanned the periods before and after the ICC came into force, is an ideal candidate for a UN special tribunal, since the ICC only deals with crimes committed after 2002; thereby creating a blind spot for justice and accountability for the period 1986-2001. If we are seriously seeking justice and willing to end impunity –by state or non-state parties, we have no excuse for not investigating and punishing crimes committed during this period.
Part IV
Being is individual, personal and problematic
In the face of decades-long, well-orchestrated concealment and revisionism through paid western intellectual brokerages in academia and public relations firms, our desire to engage Opiyo Oloya-type arguments farther in an attempt to humanise and repatriate Joseph Kony back to the realities of existence in Acholi in 1986, and journey with him to the present, is a difficult and contentious one that readily exposes proponents as easy targets for dismissal as LRM/A ideologues and sympathisers at home and in the diaspora. However, we feel that it is a worthwhile enterprise to undertake, and we are confident of the safety and protection under the armoured cloak of the core precepts of existentialist philosophy, to illuminate the choices and actions individuals make and take, based on their circumstances, to resist the imposition of limitations on human freedoms.
We want to build our arguments on the central, unifying thesis of the many streams of existentialist philosophy, which is the proposition that our lives as human beings are rooted in realities and consist of a series of crises that impose a range of choices and require certain actions from us to validate our lives. The critical consideration in making choices and taking actions under existentialist framework is not in judging what is wrong or right action, but choosing wrongly or choosing correctly-making authentic and inauthentic choices. This is because, as conscious beings, unlike inanimate objects, we do not only observe and understand things around us, but we feel, we make choices, and we actively seek to transform our environment to our will. Martin Heidegger noted that, we do not merely know and acknowledge things around us, but we manipulate and deploy them as implements to mediate our worlds. Not only does such interaction and relation deepen our awareness of our surroundings, but it simultaneously sharpens our sense of personal awareness and the ego as a result of our experiences with others and things constitutive of our environments.
Fundamentally, existentialists profess living as individual and personal. For the individual being, living is the problem of how one lives, and what meaning such a life is for the particular individual. Living, a person’s life, and how particular individuals live it, is a choice that one must make for oneself, from many and differing options, and stick with the choices and live it meaningfully. The options one must choose from to make one’s life meaningful are made of a cobweb of one’s interconnectedness with things and other people in their particular world; which are historically time-bound, and determinative of one’s choices and actions. Consequently, it would be pointless to try to deconstruct man in order to understand him better. Man is neither elemental nor a complete reality that we can know by breaking into its component parts. In that case, conventional analysis employing idealism, reason and objective or scientific methods abstract and deal with realities external to man and his existence. Therefore we must not approach the subject of man’s choices and actions in life with preconceived notions of necessary and immutable characteristics; because one’s life is a result of possibilities, choices and actions, which must at the same time, recognise other existences. However, such knowledge is not by way of abstract, intellectual idealism, but through one’s lived, experiential relationships with and acceptance of others beyond oneself.
Existentialism can assume a belief in God; or that man can play god himself; or even that man is a transient being who must make the most of his circumstances and the possibilities and choices fate has dealt him. This is the political and moral existentialist humanism we would like to adopt in our quest to complete the picture of Joseph Kony. We agree with Soren Kierkegaard that unlike other things in nature, human beings are free to make of themselves what they choose to be in life; or according to Jean-Paul Satre, we are free to take whatever actions make life meaningful for us. The advice here is that we ought not to misunderstand constraints such as theological moral templates and societal dos and don’ts as determinative of our choices, but we should rather take them as conditioning and limiting to the options and latitude of actions available to us. This is in recognition of the fact that human existence deals with environments in constant flux; dynamic possibilities and impossibilities that in themselves are not obvious until we make choices and take actions. In other words, instead of a set of immutable rules and values, existential realities are matrices of choices and actions possible and variable in our individual and specific situations.
According to Heidegger, individual freedom is the autonomy and ability to choose rightly or wrongly, or make authentic or inauthentic choices. On the other hand, Satre asserts that acting on our choices can be driven by honesty or deception. When we obsequiously jump onto bandwagons-as when we sing NRM no change while we know our people cannot wait for change- or limit our thoughts and possibilities within the confines of the ICC institutional framework and think that there are no other transcending moral arguments to make for justice or possible alternative framework than the Hague for the way forward in northern Uganda. Karl Jasper observed precisely that, limitations imposed upon us by our specific situations, underscore the importance of choice and action, under context that sometimes is incomprehensible and defies rationality. It would seem that the Kony insurgency has largely defied rationality, that is why conventional analyses rendered by Opiyo Oloya, John Prendergast et al fail to discern any meaning than nihilism and self-negation; if not lunatic abnegation.
In cases such as the conventionally labelled Kony aberration, what matters is not conformity with some moral prescriptions outside of our existential realities, but that we must be responsible for our actions and the choices we make. Accordingly, for our existence to have meaning, we must be free to choose and act, and also be responsible for these actions and choices, but resist conformism and actions that impose limitations to human freedom. Unfortunately, those willing to hang Kony are not willing to seek to understand Kony’s existential truth and the circumstances that made him and many of his compatriots choose rebellion in 1986. Pascal and later Satre, pointed out that human existence is suspended between being and nothingness. According to Pascal;
“We burn with the desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.”
Were the actions Kony and his peasant Acholi compatriots took to resist Museveni’s military dictatorship, like all peasant rebels before them who revelled in archaic forms of social movements in human history, attempts to save their “whole groundwork” which had cracked and “the earth (opened) to abysses”?
Opiyo Oloya observes that, when faced with challenges, particularly negative and baffling situations, Joseph Kony turns inwards; recoiling into his spiritual interior, so to speak, in order to make his choices and take actions that only he alone understands and counsels. Although he is onto something insightful and fundamental, Opiyo seems unaware of the importance of his discovery. Unfortunately, all he can see in this withdrawal on the part of Kony, is the conventional man that is defeated in the conventional sense and without any other possibilities except surrender and conformity with the world external to himself and his existence. However, Gabriel Marcel, Satre, and Dostoyevsky would have understood Kony’s recoiling into his spiritual interior as a nihilistic scenario of man’s repeated failure on account of his choices, and his unrelenting nature, but only to be confronted time and again, with the mystery that is himself, and more choices to make and actions to take, in the ceaseless struggle to unravel himself, his being and his problematic existence.
We learn from von Schelling that existence must not conform to reason. And for many commentators, Kony himself and his rebellion neither conform to reason nor satisfy any rationality. For them, there is even no need to waste time trying to impute meaning to Kony and his twenty-year insurgency. For our part, we want to take von Schelling seriously and insist that, we must make efforts to know Kony in his particularity, without resorting to scientific methods or objective idealisms. Instead, we must use understanding, and perhaps, heed Dilthey, and walk a mile in Joseph Kony’s 1980s and 1990s Acholiland shoes, and probe how we feel, what choices we might have made and how we might have acted, given the circumstances.
But our compatriot Oloya, the ICC’s Moreno de Ocampo, or International Crisis Group’s John Prendergast et al, are completely different creatures. In the first instance, they are formally schooled, immersed in objectivist and scientific idealism and reason. They are unwilling and unable to have a meaningful conversation on and with Joseph Kony, because they lack the mode of communication and the temperament necessary to reach him and create a mutual understanding. Unlike them, Joseph Kony never went to school; he has neither heard of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, nor read Frantz Fanon, Carl Marx, nor Paul Frerie nor Roger de Bray. Were they interested to know, they would find that in 1986, Kony was functionally illiterate. He had neither political ideas nor ambitions. It should not be of great surprise or a point of importance therefore, to find that he should have neither intelligible political programme nor secular, polemical socioeconomic ideological dogmas to organise, govern and direct his insurgency in a rational, radical or reactionary mode recognisable by Oloya, John Prendergast et al. Kony learned about his world and others through direct contacts, interactions, utility, actions, feelings, emotions, sympathies and reactions to negative unconquerable “limit situations” such as deaths and sufferings of kin and friends; the pathos of his village was both personal and collective.
Kony’s world has been shaped by concrete experiences of existence as a hapless Acholi boy in 1986, who suddenly was surrounded by corpses, wounded, displaced, disappeared, and humiliated kinsmen and women and children. His once ordered, settled and predictable world collapsed and evaporated right before his eyes; in a flash, he was violently hurled from being and hurtled towards nothingness. He had to rely on his instincts and willpower to survive. These experiences have taught him to depend on his intuition, his inner voice; because existence, even in a stable environment, is problematic. Unsophisticated village boy as he were, Joseph Kony knew pretty well that, taking up arms in 1986, was not a casual choice and pleasurable action, but a situation imposed upon him by his specific circumstance of being an Acholi youth swept up by the tide of Uganda’s violent political succession order. Therefore, uncertainty, suffering, mutilation, death or resistance with increased risks of death, were the range of possibilities that confronted his existence in pre-rebellion Acholi under social, political, cultural and moral collapse in 1986.
Many and most Acholi elite and intelligentsia chose flight and exile. But Kony and other Acholi underclass; the illiterates; the rustics; the peasants who from time immemorial tilled their land and dutifully performed their civic citizenship obligations without knowing what the national issues of contention were, chose resistance and self-defence in the face of death; in the search of personal inner truth once the familiar world they knew was under inexplicable threat. Therefore, without the willingness and patience to learn their truth without judging them on our own sets of rationalities that are meaningless to their situations then, we miss and lack knowledge and experiences and unity with and understanding of the concrete experiences and realities of 1986 Acholi, that made resistance an authentic choice for Joseph Kony and thousands of his village millenarians. These shaped their worlds and informed the logic of their existences; according to Satre, they understood quite well that; “the other is the hidden death of my possibilities.”
Furthermore, Kierkegaard and Kafka have taught us that, human existence is characterised by a futile search for security, stability and utopian reality. And that we constantly live with dread because we are convicted and condemned for crimes we do not know about, moreover, did not commit ; but we are powerless to contest and change it; yet we know quite well it ends in self-annihilation for us-the reality of our suspension between being and nothingness. Therefore, rather than being individual and personal tragedy alone, the supposed delusions, aberration, self-abnegation, and psychopathology that is Joseph Kony, is the expression of the pitfalls of the existential possibilities –of the determinants and limitations of choices and actions-of human existence in the Ugandan polity. Consequently, Joseph Kony may just turn out to be the only Ugandan, who has been able to live free and push the limits of human freedom under the Ugandan military dictatorship and institutionalised personal rule of Yoweri Museveni, who for 22 years has proclaimed himself as the only and ultimate truth Ugandans should seek; a proclamation many have meekly heeded and submitted to, but Kony alone has successfully rejected and resisted.
In our considered view, we believe that there is very little to choose from, between Yoweri Museveni, his road to power and how he has maintained power; and Joseph Kony, his road to resistance and how he has continued to exist outside the confines of control and delimited freedom imposed by the Museveni dictatorship, while others have given up and submitted themselves to such dictates. Authenticity of choice and actions must not be measured in terms of success or failures of a project; that Museveni succeeded and seized control of the state, and therefore acquired legitimacy and authenticity; but Kony has not so far succeeded and therefore, his choice and continued resistance must be judged inauthentic and unnecessary. Perhaps, no better authority than Satre, should come to our rescue and point us in the right direction on this subject of being, possibilities and choices and actions. Satre observed that:
"It is true that the possible is-so to speak- an option on being, and if it is true that the possible can come into the world only through a being which is its own possibility, this implies for human reality the necessity of being its being in the form of an option on its being."
We therefore take the view that, horrified with the mode of his resistance as we may be, Kony is as much a victim as a villain in equal measure of the failure of political and moral leadership in Uganda; a victim and a villain and the product and symptom and realised possibility of the conditions of limitations imposed on human freedom under the Ugandan state under Museveni’s institutionalised autocracy. To continue to abstract Kony from and judge him outside the realities of existence under the Ugandan state through the years, perpetrates deception that only leads us into a cul de sac. If we want to get closer to dealing with the problems of northern Uganda and Uganda, we must be courageous enough to deal with the realities of people’s existences, but not harping on assumptions and idealisms and set of rules that in 1986 were neither options and possibilities, nor choices and actions available to help Kony and his villagers in Acholi salvage their world and recreate meaning and positive possibilities for their being and existence.
Rather than a call to talk to Kony and continue on the limping Juba framework, the most realistic clarion call ought to be to the international community, the Acholi moral and political leaders, and human rights fraternities, to recognise their grievous mistakes and the rare second chance offered by the collapse of the Juba process, for them to correct their blunders. What is needed is to recognise that Juba as adjunct to ICC process, is impractical, unfair and could not be expected to deliver a just peace and future stability for northern Uganda.
What is to be done?
As we have said before, we need to sustain the spirit of the ICC, and even the LRA indictments. But for justice to be done-and to be seen to be done-, the ICC needs to be complemented by a special tribunal for northern Uganda, to deal with atrocities committed before 2002. There are precedents in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Rwanda and former Yugoslavia. Therefore, northern Uganda, where the conflict and violations spanned the periods before and after the ICC came into force, is an ideal candidate for a UN special tribunal, since the ICC only deals with crimes committed after 2002; thereby creating a blind spot for justice and accountability for the period 1986-2001. If we are seriously seeking justice and willing to end impunity –by state or non-state parties, we have no excuse for not investigating and punishing crimes committed during this period.
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